Chapter 1 - A Woman of a Certain Age: Chéri

Summary

Colette's biography and the social fabric of France in the early decades of the twentieth century are the ground from which Chéri (1920) emerges. They do not, however, account for the force of the tragic, incestual, love story. She writes it before the development of the incestual affair between the forty-seven-year-old author and her seventeen-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. As Julia Kristeva puts it: “the fantasy truly preceded the act.” However, the rapport between Léa and Chéri does replay that of the author's first marriage with the sexes reversed. My concluding chapter on Wash Westmoreland's bio picture focuses on the significance of her first marriage in her writing including Chéri. Colette's infamous relationship with her husband, the forty-year-old Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars), infantilized the nineteen-year-old young woman as well as enslaved and/or exploited her as a factory worker. He locked her up like a misbehaving child to force her to write and then published her work under his name.

While they do not discuss explicitly the incest taboo and the specific gendered behaviors analyzed below, Alex Hughes and Mary Noonan document the sexism of Belle Époque culture depicted in the narrative. My analysis of the novel does not in itself reveal the way Colette portrays the patriarchal culture of her time. With evidence from these scholars, it does, however, make a compelling argument for the presence of the prohibition and gendered conduct in this period. Society considers the “parent–child” love affair taboo at the same time that the prohibition ironically enables said society to exist. While culture shapes her narrative, it does not deny the strength and invention of her portrayal of Léa and Chéri's tragic love story, which Frank Kermode names so well, but without reference to the hidden prohibition. He says, “With a great technical and moral leap […]. Coletteinvents a mode, the mode of hedonist tragedy.” As Chéri makes clear, the taboo exists, even in its promiscuous courtesan environment.

The scene in which the young man kisses Léa for the first time followed by her embracing him and their lovemaking highlights the anxiety raised in her by this development.