Event Details
Professors Martine Reid (Université de Lille, France) and Scott Carpenter (Carleton College) will present “Gabriel by George Sand, or the Lessons of Context." This intriguing 1839 play was written by George Sand, one of the most well-known women authors of the 19th-century. In Gabriel, the main character has been raised as a man, with a man's education and ambitions, but at age seventeen learns that he is in fact a woman. He must then make the difficult decision: either continue living as a man in order to live independently and inherit his family's vast fortune, or instead switch to being a woman and lose everything. The play examines the roles that society forces on Gabriel and the struggles of the main character to find a place in that society.
Reid and Carpenter will focus their remarks on questions of gender identity and social constraints on individual freedom, both historically and in our own society today. Following their presentations, they will engage in a roundtable discussion, centering around questions from Professor Juliette Rogers and from the audience. A Light lunch will be offered.
Professor Reid earned her PhD from Yale University and is professor of literature at the Université de Lille III in France. She is the author of several books on women in French literature, including the critical essay, Des femmes en littérature (2010) and the intellectual biography George Sand (2013). She is also the editor of twenty volumes in the paperback series "Folio 2 euros: Femmes de lettres" including works by Simone de Beauvoir, Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, and Elsa Triolet.
Professor Carpenter earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin and is Marjorie Crabb Garbish Professor of French and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. He is the author of two books on 19th-century French literature: The Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-century France (2009) and Acts of Fiction: Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire (1996), as well as many articles. He is also a fiction writer, and has published two books and numerous stories and creative essays.
