Antonioli on Reid (2023)

Martine Reid’s Colette avant Colette: Trouver sa place, se faire un nom is a brilliant new meditation on Colette and a valuable addition to Colette studies.

Reid’s work is a literary essai in the French tradition rather than a heavily analytic or theoretical academic consideration of Colette, and it is engaging and readable. In addition to its value to Colette scholars, the work would be a good first read for someone interested in Colette or for students because of the lively narrative style of the text. This readability is in part due to the book’s length: it is a slender 185 pages, with no footnotes, and a two-page bibliography that is suggestive rather than exhaustive. This is not to say, however, that the book suffers from its lightness—quite the contrary, the frame of reference for the work is impressive, weaving together Colette’s literary works with her journalism, letters, and biographical details, and anchoring the text in the history, politics, and culture of the time.

As a meditation on the name “Colette,” the work begins before Colette’s birth with her mother and father (whose surname will eventually become Colette’s first name), and ends in 1923, when Colette signed Le blé en herbe with her single moniker. This trajectory is not entirely new to Colette scholars—Michèle Sarde’s 1978 Colette libre et entravée similarly concludes the fourth chapter with Colette triumphantly signing Le blé en herbe with her single name. Reid’s work nonetheless brings fresh perspective to the question of Colette’s evolving name—making fascinating observations, for example, about resonances in names in Colette’s life more generally—noting that both she and her first husband Willy take their nicknames from their last names, and that Willy and Colette’s lover, Missy, have names that follow a very similar sound and letter pattern (as does Sidi, her nickname for her second husband). The text is organized chronologically and focuses on Colette’s early life and career, with more emphasis placed on her time with Willy and Missy (roughly 1893–1910) than on her relationship with Henry de Jouvenel (roughly 1912–23).

Reid deftly navigates the complex interweaving of autobiography and fiction in Colette’s work—she accurately observes about Colette that “rarement la vie et l’œuvre ont été si intimement liées” (10). She explores the edges of autobiography in Colette’s work while neither reducing Colette’s art to her life nor ignoring the ways that Colette self-consciously refers to her own life in her works. Reid’s interpretation of La Vagabonde and its sequel L’Entrave is particularly perceptive.

In addition to the titular focus on “nom,” Reid’s Colette avant Colette also interrogates Colette’s “place.” Interestingly, this place for Reid is less centered on Colette’s physical dwellings and more focused on her placement in society. For example, Reid pays particular attention to the shifting role of social class in Colette’s life and relationships. Labeling the author a “transfuge de classe,” Reid asks whether “Colette entend bien ne pas jouer à ce qu’elle n’est pas—mais qu’est-elle au juste?” (123). The response to this question is a complex one. Though Colette reveled in some outward markers of her humbler beginnings (such as her thick Burgundian accent), Reid also identifies a lingering class anxiety in her life and works. Reid has a similarly complex and nuanced view of Colette’s sexuality, exploring her relationship with Missy at some length, and touching briefly on Colette’s literary depiction of diverse sexualities in Le pur et l’impur (which lies outside the temporal scope of the work). She writes that “Colette confère à l’homosexualité un caractère temporaire, transitoire, circonstanciel […] elle ne la constitue pas en identité déterminant un destin singulier” (113).

Reid does not shy away from discussing Colette’s faults, from her antisemitism (81) to her cozy relationship with writers on the far right of the political spectrum (49). Reid also reflects on Colette’s vocal antifeminism, reconsidering, for example, Colette’s infamous 1910 assertion that feminists deserve the whip and the harem in a historical and national context (65–6). Rather than taking Colette at face value here (or ever), Reid situates this assertion in contemporaneous discourses surrounding women and feminism, of the increasing visibility of feminism and women’s press at the time, of Colette’s known attachment to nationalist discourses through Willy. She similarly discusses perhaps the most difficult aspect of Colette’s biography to reconcile ourselves with today, Colette’s incestuous relationship with her stepson Bertrand. Reid sums up this relationship with a question “empire ou emprise, abus de pouvoir et d’autorité, volonté délibérée d’ignorer toute forme de contrainte et de suivre son bon plaisir ?” (166).

This review has cited a number of Reid’s questions, and this is a good measure of the style of the book. It reads like a brilliant discours on Colette: thought-provoking, raising questions and opening up possibilities and avenues for further interrogations. It left me eager to re-read works and passages Reid analyzed in order to consider them from the fresh angles she offers. If there were one way to improve this work, it would be with the inclusion of photographs of Colette. Reid’s analysis of images of Colette is extremely insightful, and the addition of some of these images into the volume would render this analysis more immediate, especially for readers less familiar with Colette overall. If the book were republished in French or translated into English, one might hope that the editors would include the images under discussion in this exceptional new work on Colette.