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

But Colette’s triumph was her own prison sentence. The girl who had once longed for sensual domination now found the country house in which Willy sequestered her as a kind of glorified literary slave a bit more than she had bargained for. Worried about money, Willy prodded her to make her next books even more scandalous and titillating. She complied, writing five Claudine novels, two hugely successful plays, and two other books under Willy’s name. Isolated and dominated, Colette was a good worker and an assiduous writer. Soon the books became a kind of dialogue in which Colette narrated the ups and downs of her increasingly complicated marriage to Willy, even using her scandalous attachment to a woman named Georgie as fodder for Claudine Married. The book was almost banned for its racy content, but not before Colette discovered that Georgie had been bedding Willy, too.

Colette was stunned, both by her lover’s unfaithfulness and her husband’s. But there wasn’t much time to mourn other people’s flaws when her own literary daughter had become so unruly. The Claudine novels weren’t just popular, they were a phenomenon. Wherever she went, Colette could see mountains of Claudine-branded merchandise… and hear whispers about the true authorship of the books. Colette herself was suddenly famous, and she found herself in an increasingly awkward position. Willy now celebrated her androgyny, encouraging her to wear scandalous clothing and insisting on making creepy in-public appearances flanked by his wife and Polaire, a gamine actress who created the Claudine role on the stage. Willy treated them like twin dolls, fondly calling them his “daughters” and, it is to be assumed, bedding them both. Colette played along, but not without a sense of betrayal.

For me, Colette’s next move overshadows her more famous future escapades. Sure, she went on to do her time in the theater, where her bare-breasted, passionate kiss with her then-lover, the cross-dressing Mathilde “Missy” de Morny, the marquise of Belboeuf, led to a full-blown art riot. She seduced her sixteen-year-old stepson, engaged in indulgent collaboration with the Vichy regime, even outrageously neglected a daughter who would forever be overshadowed by her famous mother. These moves were all classic Colette, but they could never have happened if it weren’t for the stand she took when it came to her first published works. This rebellion started in a social setting, where Colette’s frank raconteurism and untutored accent gave away her outsider status. It spilled over into a series of books in which lust and love are turned out at the seams, torn apart, and cobbled back together again in outlandish fashion. And it ended up practiced inside the formerly private confines of a marriage whose shelf life was up and whose inner life she no longer bothered to obscure.

In the end, it wasn’t the indiscretions or sleaze that got to Colette. It was the sight of Willy, that infamous dilettante and faux celebrity, co-opting her childhood and her heroine and claiming them as his own. Finally free from the bonds of her first, all-encompassing love and straining under the expectations of a society that neither appreciated nor sustained her, it was time to stake a claim to her most indulgent creation: herself. The details of Colette’s battle to get her name on her own literary works could fill their own book. Aware he was being made to look a fool, Willy fought hard for the character he had encouraged and fostered. But the details don’t matter much. What counts is that Colette finally fought for her name, gambling on behalf of her heroine and her legendary personal identity.

Must a heroine engage in legal battles, seduce her husband’s lover, or mock the very foundations of society in the name of self-indulgence? I think not. After all, Claudine and Colette’s most over-the-top moments were personal ones. Claudine is as extravagant and self-indulgent walking alone through the streets of Paris in search of the country life and the childhood she’s lost as when she’s brilliantly drunk on sparkling wine. That daring leads her to eavesdropping and ill-timed outbursts, failed affairs and forbidden ones, and we are left with the feeling that while surely there’s a time and a place for self-restraint, love and self-respect are no place for the bit and the reins.

In a media landscape so cluttered with ego and false courage, it’s hard to find true extravagance among the poseurs. Colette would have laughed at and loved our Madonnas and Lady Gagas, with their provocative commitment to pushing the envelope for scandal’s sake. True self-indulgence becomes even more challenging as we are encouraged to think small, curl up, and protect ourselves in response to scary social and financial forces. Austerity is the code word du jour, but is a heroine really served by constant calculation and levelheadedness? The knack must be in finding some kind of balance between outrageous action and cautious thought. Elusive and often out of reach, balance is a skill neither Claudine nor Colette ever really mastered.

There’s something so fresh and appealing about Claudine’s imperfections that it becomes easier to tolerate my own. After all, aren’t the qualities that make Claudine so human precisely the ones that move her toward happiness? It would be different if she were all play and no seriousness, but Colette made sure to give her heroine a heart that restlessly seeks love and recognition and a head that knows when she’s gone too far. For women who will never be chastened for refusing to properly restrain our feminine hair or for daring to enjoy ourselves in bed, it can be hard to remember that Claudine’s small indulgences were important ones. The Paris of Colette’s day was resolutely libertine, but it was also one in which wives still belonged to their husbands and daughters to their fathers. Claudine and Colette’s insistence on enjoying themselves takes on even more significance when we stop to consider how hard that may have been to accomplish. And Colette’s claim to the literary credit she deserved was just as daring as her most profligate romantic feats.

I’ll admit it, after I discovered the Claudine novels I walked around with a sly new sense of possibility, a desire to push up against the boundaries I don’t always acknowledge around me. I may not have wanted to go out and seduce someone inappropriate, but I definitely wanted to pause and enjoy my body and my mind, to seek out pleasure for a moment even in an unpleasant time. Part of the power of Colette is her insistence that, no matter how doomed a love affair or hopelessly cloistered a life, an indulgent enjoyment of what pleasure we can create for ourselves is our right and our due. That’s something a heroine can carry around with her even if she knows she’ll be credited with every word she writes. Informed by the spirit, if not the letter, of Claudine’s teenage rebellion, a heroine can claim what’s hers, no matter who tells her it’s off-limits. And she can take a Colette-like pleasure in kicking life’s Willys to the curb.

We remember Colette as one of life’s more indulgent figures not because she shied away from her due, but because she pursued it even when life threw heartbreak, intrigue, infidelity, lost love, and war in her path. Any heroine on the verge of claiming that life for herself will be accompanied by Colette and outrageous Claudine. After all, aren’t heroines called upon to rise higher than the petty concerns that threaten to tether them? Is it even possible to author a life as deliciously scandalous as theirs? I, for one, would love to find out.

READ THIS BOOK:

• When you’re as nervous and claustrophobic as a country cat forced to live in a small city apartment

• When you tire of changing your hairstyle as a mode of rebellion and are looking for some daring inspiration