Colette: Personal Reflections

Colette: Personal Reflections
By Natalie Allen

Though she was a celebrity and wrote stories that seemed like chronicles of her own life, Colette remained a deeply enigmatic figure. Consciously constructing her image in the public spotlight, she resisted revealing her “true self,” and it is only through the careful juxtaposition of Colette with her characters that we can begin to sketch out her portrait.
Colette never described herself as a “feminist.” In fact, she was hostile to the term. Yet her life seems to incarnate the concept: a liberated, independent woman eschewing traditional standards of male dominance and writing about the complexities the feminine condition, Colette offered to the world her own version of feminism, unwritten in the form of a doctrine but no less powerful.
Colette illuminates the difficulties and nuances of negotiating one’s place as a woman in society. But moreover, she teaches us that this “place” is not a static state, but rather a process of becoming. In both her life and her writing, Colette offers a way of life filled with continual rebirth, self discovery and re-creation. And this rebirth of the self is always linked to an engagement with the world. Colette once said, “We do not look, we shall never look enough, never carefully enough, never passionately enough.” Through her life and work, Colette asks us to look at ourselves and our surroundings with a more astute and open regard, to be incessantly aware of the wonder and richness that fill every day of our lives.