‘Un noble décor’: Modernity and Depictions of the Countryside in Colette’s La Maison de Claudine and Sido
- Rosalind Moran
- Nov 22, 2022
- 21 min read
Updated: Mar 12
Introduction
For the maverick French author Colette, writing about her childhood offered a chance to reflect on the past while keeping a firm grasp on the present. Though frequently avant-garde in their social philosophies, her memoir-adjacent novels also make evident a measured introspection. As she writes of her own attitudes towards novels and life in semi-autobiographical novel La Maison de Claudine: ‘Je ne sais quelle froideur littéraire, saine à tout prendre, me garda du délire romanesque…’.[1] This statement speaks to her work’s tension between the realist detachment of ‘froideur littéraire’ and the nineteenth-century romanticising visions of the pastoral evoked by ‘délire romanesque’. Indeed, Colette’s writing defied simple categorisation—particularly in regard to its subtly unconventional depictions of rural France.
As a close reading of La Maison de Claudine (hereafter Maison) and the similarly retrospective Sido show, Colette’s writing on her pastoral origins is distinctive. She challenges ideas and values associated with the countryside in French realist novels and specifically pastoral novels, all while remaining distinct from the realist tradition. In this sense, though Colette’s writing has an unmistakable nostalgia, it is remarkable in its divergence from traditional romantic countryside depictions. This divergence is especially apparent in her writing’s feminist thematic focus and doubting, self-reflexive stylistic modernity; her books’ treatment of memory is self-referencing and avant-garde. She does not take the supposed ‘noble décor’ in which she grew up at face value.[2]
In this essay, I argue that while Maison and Sido look back in time for inspiration, they are forward-looking and complex in their depictions of the countryside. Colette’s illustration of country living challenges stereotypes of the rural France of her childhood, which was often either romanticised for its traditionalism, or understood as being politically, economically, and socially backwards in a more pejorative sense. Colette’s work and characters, however, subvert this idea: the experiences she records and embellishes render the countryside a more modern and creative place than her urban French contemporaries believed it to be.
