“Unripe fruit”

“Unripe fruit” is the figure for a girl suspended between the independence of childhood and the passive femininity expected of her as an adult. The image’s force lies in its incompletion: she wants to become a woman without surrendering her claim to be a subject, and she meets each movement toward desire with apprehension or resistance.

Meaning and Central Dilemma

The phrase gives form to a transition that is not simply physical maturation. The girl has understood herself as essential, autonomous, and free; adolescence confronts her with the demand to become inessential, defined in relation to someone else. The account presents this as an agonizing dilemma, not a settled change of identity: she wavers between desire and disgust, hope and fear, and may invite what she then rebuffs. The taste of unripe fruit condenses that suspended state, in which childhood sovereignty has not disappeared but adult submission has not been accepted.

Desire, Idealization, and Retreat

The figure also illuminates the distance between imagined love and an actual relationship. A girl may desire an ideal man while keeping him inaccessible; when he responds and the imagined figure becomes an ordinary man, she can recoil. The passage describes this reversal as a collapse of idealization: the young woman may blame him for disappointing her and refuse physical intimacy that conflicts with her still-uncertain feelings. The image therefore marks more than immaturity. It expresses a conflict between wanting to be desired and fearing the reality that desire entails.

Vinca as an Example

Colette’s Vinca, in Green Wheat, gives the “unripe woman” a particularly concrete form. She remains active in the surrounding world—getting scratched by brambles, fishing for shrimp, and climbing trees—while becoming newly aware of her response to Phil’s touch. As this awareness develops, she sometimes arranges her hair, uses makeup, and wears gauzy organdy to look attractive. At other times she chooses shapeless clothes or trousers and deliberately appears untidy, resisting the idea that she should exist only for others. Her alternating gestures show the image’s central tension: she is curious about seduction but wary of treating it as the price of becoming a woman.

A Pattern of Contradictory Conduct

The account describes the girl as neither simply compliant nor openly in revolt. She may give way to a caress and then withdraw, or make promises and deliberately forget them. Mathilde de la Mole illustrates this divided response: drawn to Julien’s beauty and qualities, and to the exceptional future she imagines through him, she also resists both her own senses and another person’s hold over her. Her movement between supplication and scorn makes desire visible as a struggle over whether to give herself or remain sovereign.

The pattern culminates in a broader account of adolescence as denial. The girl does not accept the destiny assigned to her by nature and society, but, in the book’s analysis, she is often too internally divided to confront that world directly. Instead, she escapes or contests it symbolically. She wants to possess a man but balks at becoming his prey; each fear is accompanied by a desire, leaving her caught in evasions and contradictory gestures. “Unripe fruit” thus names a precarious interval in which neither childhood independence nor prescribed femininity can be inhabited without conflict.