Colette

by Julia Kristeva, Jane Marie Todd

Overview

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this intellectual biography of Colette—the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy "Female Genius"—will be considered a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century.

Colette (1873-1954) was a prolific novelist who celebrated sexual pleasure and invented a language for it at a time when women writers were inhibited about dealing with the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world and the joys and pains of love served as her main themes, and 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 male and female lovers, and for a time supported herself as a mime, dancing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died, she received the first state funeral the French Republic had ever given a woman.

Colette's writing was inspired by entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and fin de siècle gay aesthetes. She admired those who lived on the sexual edge and was accused of moral corruption in intellectual matters—she published 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. In a multifaceted approach, Kristeva considers Colette's use of metaphor, the characters in her novels, and the development of her writing within the context of her life. Paying particular attention to the language the French writer used 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 impression that remains is of a woman intent on experiencing the world's pleasures—its jouissance—in a melding with the world's flesh.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231128964
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/16/2004
Series:	European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.32(w) x 9.24(h) x 1.36(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII. A world-renowned psychoanalyst and literary theorist, she is the author of many books, including Hannah Arendtand Melanie Klein (both published by Columbia).

Jane Marie Todd is a translator living in Portland, Oregon. She has published some thirty translations, including Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva's The Feminine and the Sacred (Columbia).

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgment	ix
Chapter 1	Why Colette? she Invented an Alphabet	1
Chapter 2	Life or Works?	17
	From Saint-Sauveur to Willy: An Initiation	25
	Vagabondage and Social Success: Missy, Sidi, Bel-Gazou	39
	From Mother-Son Incest to the Consecration of the Mother: Bertrand de Jouvenel and Sido	48
	A Continual Rebirth	55
	Two Sides: Money and Writing	57
	The Idol Cornered by History	62
Chapter 3	Writing: Tendrils of the Vine	74
	The "Large-Limbed" Need to Write	74
	Tendrils of the Vine in Seven Movements	85
	Metaphors? No, Metamorphoses	95
	Two Narrative Registers	100
	The Imaginary as the Right to Lie	106
	The Solitude of Music and of Crime	110
Chapter 4	Who Is Sido?	123
	A Slow Apparition	123
	The Child and the Enchantments: Melanie Klein and Colette	127
	The Incestual Mother with "One of [Her] Children"	133
	What a Character!	140
Chapter 5	Depression, Perversion, Sublimation	155
	Freud's Way: Pere-version or Mere-version	155
	Idealization: Latency and the Superego	159
	Genitality or Neoreality?	164
	Succeeding Where the Pervert Exhausts Himself	168
	Psychopathia Sexualis and Melancholy According to Colette	172
	Pain, or Colette the Father	184
Chapter 6	The Metamorphic Body: Plants, Beasts, and Monsters	194
	"... My Old Subtle Senses"	194
	"O Geraniums, O Foxglove ..."	209
	The Animal, or an Unused Love	213
	"... If 'Mme Colette' Is Not a Monster, She Is Nothing" (Jean Cocteau)	224
	From the Death Drive to Decapitation	238
Chapter 7	Men and Women, Pure and Impure	241
	A New Mystic?	241
	Love Expresses Itself Only in Metaphors	246
	... Or, How to Wrest Oneself Away from Love	248
	From the Woman-Object to Objectless Love	254
	A Queen of Bisexuality	260
	Precocious Maturity, or Delicacy According to Mitsou and Gigi	267
	"... Those Men that Other Men Call Great"	274
	The Femine Ideal Includes Its Negative	283
	Mother and Child	287
	The War Between the Sexes	294
	"Those Pleasures Thoughtlessly Called Physical ..."	297
	The Infantile Revisited from the Direction of the Impure	310
	Which Couple? Or, the Triumph of the Imaginary	315
Chapter 8	A Little Politics all the Same	322
	An Antifeminist	323
	The Occupation, or the Politics of the Gourmand Ostrich	326
	Living the Image: From Illustration ...	341
	... To Cinema: In Praise of the Imaginary	348
Chapter 9	Still Writing, Between Balzac and Proust	358
	"Balzac, Difficult? He? My Cradle, My Forest, My Journey?"	358
	Proust? "As in Balzac, I'm Awash in It ... It's Delicious ..."	368
	Memory and Worthiness	379
	"Because Writing Leads Only to Writing"	391
Chapter 10	Is There a Feminine Genius?	403
	Simone de Beauvoir: "Situation" and "Individual Opportunities"	404
	The Two-Faced Oedipus	408
	Intersections	419
	Notes	429
	Bibliography	483
	Index	487

Editorial Reviews

A major study on a figure who remains one of France's most underrated writers.

France Today - Julien Bisson

Kristeva's doubting, troubled reading of Colette as daughter, as lover, as (autobiographical) writer is illuminating. Yet the encounter of Kristeva and Colette also serves to shift and open up areas in Kristeva's writing. On some levels the study is frank and personal...For Julia Kristeva, female genius depends on taking risks with language and with one's own identity. These are risks she herself is willing to take - emphatically so, as she revivifies our readings of Colette.

Times Literary Supplement - Emma Wilson

This is a wonderful book by one of the finest minds of our time.

Daily Item - Michael Payne

This work is the third in Kristeva's trilogy on female geniuses, after Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein. Rather than the many scandals of her subject's life (1873-1954), she concentrates on Colette's writing, which she sees as groundbreaking in its attention to pleasure, especially women's pleasure, and in its language.

Globe and Mail

part psychoanalysis, part apologia--all based in love.

Women's Review of Books - Julia Balen

Persuasive and entertaining. As an account of how Colette's writing works through vivid and sexualized metaphor, it's quite superb.... Kristeva and Colette are a brilliant coupling.

The Times (London)

French writer Colette's last word was "look." Perhaps it should have been "devour," for she lived voluptuously. Colette did not want simply a glimpse of life but a firm grasp of it. She was married three times, participated in an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and wrote for World War II Vichy journals while trying to prevent her third husband (a Jew) from being deported. This scholarly biography, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Colette's death, is not a scandal sheet but a psychoanalysis of Colette in which Kristeva (linguistics, Univ. of Paris VII) uses psycholinguistics to explore the author's work and life. Together with Kristeva's previous biographies of Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein, it forms the "Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words" trilogy. Like the other two, this book offers writing too dense for lay readers and will appeal only to scholars, who will benefit from Kristeva's insights into Colette's work. Recommended for academic libraries.-Bob Ivey, Univ. of Memphis Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This is a wonderful book by one of the finest minds of our time.

— Michael Payne

Daily Item

A major study on a figure who remains one of France's most underrated writers.

— Julien Bisson

France Today

part psychoanalysis, part apologia—all based in love.

— Julia Balen

Women's Review of Books