摘要：Current scholarship on George Sand has managed to get beyond the exteriors of her biography and has reached into the complex and troubled inner world of her psyche.1 There remains, however, a general tendency among the reading public, and even among some critics of nineteenth-century French literature, that most of her novels are easy to grasp, that they are more obvious than problematic, or in Roland Barthes‟ terminology, more lisibles than scriptibles. From Indiana, which protests loudly against any oppressive marriage bond to, say, Mlle la Quintinie, with its open anti-clericalism, the general opinion continues to be that, except perhaps for Lélia and Consuelo and its sequel, most of her fiction is easily assimilated.
Sand‟s supposedly obvious fictions are not all that obvious, and it has been easy for critics to miss some important insights. To illustrate, I would like to reexamine two of her earliest efforts. One, Indiana (1832), is well known; the other, Jacques (1834) is less so. I will approach these two works by focusing on a motif that has not attracted systematic attention: the flight from the corrupt lowlands and their so-called civilization up into the solitude and purity of the mountain heights.
