The Cataleptic Novel: Living on with George Sand

Abstract

This article considers the representation of catalepsy in the literature of 19th-century France. It begins with an overview of the medical literature on catalepsy and its influence over the literature of the period, which reveals a particularly gendered aspect to the fate of the cataleptic, before turning to its primary case study: George Sand’s Consuelo novels (1842-44). These texts provide Sand’s most sustained engagement with catalepsy, but also set Sand’s depiction of the condition apart from her (male) contemporaries. While in the work of writers like Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Théophile Gautier, and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly the cataleptic is generally an unstable male genius whose tale ends in death, madness, or oblivion, Sand elaborates an alternative model that allows these superior individuals to find fulfilment (irrespective of their gender). The occult knowledge associated with the cataleptic is not to be feared in Sand’s texts; rather it provides new purpose. Catalepsy in Sand’s texts is thus endowed with political significance, representing as it does the potential for new beginnings and a move beyond traditional ways of being. Drawing on the Consuelo novels as a model, this article then turns to Sand’s wider oeuvre to posit the poetics of a ‘cataleptic novel’ as inherent to Sand’s literary enterprise.