Chapter 2 - La Maison de Claudine: Maman Not Claudine

Summary

This chapter examines the long-misunderstood 1922 novel focused not on the character Claudine but on Colette's mother as a key to her writing and its pervasive incest taboo. The misleading title—the result of the author's and publisher's desire to capitalize on the series’ popularity—is not the primary reason for the misunderstanding at the heart of the narrative, as I will explain. This close reading of La Maison de Claudine shows for the first time how the metaphors of sewing and the voice link the narrator, mother, daughter, and gay actor, gradually revealing how the desire for the maternal figure poses serious challenges for self-knowledge and psychological health. In unrelated episodes, especially those dealing with these characters, Sido, Bel-Gazou, and Marcel d’Avricourt, Colette probes the conflicts arising from sexual drives both straight and gay.

While Julia Kristeva's Colette is an exception, earlier scholarship as well as the commonplace view of the novel, for example, on blogs such as those of WordPress, fail to acknowledge the threat posed by such conf licts, distorting it as a nostalgic, idyllic recreation of a happy childhood. This includes that of the brilliant novelist Doris Lessing in her forward to Andrew Brown's uneven translation published by Hesperus in 2005. Here, I explode most earlier interpretations with special emphasis on a female psychology very different from that identified by Lessing as well as by other critics whose take on the novel as idealized memories is similar. While it is true that Colette celebrates to a considerable extent the mother figure Sido especially and also the daughter who vividly conveys the precious imagination of the child, the novel as a whole stages a complex confrontation with illicit drives, particularly the incest taboo, a drama missing in the criticism.

This interpretation led to my new, forthcoming translation, which in turn contributed to discoveries confirming my sense of the novel. A careful reading of the original uncovers the incest taboo and a bisexual voice central to the spirit of La Maison de Claudine. My goal was to recreate it in my tongue.