Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

Gabri herself was more than charmed. She became obsessed with Willy’s cravings and the licentious, over-the-top personality that challenged everything her sheltered childhood had taught her. She got to know him a little better during their two-year engagement, but nothing could prepare her for the day in May 1893 when the new wife finally made fin de siècle Paris, in all its tawdry, overdressed glory, her home. Only then did she realize that Willy “specialized” in tomboyish women much younger than himself, women he courted extravagantly and jilted viciously. He enjoyed putting Gabri on display in polite society while he indulged himself in other women’s bedrooms. She learned about these affairs first through rumor and anonymous letters, then from chance meetings with her rivals. To a more seasoned woman, one versed in the languid sexuality of bohemian-meets-bourgeois Paris, Willy’s flirtations would have seemed harmless. But to Gabri, they were a betrayal.

Caught between a sort of languid love prison and her own growing restlessness, Gabri began to experiment. She didn’t dare to take her own lovers (yet), but she could push the envelope in other ways, playing her trophy role to the hilt, daring to wear a boy’s sailor suit to social events and reveling in the raised eyebrows and shocked praise of her hosts. She began to collect a shamelessly bohemian group of friends, dramatic and theatrical individuals who challenged social mores. She embraced gay men and demimondaines alike, gathering them around her with her increasingly famous stories of racy schoolgirl life. But even as she tested the boundaries of a stifling social order, her ties to her increasingly money-hungry husband grew stronger. Now she fulfilled the dual role of wife and secretary, handling his correspondence and eventually helping pen his essays.

History does not record whether Gabri (who had begun to tinker with the simple moniker Colette) or Willy first came up with the idea of writing down her schoolgirl stories, but soon enough she was embroiled in a full-scale literary project. It was understood from the start that the work was Willy’s. After all, his was the famous name, and he regularly indulged in the very du jour practice of employing a stable of ghostwriters whose toil was rewarded by a cut of the royalties—once they agreed to let Willy claim their work as his own. The deal was simple—the writers did the dirty work, Willy took the credit. Why on earth should his arrangement with his wife be any different?

But Willy could have no way of knowing that his young wife was pulling off something quite extraordinary. More impressive than her newfound diligence was the personage her book allowed her to meet, then admire: herself. “I have discovered an astonishing young girl,” she told Olympe Terrain in 1896. “Do you know who she is? She’s exactly me before my marriage.”

“She” is Claudine, the autobiographical heroine of the series that bears her name: a self-portrait of the artist as a restless, sexually frustrated teenager whose extravagance is as boundless as her potential for pleasure. We get the first glimpses of Colette’s indulgent future in her first book, Claudine at School. Trapped in an inferior school in an obscure provincial French town, Claudine is determined to poke holes in anything and everything, even as she restlessly searches for something to fill up the discomfort that has arisen during her teenage years. There are plenty of distractions while she searches for answers: the drowsy town of Montigny is full of ridiculous, atrociously human characters whose weaknesses Claudine can’t resist. School bores and shackles her, but it’s not without its charms. There are teachers to lambaste, rules to break, books to mangle, lessons to learn, and students to mock and beat. More appealingly, there are relationships to observe, tease, and secretly long for. Like her little cat Fanchette, Claudine is a sensual creature at heart, flexing and stretching and prowling around in search of someone to scratch her… or someone to scratch.

“You’re called Claudine, aren’t you?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Oh, you’ve been ‘talked of’ for quite a time…. Our mistresses used to say about you: ‘She’s an intelligent girl but as impudent as a cock-sparrow and her tomboyishness and the way she does her hair set a very bad example’… they say you’re crazy and more than a bit eccentric.”

“Charming women, your teachers! But they’re more interested in me than I am in them. So tell them they’re only a pack of old maids who are furious because they’re running to seed. Tell them that from me, will you?”

Scandalized, she said no more.

Petulant and self-centered, bored and all too aware of her own foolishness, Claudine is a shockingly modern heroine for one who lives in turn-of-the-century France. Constantly on the lookout for diversion and scandal, she creates her own if need be. She compares her breasts to those of her friends, mocking their bodies even as she marvels at her own. She listens hard to adult conversations not fit for childish ears and retaliates against grown-up doubts by acting willfully immature. When forced to look after the younger students at school, she makes them transcribe ridiculous tripe. She refuses to subdue her luxurious hair or behave for the school superintendent, whose licentious looks both thrill and scare her. Disregarding the strict expectations of her era, she leaves school when she pleases, opting instead for long walks through pungent French forests and lazy days at home.

In Claudine’s indulgences, we see a bit of the author’s own suppressed fervor for life: Claudine knows how to act in society, but chooses to push boundaries and press buttons at every turn. Hyperaware of her own body, she sets out to see how far she can go, whipping others into an erotic frenzy, then acting the chaste schoolgirl again. And, like any teenager, she realizes that her world is becoming too small to contain her. In a passage that is reminiscent of the coming-of-age chapters in which Francie Nolan realizes that her once-luminous world is cracked and chintzy, Claudine rues her sterile new school and the loss of her childish memories and interests:

Is it because I’m getting older? Can I be feeling the weight of the sixteen years I’ve nearly attained? That really would be too idiotic for words.

Claudine’s indulgence isn’t confined to the schoolroom; she falls in love as spectacularly as she flouts convention in school. She doesn’t just love, she declares it, after a deliciously drunken night with an older man. She throws herself into marriage and then into sadness, feeling the precariousness of her position as a societal curiosity and a baby bride. And she abandons herself to a passionate love affair with another woman with the blessing of a husband she wishes would object. For Claudine, this outrageous approach to her personal affairs isn’t just a means of shocking and gaining attention: it is a declaration of independence in a culture still governed by the corset and the chattel marriage contract, a hypocritical world of appearances and one that gladly overlooks infidelity and abuse as just another side of drawing-room life. It’s hard to understand just how torn about city life Colette herself felt until we read about Claudine’s struggle to feel at home in her own skin in a controlled, stifling urban setting. And it is possible that Colette didn’t understand just how imprisoned she felt before she wrote about it.

Not that the results of her scandalous reminiscences weren’t a success. Claudine at School was the runaway best seller of 1900. Though Willy initially dismissed the work as childish, yet charming, he reread it and saw a glimmer of his wife’s talents… and of the pile of money he stood to earn. His name appeared on the cover, and Claudine appeared in the drawing rooms of scandalized Paris, whose inhabitants were as intrigued as shocked by the book’s frank expressions of sexual longing and disruptive female behavior. How could a book supported by Willy’s marketing genius and his wife’s teasing, racy voice be anything but a success?