Abstrakt

Colette puts the physical aspect of things and living beings at the heart of her writing. This applies to men and their bodies. One could almost say she looks at men in the same way as men look at women, especially in her marked preference for young and beautiful bodies. But she also differs in several ways. She does not have any feeling either of superiority or resentment towards men. She also shows an acute conscience of time and its destructive power, which makes men’s beauty as ephemeral as women’s. Finally, her acceptation and representation of the feminine in every man probably makes her one of the first creative writers playing consistently on the blurring of genders.