George Sand’s La Filleule

With input from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thirty-five-year-old essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to the relatively new field of “animal studies,” the article looks at Sand’s use of the roar—le rugissement—for three characters, a Romany woman soon to give birth, a Spanish duchess from the Paris social elite, and a Romany performer/composer, within the conference theme of women’s sound. It then turns to a character who does not roar, the daughter born to the young Romany mother, just before the mother’s death, who finds her voice as the novel progresses and will use it to speak truth to power. Finally, the conclusion presents the hypothesis that, implicit in the 1853 novel is a fourth roar, that of Sand herself, as she continues her writing career after the events of 1848 and, especially, after the coup d’état of December 1851.