Colette

The link between women's identity and women's writing is explored through Colette's life and work, by twenty leading French and American critics and scholars. How did a self-styled "woman born not to write" become one of the most honored and successful writers of her time (1873-1954), while pursuing careers as musical performer, journalist, beautician, sensualist, and wife and mother? In what sense does Colette fit Louis Perche's description as "the first woman in French literature to write as a woman"? These questions are addressed in a blending of modern feminist and critical perspectives, including structuralism and post-structuralist semiotics.

In her foreword Elaine Marks celebrates a "new" Colette, not merely the fabled personality but also the innovative artist of this book. Colette made her own rules different from those of her precursors and successors, male and female. Her unique vision is reflected in the ambiguity of her signs identifying gender, genre, social class, and level of discourse. Male and female body languages are often reversed. A first-person narrator, frequently called "Colette," is both observer and subject. Characters are déclassé, socially in flux. Popular and learned cultures are blended.

The editors' introduction views Colette as opening a revolutionary gynocentric perspective, one that makes her the link between the old feminist literature and the new writing of French women since 1968. "Colette's women," say the editors, "may struggle with simultaneous desires toward freedom and submission, but they refuse self-destruction." They are survivors who epitomize the life force. And they are seekers who struggle for the freedom both to work and to love. "Genesis," the book's first section, presents those elements of Colette's experience and condition as a woman that seemingly impelled her to write. "Gender and Genre" explores the interrelationship between Colette's life and work, between the contexts and the texts. The final section, "Generation," considers the production of meaning in Colette's texts: "a re-coding of woman."

Contributors: Michèle Blin Sarde, Ann Cothran and Diane Crowder, Margaret Crosland, Claire Dehon, Anne Duhamel Ketchum, Erica Eisinger, Eleanor Reid Gibbard, Christiane Makward, Francoise Mallet-Joris, Man McCarty, Nancy K. Miller, Donna Norell, Suzanne Relyea, Yannick Resch, Sylvie Romanowski, Joan Hinde Stewart, Jacob Stockinger, Janet Whatley.