Introduction - That Most Majestic and Disturbing of Drives: Colette’s Work and Life

Summary

This book examines what is the fundamental social prohibition, the incest taboo hovering over Colette's writing. I am using the term “incest” to refer to sexual relations and/or desires between not only biological parents and children (incestuous) but also between individuals who function as parent and child in their principal interactions (incestual). Her fiction shows how women's relationships often emerge from incestuous or incestual longings and reproduce parent–child experiences. She explores how to cope with the serious problems that develop as they confront the social norms inhibiting such relations and blocking their aspirations.

The incest taboo is a contradictory concept in that it enables the existence of society while at the same time prohibiting certain forms of social behavior. The research on the topic is complex and often focuses on how the prohibition, which exists virtually everywhere and at all times, came about. Scholars consider the degree to which it is based in human biology, citing the fact that animals do not often mate with their relatives. They have also done research on the cultural roots of the taboo, using evidence from many times and places to show that “the prohibition was not simply negative: it forced men to marry outside of their clan and thus to forge social relations with the outside.” Claude Lévi-Strauss in his The Elementary Structures of Kinship is the prominent proponent of this theory.

While Colette does not as far as I know discuss the emergence of the taboo, this study of the prohibition in her work and films dealing with it leads to a fuller understanding of the prohibition and the question of how it arose. Sigmund Freud's elaboration of the myth in Totem and Taboo that “primordial sons killed their father in order to possess their mother,” suffered terrible guilt as a result and thus instituted the prohibition is by no means documented truth. The myth does, however, reveal the psychological roots of the taboo to the degree that the story focuses on guilt, as do Colette's novels. Thus, this examination of her writing as well as the films dealing with it helps to understand the prohibition and its emergence including the way incest changes and deepens because of her work.