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  • Colette and the Conquest of Self
  • Anne Freadman
Colette and the Conquest of Self. By Laurel Cummins . Birmingham, AL, Summa, 2005. xiii + 214 pp. Hb $48.95.

This study of Colette sets out to trace 'the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of "self" in Colette' (p. 1) through a chronological analysis of selected fictional and the 'semiautobiographical' works. This objective relies on turning the 'life and work question' on its head, using the fictional Colette as represented [End Page 117] in semi-autobiographical work to read the writer's evolution. The 'problematic of identity' (p. 51) is taken not only to represent or explore, but also in some way to perform the achievement of gendered autonomy in the writer herself. 'This active participation and resistance to the discourses of others is what characterizes Colette's textual selfhood' (p. 16). The device used by Cummins to distinguish the fictional 'Colette' from the writer who signs the work is the use of inverted commas around the former; note, then, that in the quotations above, these inverted commas are missing. The methodological move is canny, but it is not entirely persuasive. This is because it relies on the category of fiction, instead of on a performative account of representation. Hence, its very insistence on the distinction between Colette and 'Colette' prevents it from giving an account of how the latter can effect change in the former.

This theoretical difficulty does not prevent Cummins's book from elaborating some very illuminating readings, especially of the semi-autobiographical writings. I think this is because the distinction between 'Colette' and Colette does very little real work in them: the texts are read as autobiography. The series is taken as the classic autobiographical narrative of 'how I became the writer I now am', and the function of the inverted commas is reduced to reminding the reader that the anecdotes through which this narrative is written may or may not correspond to some historical events. In a revealing study of the Claudine series, Cummins works from 'the woman writer's entry into language by way of an apprenticeship in masculine discourse' to 'the subversion of the goal [of this apprenticeship] through the articulation of a feminine presence'(p. 7). Hence, the 'dead end' of the resolution of the Claudine series is contrasted with the 'story of the female writing subject' — the achievement of an independent voice in Sido and La Maison de Claudine (p. 73). The strong points of the argument are that the absence of a mother figure in the Claudine series, together with the dominating presence of father figures, represents the same issue as the figure of Willy in Mes apprentissages. Cummins then uses 'the maternal cycle' to tell a story of the development of female selfhood, through very interesting readings of scenes of reading and writing with both parents. Less illuminating are the readings of the mature fiction, seen in the main as love stories 'in which the mettle of the individual is tried' and which 'rewrite the Claudine series' (p. 120). While Cummins attempts at the outset to articulate a Taylorian view of the self with the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist problematization of subjectivity, this articulation eventually resolves into what she herself calls 'a modernist' as distinct from a 'postmodernist' account. The word 'mettle' in the above quotation alerts us to the fact that the issue of gendered identity is subject to slippage, through the notion of 'the self' to that of moral agency. Notwithstanding the repetition of thematic mantra [aq1]'the construction of a feminine voice, . . . a feminine selfhood and desire', a moralistic reading of Chéri as the story of a disintegrating self does nothing to further the thesis of Cummins's book as a whole. The book takes us from the 'dead end' of the Claudine novels to the 'conquest of self' at the end. This triumphalist structure (modelled on the teleology of developmental psychology) does it a disservice. While the issue of gender reversal in Chéri leads nicely into the issue of androgyny in Le Pur et l'impur (unconvincingly read as a 'novel'), these two chapters taken together as studies in gender relations are not persuasively articulated into...

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