The Body in the Text

Abstract

Colette’s fictional world is primarily a physical, sensual place. The production of identifiable characters and of the conflicts which generate plot depends less on contrasts of personality and beliefs than on differences of colour, form and smell. The most famous of the fictional texts can be resumed or recalled in terms of a sharply visual image: Chéri’s beauty etched against the warm pink of Léa; slow, dark Fanny and silvery-yellow Jane in The Other One; the trio of blonde Alain, dark Camille and many-hued Saha in The Cat. It is not simply that character is expressed through physical appearance, a device much used in realist fiction, but that identity itself is produced by the body, both within the text and in the world to which it refers.