The "Counter-Public Sphere": Colette's Gendered Collective

After a full career as novelist, journalist, playwright, and performer, when Colette died in 1954, literary critics were only beginning to reevaluate the limited position that her works had been granted in the literary canon. The process of reevaluation was slow, but thorough, and now, forty years later, we frequently find Colette on academic university reading lists. Nancy Miller, in 1988, actually named Colette as one of the “typically canonized [female] exceptions—the named inclusions.” ¹ The critical works that have been published on Colette’s oeuvre, especially in the past twenty years, approach her texts from a variety of different critical perspectives: structuralist, psychoanalytic, biographical, and other. One of these new approaches in Colette criticism in the 1970s was the move from traditional readings of the “stylistics” in her texts to a feminist aesthetic analysis of her prose. For example, Hélène Cixous, in her celebrated 1975 essay, “Le Rire de la Méduse,” notes that she can think of very few twentieth-century examples that fit her aesthetic notion of an “écriture féminine,” yet she cites Colette among the few writers that she has encountered who would qualify. ² Cixous’s new view of Colette’s prose is only one among many excellent reexaminations of Colette’s style through a feminist analysis.

I also believe that Colette’s prose, as well as the author-reader relationships produced by her works, can be considered more fully if we approach them from a feminist cultural studies angle. Many early biographical studies of Colette did focus on her work within the larger cultural environment of French popular culture, canonizing Colette, the individual, and promoting her status as both a popular and a literary “star” in French culture. However, most early biographers sought to find a position for Colette within the patriarchal structure of literary studies that was, at best, a marginal one. In effect, their approach was not what one would term “feminist cultural studies” that is, an analysis of the texts’ interaction with the societal practices of Colette’s era or our own from a feminist viewpoint. While the lack of cultural studies considerations may be understandable in early Colette criticism, it is surprising that cultural studies analyses have not been included more often in works on Colette during the past twenty years, especially given the fact that Colette’s texts actually elicit such an approach.

Although Colette may have claimed at times that she was “apolitical” (a claim that is itself a marked statement about her position in the cultural environment of her times), her works are often grounded in the social practices and familial relationships of French everyday life. They are deeply embedded in the cultural attitudes and politics of the moments in which she wrote. Not only does a cultural studies approach allow the critic to develop a broad-based “map” of the text’s social environment and the text’s location within that environment, it also permits a close reading of the work under scrutiny. Thus, by approaching her texts from a cultural studies perspective, we can understand both the context in which Colette wrote her novels and the design that she gave to them. While “cultural studies” can be understood as a broad, sweeping term, I have chosen to examine both the context and the design of Colette’s work through the particular branch of cultural studies that involves theories of community and gender. When viewed from such a feminist cultural studies perspective, some of Colette’s works that have been previously read as ambiguous or even non-feminist can now be understood as the foundation that was laid many years ago for a feminist community of author and readers, quite similar to the gendered communities that feminist cultural studies theorists of the 1990s have been formulating only recently.

Historical evidence shows that Colette was not involved in the well-established, more conservatively traditional community of university academia (very few women of the era were). In fact, her most advanced educational degree was a public school “brevet,” which she earned at age 16 in her...