Colette

Colette has long been acknowledged as one of the great French stylists of the 20th century, but the majority of male critics have qualified their praise by lamenting the triviality of her themes and the insignificance of her heroes. Over the past two decades, mostly in France and the U.S.A., feminist re-readings have begun to appear which demonstrate that Colette's work in fact deals radically with issues such as female sexuality, domestic life and the struggle to earn a living in a man's world. This study both provides an introduction to Colette's work - written over more than half a century, adopting and inventing a variety of genres - and presents an analysis of its inseparable sexual and textual politics. Colette's genesis as a writer is seen in relation to the ideologies that formed her childhood experience and in the context of writing by her female contemporaries. The work as a whole is studied from a series of related perspectives - the social and economic dimension, language as theme and as practice, the representation of male and female bodies, the place of the mother in Colette's depiction of gender.
Colette emerges as a richly and radically feminist writer whose texts demolish rigid boundaries between genders and between genres, and whose work not only offers a witty and complex critique of patriarchy, but also transcends opposition and resistance in order to formulate a positive, celebratory feminine philosophy.