Colette
This intellectual biography of Colette—the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy on female genius—represents a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century.
Colette (1873–1954) was a prolific novelist celebrated for exploring sexual pleasure and inventing a language for it at a time when women writers were hesitant to address the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world, alongside the joys and pains of love, served as her main themes. Her novels—Cheri, La Chatte, and Gigi, among them—blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction long before autobiographical novels became commonplace. She married three times, had both male and female lovers, and for a time supported herself as a mime, performing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died, she received the first state funeral ever given to a woman by the French Republic.
Colette's writing drew inspiration from entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and fin de siècle gay aesthetes. She admired those living on the sexual edge and was accused of moral corruption in intellectual matters—publishing in pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic journals during the Occupation, even as she fought to keep her Jewish third husband from deportation. Kristeva deftly examines Colette's controversial life and work and considers two of her most important influences, Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. Paying particular attention to the language used by the French writer to "say the unsayable and name the unnameable", Kristeva offers an elegant and sophisticated critique of Colette's psychological conflicts, particularly her sexual relationships, and how these conflicts are both recorded in and resolved through the act of writing.
Appealing to Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as the Oedipus complex, perversion, the symbolic, and melancholy, Kristeva opens Colette's oeuvre to psychoanalytic interpretation. The lasting impression is of a woman intent on experiencing the world's pleasures—its jouissance.
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Description
This intellectual biography of Colette—the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy on female genius—represents a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century.
Colette (1873–1954) was a prolific novelist celebrated for exploring sexual pleasure and inventing a language for it at a time when women writers were hesitant to address the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world, alongside the joys and pains of love, served as her main themes. Her novels—Cheri, La Chatte, and Gigi, among them—blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction long before autobiographical novels became commonplace. She married three times, had both male and female lovers, and for a time supported herself as a mime, performing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died, she received the first state funeral ever given to a woman by the French Republic.
Colette's writing drew inspiration from entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and fin de siècle gay aesthetes. She admired those living on the sexual edge and was accused of moral corruption in intellectual matters—publishing in pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic journals during the Occupation, even as she fought to keep her Jewish third husband from deportation. Kristeva deftly examines Colette's controversial life and work and considers two of her most important influences, Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. Paying particular attention to the language used by the French writer to "say the unsayable and name the unnameable", Kristeva offers an elegant and sophisticated critique of Colette's psychological conflicts, particularly her sexual relationships, and how these conflicts are both recorded in and resolved through the act of writing.
Appealing to Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as the Oedipus complex, perversion, the symbolic, and melancholy, Kristeva opens Colette's oeuvre to psychoanalytic interpretation. The lasting impression is of a woman intent on experiencing the world's pleasures—its jouissance.
