Seduction French-style—why read Colette?
If I met you at a party and we started chatting and telling each other about our favourite authors, and I mentioned Colette, you might look blank. “Who?” I might ask you if you’d seen the recent 2018 Hollywood film about Colette’s youthful marriage to an older man, a roguish entrepreneur and hack journalist who got his teenager wife writing—a series of saucy, racy stories about the goings-on in a girls’ school in the provinces—and then published the pieces under his own name. I might ask you if you’d seen the earlier 1958 film Gigi, based on one of Colette’s most famous (infamous) novels, concerning a young woman being groomed for high-end prostitution by her courtesan aunts, and featuring Maurice Chevalier throatily groaning “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”… You might have an image of Colette’s work as being all fin-de-siècle frou-frou naughtiness, rather dated surely: a mix of can-can, cream cakes, and kittens. Colette was terribly keen on her pets, as her second husband once grumpily observed.
The Colette whose books I’ve been re-reading certainly wrote fascinatingly about animals. Her appetite for writing about her pleasure in their company links to her appetite for writing about other sorts of pleasure; all aspects of sensuality. She explored the lure of food, love, sex, erotic adventures, taboo experiences, war, violence…the list goes on. She wrote exactly and unsentimentally about women’s secret lives and thoughts, about male codes and vulnerabilities, and about the power play between the sexes. She wrote about homosexual love and had lesbian love affairs herself. Her relationship with the woman everyone called Missy was tender and serious and got her back on her feet after depression and illness. She took a scalpel to the misogyny of the early twentieth century in France, exposing the contradictions of a culture that glorified exaggerated femininity while denying women the vote, controlling their social power and minimising their capacity to earn decent livings. She didn’t live above this culture but plunged into it. She lived out her own conflicts. She wasn’t a feminist but had beloved female friends. She wrote adoringly about her mother but neglected her own daughter. She examined perversion in her novels but in life sometimes got stuck in the victim position.
She took a scalpel to the misogyny of the early twentieth century in France.
In Colette’s day, men were named as masters, wielding phallic pens, and women as silent muses perched on pedestals. Colette broke free of this trap and got down to work. If she learned writerly discipline from her first husband, she certainly went on perfecting it once she had left him. She became a prolific author who published over seventy books. She earned her living all her life. When necessary, she also worked in the theatre as a mime, notably performing posh stripteases on the music-hall stage; she toured dramatic versions of her novels, playing the starring roles; she worked as a journalist for Le Monde, reporting on the First World War; she even (briefly) opened and ran a beauty salon. She went on writing until she died: novels, short stories, plays, film scripts, newspaper and magazine articles—plus hundreds of letters to her gang of dear friends. Her work was widely popular. Her novels were bestsellers. The literary world caught up with her eventually. At her death she was given a state funeral.
For me Colette remains exhilaratingly modern even though she died halfway through the twentieth century. Partly that’s because she invented new forms for her books that express the originality of her subject matter. For example, we may think that we invented autofiction in the twenty-first century, but Colette got there a hundred years ago. She put herself into her fictions, teasing us: do you imagine this is my self-portrait? No: it’s just a model. So, in Birth of Day (La Naissance du Jour) we encounter a Madame Colette dallying with a man thirty years younger than she is. Mixed into the pleasure of their encounters are the pleasures of swimming in an amethyst sea (St Tropez), lowering bottles of amber wine into the well to cool for lunch, planting tangerine trees and mulching them with seaweed, and waking early to watch the dawn come up and the dew glitter on the tamarisk trees. The novel is certainly an enchanting, dreamy evocation of heat, desire, and sensual joy, but what makes it so startling is the way Colette constantly turns aside from the plot to insert memories of her mother Sido into the narrative. Sido is dead, yet simultaneously vibrantly alive, a beloved figure who interrupts the story to tease and admonish her daughter. Colette quotes Sido’s letters, listens to her voice. Sido is just as important as the beautiful young man lolling in Colette’s bedroom wanting sex. Sido seems a mother goddess, walking with her daughter in the radiant garden; with her, paradise is re-found and can be re-lived in the present.
Paradise is a key word in thinking about Colette’s writing. Another reason I find Colette’s work so original and so modern is the way that it takes that Christian trope of the fallen world—paradise lost and paradise redeemed and paradise awaiting us in heaven—and resists and re-works it. Colette re-combines the body and spirit cut apart by Christian theology. She writes as a pagan, celebrating the natural world and giving us a place within it not as lords of creation but as ensouled animals connected to all that there is. She shows us a shimmering vision of paradise existing now, in this life, on this planet—a paradise we may, as humans, have damaged and exploited, and must now learn to love and to repair. If the body of the mother is paradise (paradise remembered, re-imagined, escaped from, yearned for, wounded, mended), then we can map that image onto the world around us and learn to care for it. Flesh is sacred. Dirt is holy. Desire is to be trusted, also examined. Colette never preaches. She seduces. I’m very happy to be seduced by her.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
