In “‘Ma voix se dégagea’: Music, Risk, and the Heroine’s Voice in George Sand’s Malgrétout,” I argue that Sand’s 1870 novel Malgrétout offers a view of the complexity of Sand’s thinking about sound, whether in a child’s holistic and mythical understanding of nature and music, in an artist-hero’s exhausting performances of genius, or in the erosion of the restraint and pragmatism in the heroine’s musical production. Returning through the novel, as a fulcrum on which the heroine, Sarah, balances her relationship with violin virtuoso, Abel, is the little children’s song Sarah invented, “La Demoiselle.” I propose that “La Demoiselle,” which begins as a musical exercise for a child, becomes for Sarah a means to measure Abel’s commitment to their relationship through his interpretation, arrangement, and dissemination of the little song. At stake in the returns and reiterations of Sarah’s song is a reconceptualization of the Romantic artist story through the heroine’s narrative of the discovery of the sound of her own voice and soul. Moreover, drawing from feminist care ethics, Sand studies, and sound studies, I propose that Sand’s narrative of vibrating instrumental chords, shivering bodies, and trembling voices, which explores the intersubjective and relational nature of sound, articulates a vision and ethics of people as fundamentally and vitally relational beings.
