SOURCE: "Dédoublement in the Fiction of George Sand," in George Sand Papers: Conference Proceedings, 1978, AMS Press, Inc., 1978, pp. 21-31.

In the following essay, Yalom examines Sand's portrayal of "doubled" or paired female characters in three of her novels — Indiana, Lélia, and My Sister Jeanne. According to Yalom, these doubled characters represent the split between mind and body and Sand's attempts to accept both these aspects of women.

The abundance of double figures in George Sand's novels has not yet attracted the interest of psychologically-minded literary critics. Neither Otto Rank in his early psychoanalytic treatise on the Doppelgänger¹ nor Albert Guérard in his anthology of Stories of the Double² a half century later includes George Sand alongside those nineteenth and twentieth century writers whose names are synonymous with the literary concept of the double: Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, Stevenson, James, Conrad and Kafka. The omission is...