Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 1873–1954

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Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle
1873–1954

One of the most celebrated women writers in France, Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette on January 28, 1873 in the French village of Saint-Sauveur-en Puisaye, wrote novels and short stories focused on women, passion, sexuality, and love. First famous for her series of novels about the romantic and sexual education of the school girl, Claudine, Colette made publicly evident the much broader range of sexual knowledge and experience enjoyed by adolescents. Claudine, a lover of both women and men, became a popular figure in early twentieth-century French culture, inspiring a blouse collar (the Claudine collar) and a line of cosmetics. Colette also wrote about the relations between mother and daughter, and produced more than twenty-two novels and short story collections during her long career including The Vagabond (1911), Cheri (1920), My Mother's House (1922), The Pure and the Impure (1941), and Gigi (1945).

Colette's father was a retired army captain and amputee who collected taxes. Her mother, known as Sido, was a colorful, unconventional woman who valued gardens and animals above social respectability. When she was twenty, Colette married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a writer and critic fifteen years her elder. Gauthier-Villars encouraged Colette to write and, according to one legend, locked Colette in her room until she had completed her daily quota of pages. The four novels featuring the character Claudine were initially published between 1900 and 1903 under Gauthier-Villars' pen name, Willy, leading some to conclude that the novels' accounts were the inventions of a middle-aged man instead of the artistry of a young woman.

Colette divorced Gauthier-Villars in 1906 and became an inventive and daring music hall performer. Working as an acrobat and sketch artist, Colette bared one breast during a performance and later simulated intercourse, a bit that caused a riot at the Moulin Rouge. During this time, she had a lesbian relationship with the Marquise de Belboeuf (Missy), who for a time managed her career and public image. She also figured prominently in the Parisian Left Bank culture of expatriate lesbian writers such as heiress Natalie Barney.

Returning to her career as an author, Colette married Henri de Jouvenal des Ursins, a newspaper editor, and began a long and fruitful career as a fiction writer. She gave birth to one child, also named Colette. During World War I, she converted her husband's estate into a hospital for wounded soldiers, which earned her the accolade of being a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the first of many laurels she would acquire. From 1920 until her death in 1954, Colette produced more than fifteen novels and story collections, known for their sensitive and insightful treatment of characters who occupied the margins of polite society. Focusing on gigolos, courtesans, bisexuals, and gay and lesbian characters, many of Colette's novels and stories explore the conflicts among desire, sensuality, identity, passion, and independence. Cheri, for example, tells the story of the relation between a younger, spoiled gigolo and his older lover. The Pure and the Impure recounts the relationships of four lesbian couples. My Mother's House and Sido (1930) recall the joys of Colette's childhood and the eccentric virtues of her mother. In all of her work, Colette treats sexuality and passion openly and as integral forces in people's lives that compel choices and compromises, enable freedom and fulfillment, and end often in sadness and nostalgia.

By the 1920s, Colette was France's most renowned woman writer. In Paris she associated with artist Jean Cocteau and members of his circle who constituted part of the literary avant-garde of the time. She was the first woman elected to the Academie Goncourt and the Belgian Royal Academy, both indicia of respect for her writing. She divorced Henry de Jouvenal in 1924, and in 1935 married the Jewish jeweler Maurice Goudaket, whom she hid during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. In her later years, Colette suffered from debilitating arthritis, but continued to write until her death in Paris on August 3.

Colette's sensitive and open treatment of issues of love and sexuality helped to foster public consideration of sexuality as a necessary part of the human experience. By humanizing marginal figures and showing how such admirable characters as Claudine experienced a variety of desires, Colette not only demonstrated that passion and desire were more varied and universal than had been previously acknowledged, but that homosexual and heterosexual desires coexist as part of a larger human drama.

see also Adolescent Sexuality; Puberty.