3 - Colette: The Middlebrow Modernist

Summary

In her lifetime, and for many decades after her death, Colette occupied a ‘median position’ (André, 2000, 15) in the French literary field: betwixt and between, in Woolf's phrase, belonging neither to the high literary canon of her era nor to the ranks of the simply popular. Her brilliance and originality as a crafter of French prose were certainly recognised, and with the publication of one of her greatest novels, Chériin 1920, she was even praised by the masters of French modernism, notably Proust and Gide, the latter declaring himself ‘tout étonné du si grand plaisir que j’ai pris à vous lire’ (Colette, 1986, 1547; ‘amazed by the great pleasure I have taken in reading you’) in a letter to Colette. If the book's quality was, for Gide, unexpected, this was because of the yawning gap between himself, ‘maître à penser d’une revue d’avant-garde dont toute la démarche littéraire est inscrite dans une logique de prestige’ (‘the recognised intellectual authority of a highly prestigious avant-garde journal’) and a Colette ‘aux débuts passablement scandaleux’ (‘whose early days were fairly scandalous’) and whose ‘logique’ was decidedly more commercial (André, 2000, 30). Colette had few intellectual credentials, was perhaps best known for her colourful private life, and appealed to a large – and, worse still, female – popular readership. However well she wrote, she did not fit the image of a serious writer. Marie-Odile André has shown how Colette was nonetheless legitimised from the later 1920s on by inclusion in the French school curriculum, but at the cost of being sanitised as essentially a writer on nature and animals, so that generations of French readers first encountered her as the source of tryingly difficult passages for dictation or stylistic analysis. Her image in France, and thus elsewhere, fluctuated between scandal and bowdlerised respectability, until second-wave feminist critics from the 1970s recognised in her a rare and radical feminine voice, though one who still fell awkwardly outside the master narrative of French literary history.

Since feminist work on Colette has been at pains to point out that she is as challengingly original in style and moral vision as her celebrated male contemporaries, it may seem perverse to wish to confirm her now as middlebrow.