In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

38 Chapter 2 Colette at Home If anyone has succeeded in carrying out, through her writing, the Dianic charge of protecting women and animals, not negatively, by vindicating and affirming a female power to inflict retribution, but positively, by celebrating domestic diversity, it would be Colette, a contemporary of both Wharton and Barnes. In Colette’s case, the affirmation of that domesticity was also the birth of an author who turned the intimate and the quotidian into subject matter worthy of literature. The developing role of the beast in her work charts not only her trajectory as a writer but also her success in marking out a space all her own—a space, as we shall see, coterminous with the counter–public sphere we have labeled as that of Diana. The beginnings of Colette’s writing career, it is well known, are a far cry from such a utopian alternative, rooted as they are in her oppressive relation with the infamous Willy, described in her Mes apprentissages (1936) as an overbearing patriarch, an older man well established in Parisian society who married the young girl from the country, introduced her to the big city, then locked her in her room to write her schoolgirl memoirs, which would later be published under his name as Claudine Goes to School (1900) and would be followed by other “Claudine” novels all equally written by her but credited to him. Separated from Willy in 1904 and ultimately divorced in 1907, after her scandalously public affair with an aristocratic woman, the Marquise de Belbeuf, or “Missy,” and an equally compromising stage and music-hall Colette at Home | 39 career, Colette eventually found her way as a writer by going back to her roots, to her mother and her mother’s rustic menagerie of a home. Only then, after publishing La maison de Claudine (1922), translated into English as My Mother’s House, could she emerge as the writer who signed her name simply “Colette.” For Colette became her pen name only by the slow process that defined her both as a writer and as a woman, and a woman who was indeed the daughter of her powerful mother, Sidonie or “Sido,” whose name she shared. Born Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, Colette would first take the authorial name “Colette Willy,” the result of joining her father’s surname to her husband’s pen name, itself a deformation of his patronymic , Gauthier-Villars. Signing her works with this name—ironically just as she began to separate from Willy—allowed her to recuperate and reclaim those works previously thought to have been written by Willy, as if to dislodge the priority of his name by preceding it with her father’s own feminine-resonating patronymic. Interestingly, the first work signed by the name Colette Willy, the 1904 Dialogues de bêtes (Creature Conversations), sketches out the rural, animal-filled space that finds its full expression in the last work signed by that name, My Mother’s House. These two works also chart that maternal domesticity whose problematic edges are then explored in later works, all of which are signed simply “Colette,” a pen name that can be read as a woman’s given name or as patriarchal surname. At the same time, “Colette” becomes the name of the author’s literary persona in an increasingly baroque mix of narrative fiction and autobiographical reflections that has ensnared many an overly literal reader. Since my concern is less the “reality” of her references than the import of the domestic imaginary she presents in her work, the question of whether any particular use of the name “Colette” refers to the historical person of the writer or the fictional persona of a character is ultimately moot. Dialogues de bêtes represents not only a first step toward authorship but also a radical change of genre from the salacious Claudine stories, from adolescent love novels to fictive animal conversations. In Mes apprentissages, Colette makes clear the connection between the change in writing and the changes in her domestic life: Je n’en étais pas encore à vouloir fuir le domicile conjugal, ni le travail plus conjugal que le domicile. Mais je changeais. Qu’importe que ce fût lentement ! Le tout est de changer. Je m’éveillais vaguement à un devoir envers moi-même, celui d’écrire autre chose que les Claudine. Et, goutte à goutte, j’exsudais les Dialogues ] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 01:34 GMT) 40 | Colette at Home de bêtes, o...

Share