AMANDINE A.L. DUPIN (GEORGE SAND)
In pursuit of my art I consumed all of the culture that I could. When doing this-I wore the clothes of the day-those most typically worn by men. Such a measure was to gain advantages known only to those who wore these garments, those who were men. Some called this defiance-I preferred to call it compliance. If the simple donning of trousers and garters would allow me the access I needed to the theaters, certainly I could oblige, and I did.
I embraced all rules that created order and firmly rejected those that simply ordered me. I defied convention and emerged enlightened. I challenged an angry husband and lost half of my inheritance, but won custody of the daughter that I alone had to retrieve from the hands of the angry thief.
I felt my art from so early on. Yet mine was not the time when a woman could declare herself a writer while retaining her feminine image. So I called myself an artist, for indeed I did create-I did work from my soul.
Is this not an artist?
"Artist," this term is one that conjures images of brushes and canvas and colors of the world, and not of this world, hidden in containers, and in the minds of artists, waiting to expose and express.
Is this not a metaphoric detailing of that which I sacrifice to do?
I suggest that it is and further that one day these terms, Artist and writer, will not be terms forced to stand exclusive from one another.
I made so many choices that enriched me while they enraged others, including the apparent choice to be a writer which ironically was not a choice at all-it was, in fact, an inevitability.