ones. Claudine is as extravagant and self-indulgent walking alone through the streets of Paris in search of the country life and the childhood she’s lost as when she’s brilliantly drunk on sparkling wine. That daring leads her to eavesdropping and ill-timed outbursts, failed affairs and forbidden ones, and we are left with the feeling that while surely there’s a time and a place for self-restraint, love and self-respect are no place for the bit and the reins.
In a media landscape so cluttered with ego and false courage, it’s hard to find true extravagance among the poseurs. Colette would have laughed at and loved our Madonnas and Lady Gagas, with their provocative commitment to pushing the envelope for scandal’s sake. True self-indulgence becomes even more challenging as we are encouraged to think small, curl up, and protect ourselves in response to scary social and financial forces. Austerity is the code word du jour, but is a heroine really served by constant calculation and levelheadedness? The knack must be in finding some kind of balance between outrageous action and cautious thought. Elusive and often out of reach, balance is a skill neither Claudine nor Colette ever really mastered.
There’s something so fresh and appealing about Claudine’s imperfections that it becomes easier to tolerate my own. After all, aren’t the qualities that make Claudine so human precisely the ones that move her toward happiness? It would be different if she were all play and no seriousness, but Colette made sure to give her heroine a heart that restlessly seeks love and recognition and a head that knows when she’s gone too far. For women who will never be chastened for refusing to properly restrain our feminine hair or for daring to enjoy ourselves in bed, it can be hard to remember that Claudine’s small indulgences were important ones. The Paris of Colette’s day was resolutely libertine, but it was also one in which wives still belonged to their husbands and daughters to their fathers. Claudine and Colette’s insistence on enjoying themselves takes on even more significance when we stop to consider how hard that may have been to accomplish. And Colette’s claim to the literary credit she deserved was just as daring as her most profligate romantic feats.
I’ll admit it, after I discovered the Claudine novels I walked around with a sly new sense of possibility, a desire to push up against the boundaries I don’t always acknowledge around me. I may not have wanted to go out and seduce someone inappropriate, but I definitely wanted to pause and enjoy my body and my mind, to seek out pleasure for a moment even in an unpleasant time. Part of the power of Colette is her insistence that, no matter how doomed a love affair or hopelessly cloistered a life, an indulgent enjoyment of what pleasure we can create for ourselves is our right and our due. That’s something a heroine can carry around with her even if she knows she’ll be credited with every word she writes. Informed by the spirit, if not the letter, of Claudine’s teenage rebellion, a heroine can claim what’s hers, no matter who tells her it’s off-limits. And she can take a Colette-like pleasure in kicking life’s Willys to the curb.
We remember Colette as one of life’s more indulgent figures not because she shied away from her due, but because she pursued it even when life threw heartbreak, intrigue, infidelity, lost love, and war in her path. Any heroine on the verge of claiming that life for herself will be accompanied by Colette and outrageous Claudine. After all, aren’t heroines called upon to rise higher than the petty concerns that threaten to tether them? Is it even possible to author a life as deliciously scandalous as theirs? I, for one, would love to find out.
READ THIS BOOK:
• When you’re as nervous and claustrophobic as a country cat forced to live in a small city apartment
• When you tire of changing your hairstyle as a mode of rebellion and are looking for some daring inspiration
• Over café au lait and a croissant at your favorite coffee shop
CLAUDINE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Linda Radlett in
• Nancy Astley in
• The nameless main character of
Chapter 7 Fight
Scarlett O’Hara in
by Margaret Mitchell
Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it’s be brave or else be killed.
MARGARET MITCHELL,
Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell was in fighting form, surrounded by dilapidated manila envelopes, which, stacked up, nearly made it to the top of her barely-five-feet-in-high-heels frame. Earlier that day, she’d been a smiling and enthusiastic hostess. But now the sweet woman that had ushered the literary scout Harold Latham around Atlanta had been replaced by an impulsive spitfire. Her eyes snapped as she held out a piece of her gargantuan manuscript. “Take it before I change my mind,” she said. She did change her mind, but not before Latham had been seared by the book she had given him. By then it was too late: her fight had unleashed a literary phenomenon, and all because a snide friend had doubted her ability to write.
When asked to show Latham around Atlanta in April 1935, Peggy reluctantly agreed. Once she was roped into the task, though, it just wasn’t in her nature to deny a perfect stranger all the hospitality a Southerner could muster. She took him from social event to social event, introducing him to everyone she knew, charming him with the dexterity of an experienced hostess. When Latham implied that she herself might have something juicy to show him, she tried to hide her impatience. No, no, she dissembled; she was just an ex-journalist, not a novelist. But then the forces of literary history struck, delivering an insult that would change the course of Peggy’s life forever. A sharp-tongued friend overheard and interjected, her voice laced with sarcasm. Peggy had written a novel, she said, though she wasn’t sure how someone as frivolous as Margaret Mitchell could have much to say about anything at all.
Peggy laughed along with the others, but inside she was seething. When she finished dropping off Latham, she catapulted around her apartment, looking under desks and inside closets for the piles of manuscript she’d been accumulating for the last ten years. The manila envelopes had been hidden under towels, used as footrests and coasters and doorstops. They were coffee-stained and discolored with age, some still sporting handwritten notes to self. Now they were thrown into the car. When she finished handing them off to Latham, she was overcome with relief and a bit of fear: maybe this time she had gone a bit too far.
But Peggy was used to a rousing fight. It seemed she’d been on the offensive since before she formed her first coherent memories, for though her life had followed the simple trajectory of a Georgia debutante for the most part, her boisterous insides had never really matched the polite Southern girl she was supposed to portray. Atlanta, Georgia, was a place where name was everything, where a girl acted and thought like other girls if she wished to stay afloat. Externally, Peggy managed to be everything that was expected of her: gracious, inviting, a good conversationalist, and an expert flatterer. But the tiny body that obediently danced, sat, and played along concealed a defiant, unruly mind.
She inherited some of her uppitiness from her mother, Maybelle, a suffragist who warned her not to give over her life to that of some man. “Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart,” she wrote to Peggy just days before her death of Spanish influenza in 1918, “but give only the excess after you have lived your life.” Peggy had struggled with her mother’s unflappable sense of authority and her unerring knack for knowing just what to do; now she tussled with her advice. Ultimately, she defied it. Once her mother was gone, she had a chance to take the helm of a respectable Southern family, even if it meant leaving college and taking on the dull social duties expected of a matriarch. She snatched up the opportunity, never suspecting it would be one of her life’s first battles.
Peggy knew that any brainy girl could win the battle of Society, with a capital
