Colette Analysis

Colette, whose complete works fill sixteen large volumes, is best known for her novels. Her first success, La Vagabonde (1911; The Vagabond, 1955), was followed by its sequel, L’Entrave (1913; The Shackle, 1964), and in time by Chéri (1920; English translation, 1929), La Maison de Claudine (1922; My Mother’s House, 1953, a novelized autobiography of her early years that followed four Claudine novels, published from 1900 through 1903 under her first husband’s name), La Fin de Chéri (1926; The Last of Chéri, 1932), Le Blé en herbe (1923; The Ripening Corn, 1931; also known as The Ripening Seed), La Seconde (1929; The Other One, 1931), La Chatte (1933; The Cat, 1936), Julie de Carneilhan (1941; English translation, 1952), and Gigi (1944; English translation, 1952). These and many others constitute a substantial body of internationally famous novels. Colette is also the author of numerous volumes of memoirs, plays, film scenarios, essays, reviews, sketches, and criticism. A centenary edition of her uvres complètes de Colette (complete works of Colette). Short Novels of Colette (1951), edited by Glenway Wescott, contains translations of six of her novels. Robert Phelps edited The Collected Stories of Colette, which includes translations, again by various hands, of one hundred works of short fiction.

The publication of Colette’s first Claudine segment preceded by five years her first notable success under her own name, Dialogue de bêtes (1904; Creature Conversations, 1951), a group of “dialogues” between her bulldog and her Angora cat. The Vagabond, published shortly after L’Ingénue libertine (1909; The Gentle Libertine, 1931), was nominated for a Prix Goncourt. The publication of Chéri, when she was forty-seven years old, ensured her reputation as a literary giant in France. She had achieved fame in journalism, the theater, on lecture tours in Europe and Africa, and as a writer whose works were admired in English, German, and Italian translations. She began her consistently successful work in the cinema in 1931. André Gide’s journal entry for February 11, 1941, includes enthusiastic praise for Colette’s writing style and for two of her works in particular, one published in 1922 and the other in 1937. In 1936, Colette succeeded the countess Anna-Élisabeth Mathieu de Noailles to a chair in the Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Francaises de Belgique (the Belgian Royal Academy of French Language and Literature). She completed her last long novel, Julie de Carneilhan, in 1941. At the end of World War II, she won election to the Académie Goncourt. A fifteen-volume edition of her complete works appeared in 1949. W. Somerset Maugham had said in 1938 that “no one in France now writes more admirably than Colette,” and Wescott, in his introduction to Short Novels of Colette, calls her “supreme rememberer.” A biographer, Herbert Lottman, quotes The New York Times obituary of August 4, 1954, which states that Colette’s “fifty-odd novels and scores of short stories were as popular with housewives, shop girls and laborers as they were with intellectuals.”

Many of the works written by Colette (kaw-LEHT) defy ready classification. Aside from creating tales that are of such a length as to make it difficult to decide whether to term them short novels or long short stories (the term nouvelle, which Colette often used for her work, means both “novelette” and “novella”), Colette also frequently mixed fiction with fact in a confusing blend. La Maison de Claudine (1922; My Mother’s House, 1953), for example, can pass for fiction; however, the book is essentially a series of sketches from Colette’s life, primarily dealing with her mother, the famous Sido. Indeed, it has been observed that almost every page of this author’s very personal writing contains something that can be traced to her life. Several of her particular fixations, such as animals and flowers, thus not only appear prominently in her fiction but also are dealt with at length (and with great knowledge and sensitivity) in her full-length essays.

When a film was made of her life in 1952, Colette told an interviewer who had not seen the production to go and see what a wonderful life she had led; she then remarked that she wished that she had been aware of its quality earlier. In fact, her interest in and wonder at life can be found in all of her writings. These works include, in addition to a number of short stories, a variety of reminiscences, adaptations of her tales for the stage and the cinema, and virtually unclassifiable publications on life as a music-hall performer, on cats, on writing, and on life in general. uvres complètes de Colette, the “complete” works of Colette (prepared under the eye of the author, who excised a number of titles that she considered unworthy of republication), published from 1948 to 1950, fill fifteen large volumes; these do not contain a sizable correspondence, most of which has been published separately.

One indication of Colette’s persisting appeal is the impressive number of republications of her chief works, including a sometimes bewildering array of retranslations. In her lifetime, Colette enjoyed an enormous popularity with everyday readers and eventually was recognized by the literary establishment as a genuine talent. She was elected to the Académie Goncourt (1945) and was the first woman to serve as its president (1949); she was given the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur (1953); and she was the first woman in France to be accorded a state funeral. Perhaps a more significant index of Colette’s literary importance is the record of her friendships with towering figures such as Marcel Proust and André Gide, both of whom admired her work. Since her death, numerous biographical and critical studies (from writers in France, England, and America) have attested Colette’s impact on French letters and on world literature.

Few authors begin their career as coauthors, as did Colette. How did this early experience benefit her career?

Colette is well known for her gamins, of whom Gigi is probably best known to Americans because of the film based on the story. By what means can an author contrive characters both “assertive” and “endearing”?

To what extent was Colette, by then a senior citizen, able to convey successfully the era of the Nazi invasion of France in World War II?

In what ways did Colette’s nation far exceed the United States in honoring a literary woman with a sensational personal reputation?

Is Colette open to the charge of repetitive plotting of her fiction?