Chapter 3 - Gigi: The Importance of the Uncle

Summary

More than twenty years after publishing Chéri, Colette continued to explore in Gigi (1944), the fundamental prohibition enabling the social contract, the incest taboo, and its ramifications for women's psychology in a changing world. Known for her critique of heterosexual love and marriage, she celebrates them here in a late anomalous novel and its romantic fantasy of an adolescent and an older father figure. Gigi in fact embeds Colette's exploration of the social contract and its prohibition in the narrative, enabling the reader to reflect on a young woman's decision to follow her desire. The author's foundational relationship with her first husband, Willy, is clearly one of the sources for the novel. While Gigi on its surface does not replay the events of Colette's life, I argue that it is an example of her invention of autofiction and thus of her contributions to modernism, as I will examine.

In the novel, fifteen-year-old Gigi raises questions about love with a womanizing thirty-three-year-old man in dialogue presented by a third-person limited narrator. The narrative's subtext has Colette setting out problems in and through a young woman's entanglement with the incest taboo. This donnée sets the dramatic stage for a deep exploration of social and gender conflicts waiting to be played out in a nineteenth-century jewel box of French corruption.

The novel's semblance of popular romance fiction misleads critics, biographers, and mainstream readers alike who conclude that, while entertaining, it is not worth serious attention. Jerry Aline Flieger, for instance, who has written the excellent analysis of Colette's autobiographical writing discussed in my preceding chapters and below in this one, does not mention the title. The fine biographer of the author, Judith Thurman, says that she wrote it while sick and bed-ridden in Nazi-occupied Paris as if to excuse her for having written an anomalous weak narrative capitulating to fantasy. She calls the novel “a delicious bagatelle,” mellow and nostalgic, with a fairy-tale ending. Earlier, in her introduction to Roger Senhouse and Patrick L. Fermor's translation of the novel, she writes: “Gigi—written in the bleakest months of World War II—is the best known [of her works] to English-speaking readers, somewhat unfortunately, if only because its promise of happiness so misrepresents Colette's view of love [Vincente Minnelli's film version is an important factor in making her known in the US].”