Resisting realist petrification in George Sand's Lélia and Balzac's Sarrasine

Abstract This article considers how George Sand's Lélia , which first appeared in 1833 and was extensively rewritten before being republished in 1839, might be read as constituting Sand's critical manifesto on realism. My argument investigates the links between Lélia and Balzac's Sarrasine (1831), which Barthes reads in S/Z as a paradigmatic realist text. This comparison brings out a network of images and structures common to the two novels: petrification, the enigma of sexual identity, the gaze of the male artist, the codes of sculpture and painting, and binary oppositions such as life/death, real/artificial, and plenitude/emptiness. But if, in Balzac's text, this network functions to underpin realist representation, Sand undermines these structures, and the 1839 Lélia becomes a veritable literary battlefield which opposes the petrifying male gaze and the heroine's resistance to the fixity and corporeal imprisonment that this entails. Lélia can thus be interpreted as constituting a self-conscious dismantling and refusal of the gendered structures of the realist text. Moreover, this analysis rewrites Barthes's interpretation of the conclusion of Sarrasine , reading it as the playing out not of a ‘contamination of castration’, but of a ‘contamination of petrification’ whose repercussions can be traced to Balzac's later novel Béatrix.