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Stolen Limelight

Name: Stolen Limelight
Author: Margaret E. Gray

Gender, Display and Displacement In Modern Fiction in French

Margaret E. Gray

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eBook - ePub

Stolen Limelight

Gender, Display and Displacement In Modern Fiction in French

Margaret E. Gray

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About This Book

Who has not, in a favored moment, 'stolen the limelight', whether inadvertently or by design? The implications of such an act of display – its illicitness, its verve, its vertiginous reversal of power, its subversiveness – are explored in this book. Narrative crafting and management of such scenarios are studied across canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras, as well as by African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. As manipulated within narrative, acts of display position a viewer or reader from whom response (from veneration or desire to repugnance or horror) is solicited; but this study demonstrates that display can also work subversively, destabilising and displacing such a privileged spectator. As strategies of displacement, these scenarios ultimately neutralise and even occult the very subject they so energetically appear to solicit. Powered by gendered tensions, this dynamic of display as displacement works toward purposes of struggle, resistance or repression.

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Publisher

University of Wales Press

Year

2022

ISBN

9781786838629

Edition

Topic

Literature

Subtopic

French Literary Criticism

Index

Literature

Part I

Embodied Display and Effects of Displacement

Chapter One

Staging the Hyperfeminine: Colette

While Colette’s coming-of-age novel, Le blé en herbe [‘Ripening Seed’] decisively overturns normative masculinist projections of femininity in a climactic closing scene, such an outcome would not immediately seem likely.¹ Colette’s voluminous production, on both stage and page, tends to indulge in extreme, exaggerated feminine images – as in the hype of her successful ‘Claudine’ novels, as well as the glare and scandal of her music-hall roles. In husband Willy’s canny management of his ingénue wife as a virtual walking billboard for her ‘Claudine’ novels, we already see the shape of hyperbolised feminine display to come; Colette herself, overshadowed by her own mythic creation, Claudine, becomes the orchestrated puppet of a male gaze. ‘A côté de moi’ [‘Next to me’] wrote Colette significantly when Willy, crafting his wife into a Claudine clone, lops off her long braids in a slashing, cropping image to which we will return – ‘quelqu’un voyait beaucoup plus loin’ [‘someone saw a good deal further’].² Yet, in the subversive manipulation of feminine tropes that closes Le blé en herbe, Colette’s narrative ultimately succeeds in confounding any male gaze putatively seeing ‘a good deal further’. From exploited object, Colette’s hyperfeminine display ultimately provokes the veritable consternation of the desiring, prurient male gaze. Seeking to read the index of its own impact, this gaze confronts, instead, the spectacle of its own exclusion: a scenario bespeaking utter indifference to its domination. Such manipulation of hyperfeminine tropes to displace – rather than affirm – the masculine gaze is prepared not only in Colette’s earlier writing, but during the performing years between the ‘Claudine’ novels and the 1923 publication of Le blé en herbe: the first novel signed not ‘Colette Willy,’ but, simply, ‘Colette’. A full assessment of the freight of Le blé en herbe’s closing scene thus calls for its wider contextualisation within the feminine hype and clichés characterising Colette’s life and work leading up to her first officially self-authored novel.

As a running experiment with images, caricatures, hyperboles and figuration, Colette’s life itself was a long and intense engagement with gendered display – her image-production, highly crafted and stylised, extending to her own self-representations. In Le pur et l’impur [‘The Pure and the Impure’], a narrating voice at times indistinguishable from Colette’s own refers to ‘un ancien aspect de moi-même, aspect public, dont j’ordonnais, avec ostentation, la légende, les détails extérieurs, le costume’ [‘an earlier me, a public one, whose legend, appearance, costume I myself ostentatiously arranged down to the last detail’].³ The studied craft of these ‘elaborate arrangements’ invites us to go back to the early scenes and extremes of Colette’s relationship to feminine tropes. Such displays – from being played as exploited Claudine pawn by Willy’s manipulation; to Colette’s own playing and performing of gendered tropes as actress and mime onstage; to her playing with these tropes in her texts – will then inform our return to Colette’s writing, where we will find them re-textualised in the highly crafted balcony scene that closes Le blé en herbe. For in a gendered itinerary that anticipates Vinca’s evolution in Le blé en herbe, the young heroine of Colette’s early series of four rollicking novels – Claudine – is styled as a vigorous, independent tomboy, maturing into confident self-assurance. Colette’s relationship to her own creation – from Claudine as literary character to Claudine as stage figure to Colette’s own dispossession of and subordination to Claudine – provides insight into her manipulation of hyperfeminine tropes.

At the outset, Colette enjoyed the welcome distraction and anonymity of the reassuring ‘mask’ provided by the ‘farce’ of her Claudine novels: ‘Rien ne rassure autant qu’un masque. La naissance et l’anonymat de ‘Claudine’ me divertissaient comme une farce un peu indélicate, que je poussais docilement au ton libre’ [‘Nothing is so reassuring as a mask. The birth and the anonymity of ‘Claudine’ entertained me like a slightly indelicate farce, which I obediently pushed towards a licentious tone’].⁴ This farce, however, ends up eclipsing Colette herself, for when the ‘Claudine’ novels evolve into a stage production, it is the actress Polaire – not Colette – who is chosen to perform the title role. In Colette’s own judgement, though, Polaire’s obstinacy, her resistance, her very mistakes, created an ‘unforgettable’ Claudine: ‘elle ne s’est trompée qu’heureusement. Elle montra, à réclamer le rôle, une obstination d’illuminée ... “Non, Meussieur Vili, Claudine, c’est moi”’ [‘she was only wrong in the most fortunate ways. She demonstrated, in demanding the role, the stubbornness of a visionary ... “No, Mister Vili, I am Claudine”’].⁵ Colette admired the passion and ferocity with which Polaire took to the role, suggesting that Polaire lived only for her Claudine performances, and drooped between showtimes: ‘Oh! moi, jeu [sic] ne dors guère, vous savez ... j’attends. – Qui donc? – Personne. J’attends la représentation de demain’ [‘Oh! me, I scarcely sleep at all, you know ... I’m waiting. – For whom, then? – No one. I’m waiting for tomorrow’s performance’].⁶ And Colette writes almost wistfully of Polaire’s passionate embrace of the Claudine persona:

Polaire croyait à Claudine, pensait à Claudine avec un sentiment profond et pur. Les reprises de la pièce, les représentations données hors de Paris lui inspirèrent des mots quasi mystiques: ‘Je vais la retrouver, disait-elle’.

[Polaire believed in Claudine, thought about Claudine with profound, pure feeling. The reprises of the play, the performances given outside Paris, inspired in her the almost mystical words: ‘I’m going to find her’.]⁷

Ultimately, Colette finds herself obliged to ‘abdicate’, as she puts it, her Claudine creation to Polaire: ‘en l’écoutant, j’abdiquais secrètement, et je faisais hommage à Polaire d’avoir inventé Claudine’ [‘in listening to her, I secretly abdicated, and paid homage to Polaire for having invented Claudine’].⁸ Colette goes so far as to claim – despite her own onstage eventual Claudine performances⁹ – that Polaire was the only true Claudine: ‘Il n’y eut qu’une interprète de qui le jeu trépidant, le brûlant visage, la voix parfois saccadée d’émotion écartaient toute idée d’école, de métier, de sensualité concertée, il n’y eut pas d’autre “vraie Claudine” que Polaire’ [‘there was only one actress whose vivacity, whose burning face, whose voice sometimes halting with emotion, eliminated all idea of acting, of method, of a belaboured and factitious sensuality; there was no other “true Claudine” than Polaire’].¹⁰ It is Polaire’s Claudine, rather than Colette’s, who defines the character so decisively that every nightclub, every bar and seedy cabaret had its own imitation, a Claudine who struggled to emulate Polaire.¹¹ Even after Colette herself has gone upon the music-hall stage in mimodramas, playing non-Claudine roles of her own, she is described as strikingly resembling Polaire’s little sister.¹²

Dispossessed of her own creation in this stampede to emulate Polaire’s Claudine, Colette herself is subsequently swallowed up in Willy’s marketing campaign; conscripted for publicity purposes, she is made over into a second-best Claudine. Following the bobbed hair that brought about Colette’s resemblance to Polaire, Willy took to going about with these two specular Claudines in matched outfits – walking the two women, as Polaire complained, the way one might walk a pair of greyhounds, or Great Danes.¹³ Polaire went so far as to claim that Willy himself even occasionally mistook the two women for each other.¹⁴

But Colette’s displacement and doubling as Polaire’s twin soon mushrooms into the aggressions of a crowd of clones. When Polaire, committed to her stage career, starts avoiding Willy’s threesome outings and dinners, Willy contrives to find an understudy ‘twin’, multiplying what Colette called her ‘occasional doubles’. They encroach, buy the same hat from her milliner, and one, Colette writes, had even appropriated her name – for, after various postal ‘ricochets’, a letter arrived from an enamoured supply officer.¹⁵ Colette’s ultimate impatience with such confusion – between herself and Claudine, herself and Polaire, herself and masqueraders of herself – might be read in her little scripted scene with an imagined Claudine. Hailed by Claudine’s cheerful ‘Hello, my double’, ‘Colette’ shakes her head and answers:

Je ne suis pas votre sosie. N’avez-vous point assez de ce malentendu qui nous accole l’une à l’autre, qui nous reflète l’une dans l’autre, qui nous masque l’une par l’autre? Vous êtes Claudine, et je suis Colette.

[I am not your double. Haven’t you had enough of this misunderstanding that throws us together, that reflects us in each other, that masks us, each by the other? You are Claudine, and I am Colette.]¹⁶

In her flight from Willy’s domination as impresario, Colette at last acquires more control over stage creations of her own: creations that, in her own mind, allow her to mask herself. As she writes, ‘[d]es mois passèrent, et des années’ she writes, ‘pendant lesquels, me donnant çà et là en spectacle, j’usais du droit de me taire sur moi-même’ [‘months passed, years, during which, performing myself here and there as spectacle, I exploited the right to be silent about myself’].¹⁷ Such welcome self-silencing in the refuge of the stage, however, also leads to a virtual emptying-out of self, as when Colette suggests that even in off-stage moments she becomes nothing but a role. Catching sight of her bedraggled reflection in a window during the touring troupe’s layover in the countryside, Colette writes of the cruelly specular, involuntary role she is reduced to playing: the role of a touring actress, even in her most off-stage, off-duty moments. Listing the various piteous creatures her discouraged reflection evokes, including a plucked bird and a governess fallen upon hard times, she concludes, ‘Mon Dieu, j’ai l’air d’une actrice en tournée, et c’est assez dire’ [‘My god, I look like an actress on tour, and that says it all’].¹⁸

Yet such self-effacing or emptying is accompanied, in ironic contrast, by generalised visibility and scandal, beginning with Colette’s role as the scantily dressed Paniska, companion of Pan in an outrageously impudent performance, in one critic’s view.¹⁹ Perhaps most well-known of the scandals that accompanied Colette’s music-hall roles, however, was that provoked by ‘Rêve d’Egypte’ [‘Egyptian Dream’]. The opening-night performance culminated in a kiss between Colette, as a mummy come to life, and the Marquise de Belboeuf (‘Missy’) – Colette’s companion following the rupture with Willy – in the role of an archaeologist enchanted by the mummy’s charms.²⁰ Reactions ranged from indignation to outrage:

Si des personnes ne comprennent pas que leurs associations d’un ordre trop spécial ne doivent pas être offertes à l’admiration publique, il est bon que Paris ne leur fasse parfois entendre, fût-ce par les moyens élémentaires du soufflet.

[If people don’t understand that their relations of a too-particular order mustn’t be offered to public admiration, it is right that Paris should occasionally make them realise it, be it by the elementary means of boos and hisses.]²¹ ²²

In a later mimodrama, ‘La Chair’, elements of feminine display, seduction and manipulation are organised around a jealous triangle as the beautiful Yulka receives, in the absence of her husband, Hokartz, the attentions of a junior officer. Surprising the illicit lovers, Hokartz disarms and ejects the officer and might have turned on Yulka herself in his rage, but for ‘la chair’ [the flesh] which he passionately worships; with her garment ripped in the fray, Yulka’s nudity now stands revealed in all its glory. As Hokartz hesitates, Yulka flees, and he kills himself in despair of ever again possessing such beauty.²³

Yet, while some programmes, such as that of the Casino de l’Eldorado, similarly render the ripping of Yulka’s clothes as accidental – ‘Elle veut se protéger de ses bras, dans le mouvement qu’elle fait, et sous le geste brutal de Hokartz, son vêtement se déchire et elle apparaît nue’ [‘She tries to protect herself with her arm, but in her struggle, and under Hokartz’s brutality, her garment rips and she appears nude’] – others argue for Yulka’s ruse and coquetry. As her husband hesitates, runs one interpretation, ‘La fine mouche s’en aperçoit et le brave. Connaissant le pouvoir de ses charmes, elle déchire tout à coup ses vêtements et jette à la face du jaloux, éperdu de rage, le défi de sa souveraine beauté soudainement dévoilée’ [‘The crafty beauty notices and defies him. Knowing the power of her charms, she suddenly rips her clothes and flings in his jealous, enraged face, the challenge of her sovereign beauty, suddenly revealed’].²⁴ As another programme puts it, ‘Celle-ci connaît le pouvoir de ses charmes. Elle paraît devant lui la poitrine nue. Le mari vaincu renonce à sa vengeance et emploie son poignard à s’ouvrir les veines du bras’ [‘She knows the power of her charms. She appears before him, her chest bared. The defeated husband renounces revenge and uses his dagger to slit the veins of his arm’].²⁵ As thought to emphasise this power of ‘la chair’ [‘the flesh’], Colette appeared onstage completely naked at one performance reserved for the press alone – scandalising, among others, Polaire.²⁶

Such a shift in the interpretation of Yulka’s role – from a terrified, victimised wife whose clothes are ripped by an enraged husband, to a crafty coquette who rends her own clothes so as to seduce him – figures another shift. This is the movement from Colette herself as victimised, masterminded publicity object, her hair slashed and cropped by Willy, to Colette as crafty, masterminding manipulator of feminine tropes in Le blé en herbe.²⁷ ²⁸ Following upon these years of stylised feminine caricatures – first, as a walking ‘Claudine’ billboard; later, as music-hall mime and actress performing hyperfeminine roles – Colette’s apprenticeship in such theatrics might be read as culminating in Le blé en herbe’s closing pages. Whereas the treatment of gender in the novel appears more fluid and flexible than the staged caricatures we have seen here, the novel’s ending appears to relapse into stale feminine tropes. As I will argue, however, such display works to displace, rather than gratify, the prurient, normative, masculine gaze.

It is generally...