This book makes an argument critical to literary theory and sexuality in 2025. It argues that Colette’s fiction portrays a woman struggling to live in the throes of the incest taboo, understood in its psychological implications for power relations both private and public, then and now. Informed by Julia Kristeva’s work, it approaches Colette’s writing and its translation along with two films via close, psychoanalytic readings. It demonstrates that this version of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory, in an accessible form and with emphasis on the psychology of women and social transformation, helps to read Colette for the twenty-first century as well as to show how Kristeva’s theory works. This volume examines especially Colette’s most admired novels, especially from the second half of her life, including the much misunderstood La Maison de Claudine (1922), where the incest taboo surfaces in the relationship of the narrator with the mother. The taboo had appeared two years earlier in Chéri (1920), in the rapport between the maternal Léa, a woman of a certain age, and the young man, Chéri; finally, in Gigi, the incest taboo characterises the relations between the young teenager of the eponymous title and her much older, uncle figure Gaston.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments; Introduction. That Most Majestic and Disturbing of Drives: Colette’s Work and Life; 1. A Woman of a Certain Age: Chéri; 2. La Maison de Claudine: Maman Not Claudine; 3. Gigi: The Importance of the Uncle; 4. More Than a Musical: Minnelli’s Gigi; 5. Far from the Father of Personal Pre-History: Westmoreland’s Colette; Neither Depression nor Perversion: Colette in Bloom (Julia Kristeva, trans. Carol Mastrangelo Bové); Bibliography; Index
About the Author :
Carol Mastrangelo Bové is Professor Emerita in English and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She is also Professor Emerita in French, Westminster College, PA, USA. She has published Language and Politics in Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy (2006), Kristeva in America: Re-imagining the Exceptional (2020), and many articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film and literary translation.
Review :
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A fascinating, provocative unveiling of a Colette that critics/translators have ignored, highlighting the bisexuality and unconscious incestuous desires at the heart of some of her most admired novels. In dialogue with Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic vision, Bové illuminates brilliantly the complexities of the incest taboo at the heart of Colette’s imagination, with striking implications for our understanding of modernism as well as for debates today about power and sexuality.” —Alice Jardine, Research Professor, Harvard University, USA.
“Through her keen reading of a selection of Colette’s works in the light of the “incest taboo,” Bové draws attention to topics and characters “long misunderstood.” Informed by Kristeva’s thought, this original contribution skillfully exposes Colette’s complex version of feminism. This study is truly an inspiration and an excellent read.” —Christine Raguet, Professional literary translator, Professor Emerita Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France.
“Through an engagement with Colette and Kristeva, Bové presents new ways to think about gender fluidity. This book will be of interest to feminist theorists trying to think beyond binary notions of gender or sexual difference that anchor classical psychoanalysis. To stay up to date, psychoanalysis needs a new theory of gender fluidity. Bové’s book is the first step in this new and welcome direction.” —Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University, USA.
In this remarkable study, Carol Mastrangelo Bové uses the figure of the incestuous relation to explore Colette’s work. Combining original readings of novels with the psychoanalytic framework of Julia Kristeva, the book shows, with great care and insight, the depth and complexity of Colette’s negotiations of the dynamics of gender, power, and desire. —Daniel Morgan, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, USA.
Bové has written a thorough, considered, and precise analysis [...] It is, I think, good that “Colette and the Incest Taboo” exists. It is a work of a type that deserves respect. —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
