... having been breathed out

It was impossible for Colette’s contemporaries—and Freud was not the least of them—to conceive that a young woman might yearn for the freedom symbolized by a pair of trousers, a sailor suit, or a short haircut without yearning to be a man. Women themselves—Colette included—were confused and troubled by such yearnings, and that, in part, would be the subtext of the Claudines. Indeed, Colette’s early work is a fascinating and baroque form of transvestism. She is a woman writing as a man, [her husband] Willy, who poses as a boyish girl, Claudine, who marries a “feminized” man, the aging Renaud, who pushes her into the arms of a female lover, Rézi, with whom she takes the virile role.

—Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

I love the breakdown of all the gender play involved in the act of writing the Claudine novels here, but maybe even more I love how Thurman points up female unease around the at-the-time daring act of usurping male dress and male behaviors. What was it that women wanted when they put on illegal trousers? What did it mean about them as women? Did it mean they were practical? That they were lesbian? That they wanted to be men? That they were merely publicity-savvy? (In fin de siècle Paris there was always a market for a spectacle.) The lines were often less than clear-cut–not only for people observing these women from outside (who often leapt to grievous conclusions), but also for the women themselves.

Of course this is still true, but I imagine it was even more so at a time and place when a) gendered codes of dress were actually enforced by law, and b) so little language existed to articulate the subtleties of these desires.

[Sharing with folks' reading pages since this may be of interest again in the wake of the Colette biopic, which I quite liked. The original post was part of my research leading up to writing Chez les bêtes and A hundred hours. This section doesn't really touch on her relationship with Missy, who was some way further along the "identifying as/wishing to be a man" spectrum than Colette—today she might have identified either as a butch lesbian or as a trans man—but these same anxieties come up for the pair of them as a couple.]