The representation of childhood in the autobiographical narrative structure (F.-R. de Chateaubriand and George Sand)

The article considers the theme of childhood and the specific features of its representation in the Mémoires d’outre-tombe by F. R. de Chateaubriand and Histoire de ma vie by Georges Sand. Childhood is seen as an integral structural element of the self-narrative, the artistic concept of which is formed in the context of the era and the existing literary tradition. The conceptualization of the mechanisms of this process seems to be important from the perspective of literary studies, as it allows us to reveal the variety of forms of Romantic worldview and trace their dynamics. The comparative analysis of texts created by authors who belong to different literary generations and represent the extremes of the French Romantic tradition in their work is aimed at exploring the mechanisms and individual features of the childhood representation within the framework of the narrative model developed under the influence of Romanticism. The comparison of the two author’s concepts of childhood reveals the general Romantic dominant perception of this phenomenon, demonstrates the evolution of views on the child in the culture of the first half of the 19th century, and also reveals the specific nature of memoirists’ self-perception expressed in the techniques of recreating child hood. It is shown that Chateaubriand’s portrayal of childhood is focused exclusively on his own, in his opinion, unique experiences that allow him to identify in a child the outlines of the future “son of the century”, a lonely and frustrated wanderer, while for George Sand her personal experience becomes the material for analyzing the phenomenon of childhood itself. Using the material of her own memories, she creates both a deeply intimate and psychologically convincing image of childhood, thereby expanding the palette of topoi formed by her predecessors and forestalling the discoveries of age psychology. This study allows us to conclude that the two narrative models, while retaining the general Romantic tendency to mythologize childhood, also distinctly record the transition from the marked egocentrism and introspection of the older generation of Romantics to the overcoming of individualism and searching for new narrative strategies among writers who worked at a later stage of French Romanticism and were influenced by new aesthetic, philosophical and social concepts.

romanticism, memoirs, autobiography, childhood, Chateaubriand, George Sand