Colette: Historical Context

Colette: Historical Context
By Natalie Allen

Colette’s life spans the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, a time of immense change, tumult and development for Europe and the rest of the world. In France, the Dreyfus affair divided the country and exposed deep-rooted anti-Semitism in the society. The country emerged as a major colonial power in Africa and Asia, a development accompanied by economic growth but also by a great number of polemics concerning the notions of “Civilization,” “Self” and “Other.” The nation lived through the hardship of the two World Wars and the Vichy regime. These latter events touched Colette very personally. Maurice Goudeket, her third husband and a Jew, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and taken into a detention camp. It took Colette seven weeks of relentless efforts to win his release.
The early 20th century ushered in an era of glamour but also of darkness in French society. The “Belle Epoque” revealed itself as an era of brilliance and style, of but also of boredom, perversity, and depression. Poverty was rampant and the misery of working class women contributed to a flourishing prostitution industry. At the same time, more and more people were beginning to question traditional social norms. A greater number of women were living independently in urban centers. Experimentation with sexuality and homoerotism increased, and developments in contraception allowed women a greater sexual freedom. The feminist movement continued to grow.
In literary and artistic circles, the first half of the twentieth century was an era marked by a rich array of new movements and the development of the avant-garde. A newfound interest in the unconscious, exemplified by Freud, was omnipresent. Marcel Proust combined social and psychological analysis in his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, and surrealism exploded as an esthetic movement thanks to writers like André Breton. In the arts, cubism, fauvism, Dadaism, and other schools questioned traditional modes of representation in an effort to re-think and re-work the notion of art.
Taking these major currents into consideration, we might observe that Colette was a writer both of and “out of” her era. An independent woman working in the arts, her existence defied the social norms of the past and marked her as distinctly “modern.” Yet, though she was a model of “feminine liberation,” Colette consistently rejected the title of “feminist.” This aversion to labels and classifications also becomes significant when we place Colette’s work in the context of her era. Colette’s writing certainly reflects many of the preoccupations of her time. She seeks continually to explore the unconscious, and experiments with new strategies of representation, in particular, new ways of representing the self. However, in contrast to her masculine counterparts, Colette avoided ascribing to any particular ideology or set of esthetic standards. She never attached herself to a specific movement or “ism,” but sought rather to paint a portrait of the “daily lives of women.” It is certainly revealing that Colette, without question France’s preeminent female writer during the first half of the twentieth century, worked in such isolation.

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