by Jane Rule
Like Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen satirizes the conventional world, but her judgments are harsher because she does not see the victims of power being the better for it. The distinctive girl child who doesn’t easily fit the narrow mold often does not survive at all, and, if she does, she may have to wait through repressed middle age for a Diana, or be turned into a monstrous caricature, dangerous to herself and other people. Elizabeth Bowen finds nothing unnatural in love between women, a great deal that is hostile in the world in which they try to survive.
Colette 1873–1954
READING TOO MUCH COLETTE at a time is like having an orgy of rancid maple sugar. She might herself have agreed, clear-eyed as she was about any kind of overindulgence, whether it was smoking, drinking, or sensual pleasure. One of the qualities she admired in certain lesbian relationships was the ability of women not only to enjoy the ecstasy of orgasm but to cultivate a more diffused and warm sensuality. There can be that sort of warmth in her writing when she speaks of her pleasure in the natural world, but even then the warmth more often than not becomes heat. Her third husband presents her literally devouring a garden, crushing and inhaling leaves, smelling, taking apart and eating flowers. In describing human beings, even at her most delicate, Colette is always suppressing greed. She is never as detached as she often claims to be, the claim itself a device to taunt. When she is in a mood to protest her own morality as purer than the false modesty she sees around her, she is grandly outrageous:
You were overcome with an irresistible shudder of modesty, you put both hands over your face, your whole body recoiled so far that your dress clung to you and for a moment revealed you more than naked: your little breasts crushed by a tight-fitting corset, your stomach elongated and flat, ending in a mysterious fold, your thighs rounded and close together, your knees delicate, slightly bent, every detail of your graceful body appeared to me so clearly beneath the crepe de chine that I was embarrassed … you who emerge from the sea at Trouville, your nipples visible beneath the taut silk bathing-dress which gleams like a wet fish. …1
Character after character, male and female alike, is exposed to appetite and judgment, often at the same moment. Young Cheri, irresistible before his aging mistress, is at the same time vacuous and silly. Claudine does not enjoy her school mistress’ prettiness without reminding herself that Aimee’s eyes “were neither kind nor frank nor trustworthy.”2 Even a disembodied female breast, fondled like a peach in the hand as an example of simple pleasure, becomes a virile victim, excited and guilty.
Colette would gather around her those she calls her equals who “are inclined to cherish the arbitrary, to prefer passion to goodness, to prefer combat to discussion.”3 Her taste is obvious: “Remove from me everything that is too sweet! Arrange for me, in the last third of my life, a clear space where I can put my favorite crudity, love.”4 Those breasts and thighs are too sweet unless seasoned with a mortal reality which, at its height, can be tragic but which is far more often rancid with cynicism. For Colette nothing illuminates the human creature, raises him or her above the banality and cruelty of human nature, but erotic love, and that illumination lasts only long enough to expose the aging inadequacies of the lovers. “This book,” she says of The Pure and the Impure, “will treat sadly of sensual pleasure.”5 It could be the description of all her books.
Colette began her writing life under orders from her first husband, Willy, who commissioned writing from a number of young writers and then signed his own name to their work. When the very successful Claudine books came out, Colette’s husband was proud to indicate that she was the subject of them, but he claimed authorship for himself. Much older than Colette, he enjoyed calling himself the father of Claudine, a multiple pun on his actual role in the writing of the books. He did suggest their subject matter, and he encouraged Colette to heighten the erotic possibilities of her schoolgirl memories. At the same time he was extending her erotic education by introducing her to lesbian and male homosexual circles in Paris and by his own numerous affairs with other women. Monsieur Bonmariage, in his book Willy, Colette et Moi, claimed that Colette had love affairs with Polaire, the young actress who played Claudine in the stage version of the novel, with Missy, the wife of the Marquis de Belboeuf, and with a number of other women. Margaret Crosland, in her first biography of Colette, tried to dismiss these charges. “Colette was talked of as a Lesbian because she was curious about women and found them just as interesting as men, in certain cases, more interesting.”6 In her later biography, Margaret Crosland was forced to go further: “When two women are deeply fond of each other, or are at least drawn together by some irresistible force which can only be described as sexual …” then the relationship between Missy and Colette is “perhaps best described as amitie amoureuse, a term much more expressive than ‘lesbianism,’ of which there is no simple definition.”7
Colette herself did nothing to disavow or encourage such statements. Later she confessed to a lack of respect for the Claudine novels. “I cannot forgive myself for the fact that by allusion, caricatured but recognizable sketches, plausible fables, these Claudines reveal a thoughtlessness in hurting others.”8 If she was ever troubled about hurting herself with the image she created of a precocious and cruel schoolgirl growing into the indulged wife of an aging libertine, she does not say so.
The lesbian relationship in Claudine at School is between the head mistress, Mademoiselle Sergent, and the young teacher, Mademoiselle Aimée Lanthenay, who are ludicrously portrayed as fawning over each other in public and quarreling over Aimée’s affairs with men and her attachment to Claudine. More realistic and sadder is the relationship between Claudine and Luce, Aimée’s much-abused younger sister who is a student at the school; for Luce really is starved for affection and dotes on Claudine, who returns her devotion with nothing but verbal and physical abuse. “How she loves to be beaten. It’s astounding,”9 Claudine remarks. She is scornful of both sisters, “cowardly, naturally perverse, egotistical and so devoid of all moral sense that it’s amusing to watch them.”10 Acknowledging that she is, just the same, drawn to Aimée, Claudine explains, “I have an irrational heart.”11 Claudine, brighter and in social position superior to everyone else at the school, spends her time in scornful mockery. “Lord, how idiotic women are!”12 Analyzing her own attitude, she comes to the conclusion that “I don’t love people I can dominate.”13 “If that appealed to me, it would be with someone stronger and more intelligent than myself, someone who’d bully me a little, whom I’d obey. …”14 Though there are these moments of psychological interest, most of the sexual material in the book is simply erotic farce, lightly pornographic to appeal to a popular audience, which it obviously did.
Claudine in Paris is taken up with Claudine’s falling in love and marrying. But homosexuality is introduced through Marcel, a boy Claudine’s age whose father she is to marry. Marcel takes Claudine into his confidence for the pleasure of talking about his male lovers, but he wants in exchange stories of Claudine’s lesbian school days. Claudine, in competitive spirit, is forced to invent details about her relationship with Luce and, uneasy, chides Marcel, “In the case of girls, those little diversions are just called ‘school girls’ nonsense.’ But when it comes to boys of seventeen, it’s almost a disease. …”15 To herself she admits, “In your heart of hearts, Claudine, you’re nothing but a common everyday decent girl.”16 In love, she comes to the realization that “what I had been searching for for months—for far longer—I knew, with absolute clarity, was a master. Free women are not women at all.”17
In Claudine Married, also called The Indulgent Husband, Colette explores lesbian relationship far more astutely than she has before. Claudine’s husband, very much troubled by the homosexuality of his son from a previous marriage, takes a very different attitude toward relationships between women which are “all charming and unimportant.”18 He explains himself to his questioning young wife. Lesbian affairs for women are “at any rate a compensation, a very logical
seeking after a more perfect mate, after a beauty more nearly equal to your own, in which your sensitiveness and frailties catch their own reflection. If I dared—but I don’t—I would tell certain women that they need a woman in order not to lose their liking for men.”19 Claudine is shocked by his views and wonders if they are not a rationalization for his tendency to enjoy watching depravity in other people. But, since she also loves and admires him, she works through to a rather comic morality of her own. “It is unnatural to do wrong without enjoying it,”20 which proves good temporary protection for her in the sophisticated world they move in.
Because Claudine is too much in love with her husband to be interested in other men, people assume she must therefore have a taste for women. She talks about fending off those women who are “drawing-room professionals,”21 but she has very little way to defend herself against the charms of Rezi, a beautiful woman who makes her passionate attachment to Claudine evident without forcing her into quick intimacy. While Rezi’s husband watches her with possessive jealousy, Claudine’s husband instead encourages the two women in their relationship, enjoying it vicariously. When Claudine’s own desire grows, Rezi persuades her to ask her husband to find them a place where they can be private. He is only too willing. He even accompanies them to the flat he has found for them and jokes with Rezi about what is to take place. Claudine is shocked by them both. She would have preferred her husband to refuse her in the first place. She is baffled by “the need, common to both of them, to pose as immoral and up-to-date. …”22 For Claudine the experience is entirely different. “The ecstasy of love—as I conceive it—has nothing to do with this kind of flirting.”23 Already she is fearful that Rezi will develop an interest in her husband instead. Rezi, described now not only as very desirable but also unstable and deceitful, is delighted with the arrangement. “We three are acting out a rather unusual little romance.”24 Claudine’s brief illness gives her husband and Rezi the interlude they’ve obviously been looking forward to, and Claudine discovers them at the flat. “I am tormented with jealousy and yet—I do not love her.”25 Claudine leaves her husband and returns to her home in the country, always for Colette a retreat to innocence. Letters from a contrite husband and nature itself gradually give her some understanding of what has happened. Writing to ask him to come to her in the country where she is restored to her real self, she says, “I wanted Rezi and you gave her to me as you would a piece of candy. You must teach me that some of the things we are greedy for are harmful and that anyhow one should beware of imitations.”26 Her request is what it has been all along: “My beloved man, I order you to dominate me.”27
In life Willy left Colette, and for a time she had a career as a mime in music halls, touring the country with Missy and living with her when they were in Paris. It was rumored that she wore bracelets engraved with the words “I belong to Missy.”28 Together they caused a scandal by performing a mime in which they exchanged a passionate kiss. Missy’s estranged husband was in the audience, and he and his friends caused a near riot. This period of Colette’s life is described in The Vagabond, the novel in which Colette gives up the notion of being dominated. The main character finally rejects her suitor with this explanation: “You’re giving me a friend who is young, ardent, jealous and sincerely in love? I know: that is what is called a master, and I no longer want one.”29 In this book there is a more tender if not very positive defense of lesbian relationship, this time from the point of view of the woman. “Two women enlaced will never be for him anything but a depraved couple, he will never see in them the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps sought shelter in each other’s arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is so often cruel, and there to taste, better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail and forgotten.”30 There is also a brief portrait of Amalia Barally, who appears again in The Pure and the Impure as Amalia X., an aging actress who has “a delicate motherliness in her gestures which you find in women who have sincerely and passionately loved women; it confers on them an indefinable attraction which you men will never perceive.”31
Obviously Colette thought of her relationship with Missy in those terms. Missy bought and furnished a villa for her in Brittany, and there she could “take refuge in Missy to be scolded, looked after and given warmth.”32 In the short “Nuit Blanch,” dedicated to M., the love-making is overt, though the image is that of a woman’s love for a substitute child. Missy apparently did not object to some of Colette’s light love affairs with men on the road, but they separated in anger over the man who was to become Colette’s second husband. Missy took the furniture, and Colette kept the house, still feeling hard done by: “She continues to keep everything that belongs to me.”33
Colette had a daughter by her second husband, but she was not to find a happy relationship until she met and lived with a man fifteen years her junior who became her third husband and devoted himself to her and her work until she died.
Though most of her novels and short stories explore relationships between men and women, there are often minor lesbian characters. Elaine Marks, in her book Colette, complains that much of Colette’s writing is flawed by “the often pointless references to Lesbianism which date these novels in a rather unfortunate way.”34 Clearly Colette did not share her assumption that lesbian relationship was a postwar fad like short haircuts, though she could make light of it as she does, for instance, in the short story “Habit,” in which two women have just separated. “They broke up in the same way as they had become close, without knowing why.”35 Both are caricatured, Andrée as grossly masculine, Jeannine blankly feminine. Friends gossip about what happened, speculating about the truth of Jeannine’s complaint that Andrée called for her just as she did for the dogs. “One can’t be sure that Andrée whistled for Jeannine, but those van-driver manners were very like her.”36 Walking in the park one afternoon, Jeannine catches brief sight of Andrée, then hears her familiar whistle and sees the dogs come running. She is filled with nostalgia but not really for her lover. She sighs, “I want last year. …”37 These women are no more foolish and wistful than men and women and are treated with the same mockery, seasoned with tenderness. In that sad novel The Last of Chéri, Chéri finds temporary comfort in the company of an aging lesbian. “A woman burdened with a sexual abnormality could not sustain it at all without bravery and a certain grandeur of spirit such as men sometimes display under sentence of death.”38 Sometimes silly, sometimes courageous, they are almost always attractive. In the story “My Friend Valentine,” a character called Colette asserts, “I find pleasure … in looking at women in each other’s arms, waltzing well.”39
In The Pure and the Impure, the book Colette thought would finally be considered her best, she expresses most candidly her attitudes toward a range of sexual experience. Though she employs the device of long narrative anecdotes, this book is not fiction. In it she presents portraits of people she has known or heard about and sometimes comments about her own relationships with them. Janet Flanner, in an introduction, picks up the vocabulary Colette herself uses, as do so many others in trying to deal with the wide spectrum of sensuality. “Colette’s understanding of the male sex amounted to an amazing identification with men per se, to which was added her own uterine comprehension of woman, more objective than feminine.”40 “She seemed to have a hermaphroditic duality in her understanding and two-fold loyalties.”41
In the section of the book in which Colette explores her concept of Don Juan as a misogynist, the man she is listening to is a clear example of the type, bitterly complaining about the amount of sexual attention women want and counting up the number of conquests. He can discuss his sexual life with Colette because he does not consider her a woman. She understands and in part accepts this casual cruelty because she believes there is real hermaphroditism, an ambiguity she herself has tried to escape from. She seems to associate this double sexuality with intelligence rather than sexual preference, an intell
igence that frightens men off. “Who,” she asks, “will realize that we are women?” Another woman replies, “Other women, women aren’t offended or deluded by our masculine wit.”42 Colette, like so many other gifted women, would wish the gift away if she could, “to be completely woman, completely and stupidly female.”43 She remembers a time when she tried to make the other oversimple choice of emulating the male. In masculine disguise she still felt timidly feminine. If she finally established herself in the womanly role she desired with a younger and devoted husband, if she never fully acknowledged the highly honored and loved place she held as a writer not only in France but all over the world, she was never to become “completely and stupidly female.” She did not outgrow her awareness of the erotic power of ambivalent sexuality. Perhaps because she wanted to reject what she thought of as the “masculine” side of her nature, she both romanticized and found more grotesque relationships between women than between men and women. For Colette, the androgynous person had only one right and duty: to be unhappy.
Some of the portraits of those privileged to sorrow are very convincing. There is La Chevalière, who is Missy, Colette’s ex-lover, though Colette does not offer that information. Her attitude toward Missy has softened over the years. La Chevalière is pictured as extremely masculine and very shy, the model and mentor of a large group of lesbians in Paris, who all her life sincerely looked for but could not find a lasting, affectionate relationship with another woman. She is set apart and above the others who pursued younger women, actresses and models, for sexual pleasure, for she herself is not interested in such affairs. She is obviously offended by the sensual appetites of the women she attracts, complains about their demands in much the same way Don Juan complains but not for the same reason. She wants a relationship that is tender rather than passionate.
