Colette and the Fantom Subject of Autobiography. - book reviews

In her volume of the "Women Writers" series, Diana Holmes points out that Colette's fiction deals seriously with female sexuality, domestic life, and the problems of women working in a man's world. She negates the frequent assumption that Colette's themes are trivial and her male characters insignificant. Holmes shows that the French writer's novels are based on her experiences and mirror the social and economic conditions of the early twentieth century. She states that these novels and short stories need to be evaluated by female critics, not just by their male counterparts. Holmes praises Colette's realistic precision; her presentation of both Bohemian and bourgeois types; her narrative technique with its frequent changes in point of view; her emphasis on the conflicts between love and freedom, marriage and independence, in a conservative patriarchal society. She describes briefly Colette's life of struggle: her early comparatively tranquil existence in a small country town of Burgundy in contrast with her later adventurous life at Paris beside her unfaithful husband Willy and the music-hall environment, her conflict between female aspiration and social reality. Holmes argues that Colette's stories, composed over a period of more than 50 years, are original in their open-endedness, their lack of resolution of theme and "absence of closure," which make them different from other popular fiction of the time. She also cites the fact that Colette's world is primarily physical and sensual where differences in color, form, and smell are important, with the result that the French writer has been placed in a secondary position among authors. Holmes praises Colette's use of striking similes and metaphors, which lend variety to her descriptions. She indicates that paradox is the central figure of this novelist's writing: her works, termed irreligious by some, really depict the true value of life.

Holmes's book consists of seven short chapters, notes, bibliography, index, and brief quotations from Colette's tales. The volume is easy to read, a clear analysis of Colette's worth in the realm of fiction--a worth underestimated by many readers.

Jerry Alice Flieger's Colette and the Fantom Subject of Autobiography furnishes a discussion of Colette's fictional autobiographies from the points of view of psychoanalysis and feminism, aspects neglected in the criticism of the French writer's works. Freudian theory helps to explain the "fantom subject" called Colette, who relates true accounts but with a changed chronology and invented characters. According to Flieger, the writer's unconscious memory is at work as a kind of mirror with ghost-like relatives and friends who emerge from her pages on a process of self-discovery. Flieger discusses several compositions of Colette, including Sido, My Mother's House, Break of Day, and The Pure and the Impure. She points out that in Colette's autofiction, the reader's involvement with the narrative text is also important, writer-character-reader creating a triangular circuit. Flieger constantly asks questions: Does the book reveal what Colette desired to happen? What is Colette's relation to her various role models? We are in a sort of dream-world with multiple conflicts, an evocation of the past, hypnotic images of childhood. For Colette, writing is a game, a challenge, the fulfillment of a desire but one replete with tension, a kind of needlework. The Imaginary and the Symbolic are said to exist throughout human life for an intertwining of generations. The maternal figure from Colette's childhood assumes mythical proportions, whereas the father is an outsider, a type of paternal enigmatic ghost after his death. There are references to ancient classical mythological figures such as Antigone, Oedipus, and Electra. Flieger writes that "Long before the French feminists, Colette was grappling with the question of female sexuality and its veiled relation to discourse." She states that some of the scenes in Colette's novels depict a mysterious milieu worthy of Poe, a shadowy underworld. Yet we discover high spirits in her writings, no existentialist angst: pathos and nostalgia may at times find a place there. Caricature supplies a favorite comic effect, cartoons of those familiar to the French writer. Flieger applies Freud's theory of joking to Colette's compositions, in which she uses the technique of allusion rather than a clear revelation. She changes the role of parents from being external objects to forming parts of her inner self within the unconscious. She has become, so to speak, a haunted house inhabited by fantoms, the self taking shape through a process of narcissistic identification.

Flieger's volume, divided into chapters subdivided into sections, contains a wealth of footnotes, a selected bibliography, and numerous quotations from Colette's writing. The book is especially useful for scholars of women's studies and for those who stress psychoanalytic applications to literature. As Flieger indicates, her work is different in its approach, since critics to date have written rather about the facts of Colette's interesting life. Flieger produces a well-written, thought-provoking volume analyzing Colette's tales of reality mixed with fantasy.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Studies in Short Fiction
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