Voyeurism, Desire, and Narrative Subversion in Colette’s Claudine Novels

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay positions the French author Colette’s earliest works, the Claudine novels, at an inflection point in queer feminist discourses of the early 1900s. Combining recent critical explorations of the sexological and literary roots of the lesbian figure at the fin de siècle, queer theories addressing the power and limits of the heteronormative gaze, and an examination of Colette’s development of a queered authorial persona in the course of her career, I argue that the “fluffy”, “commercialized” Claudine novels in fact make use of stylistic innovation in order to subvert contemporary expectations of the lesbian narrative. Colette’s generative denial of the male gaze in her depiction of Claudine’s affair with her woman friend, Rézi, results in the adoption of a deliberately evasive, self-obliterating narrative perspective. In this, Colette anticipates later explorations of subjective desire and authorial persona in the canonically modernist works of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Natalie Barney. In their exploration of the alternative modes through which an authentic desire experienced between two women might be narrativized in the twentieth century, the Claudine novels’ use of generic subversion, shifting narrative personae, and strategically fragmented prose mark them as key works in a developing sapphic modernist canon.