Colette

Colette appears in The Second Sex both as a writer in her own right and as a recurring witness to the conflicts that shape women’s lives. Simone de Beauvoir uses her writing to expose the pressures of marriage and domesticity, the ambivalence of romantic attachment, and the demanding craft behind artistic achievement. Colette’s importance lies in the range of these examples: her work registers women’s frustrations without reducing them to helplessness, and her career demonstrates that a woman’s creative gifts require sustained labor to become a body of work.

Identity and literary presence

Beauvoir treats Colette as a ubiquitous presence in The Second Sex, drawing on her memoirs, fiction, and accounts of family life. Colette is presented as a writer whose observations help make women’s private experience legible: the wish for independence can coexist with a desire for intimacy, and domestic life can promise affection while narrowing a woman’s world. Her evidence is not confined to one stage of life or one social role. Beauvoir cites her on marriage, love, household labor, and the practice of writing, allowing Colette’s work to recur across several of the book’s analyses.

The biographical portrait in Judith Thurman’s introduction places Colette beside Simone de Beauvoir as a childless writer. It also contrasts her with women who became mothers: Colette had a daughter late in life and left her to the care of surrogates. Thurman connects Colette’s own account of her literary identity to the danger that parenthood might draw a woman away from authorship. In a 1946 memoir, Colette describes the writer’s risk of becoming a merely happy and tender parent, while invoking an “old boy of forty” within herself who protected what might be precious in her. The image presents creative independence not as an abstract principle but as something a woman may feel she must defend against an expected role.

Marriage, domesticity, and women’s constrained choices

Colette’s writing helps Beauvoir distinguish the social promise of marriage from the choices available to women without independent means. In discussing marriage markets, Beauvoir invokes Colette’s account of a young woman without a fortune or trade who depends on her brothers. Such a woman, Colette observes, has little choice beyond keeping quiet and being grateful for her position. The passage gives sharp form to Beauvoir’s argument that a woman’s apparent pursuit of marriage may arise from economic dependence rather than free preference.

That dependence also shapes the advice girls receive. Beauvoir describes mothers, older sisters, and women’s magazines teaching the techniques of “catching” a husband: calibrating ambition, modesty, and coquetry while trying not to appear too eager. Colette’s contribution to this discussion is not simply a portrait of individual calculation. It helps reveal a social arrangement in which a girl is expected to pursue security through marriage, even as men may distrust the pursuit and describe it as a trap. Her choice becomes meaningfully free only if she can also afford not to marry; otherwise, accepting a suitable suitor may involve resignation rather than passion.

Colette’s family portraits also give domestic unhappiness a material setting. Beauvoir recounts the first marriage imposed on Colette’s mother, Sido, who left a familiar Belgian home with its kitchen, instruments, books, newspapers, and social life for an isolated estate in the forest country. In the new house, the decorated ground floor contrasted with unfinished bedrooms; the surrounding isolation left Sido among servants and farmers rather than the cheerful company she had wanted. She filled the house with flowers, improved the kitchen, prepared Flemish dishes, and looked forward to a child, while her husband repeatedly left on outings. When her recipes, patience, and efforts at polishing the furniture were exhausted, she grew thin with loneliness and began to cry. The contrast between her activity and her isolation makes domestic labor appear not as a natural fulfillment but as an inadequate substitute for companionship and a life of her own.

In another domestic portrait, Colette’s Sido is active and attentive to cleanliness without becoming a compulsive housekeeper. She is not absorbed in counting household supplies or guarding every surface. While cleaning, she watches a servant at work and responds to the scene with impatient cries that Beauvoir associates with a desire for freedom. Sido’s remark about feeling herself grow older while spending time polishing Chinese cups captures a different measure of domestic work: its cost is not only the effort spent on objects, but the life that effort consumes.

Love, admiration, and the risk of dependence

Colette also gives Beauvoir a language for the ambivalence of a woman who wants freedom yet may still yearn to be possessed. In considering the difficulty of independence, Beauvoir notes that romantic attachment, financial security, and a man’s provision of purpose or status can function as temptations of ease. Colette’s writing renders the conflict in less abstract terms: a woman’s hope of escape is obstructed by her own body, figured as willing to remain passive and to perish. The image does not cancel the desire for liberation; it shows how deeply the wish to be free can be entangled with habits of surrender.

In The Vagabond, the desire for recognition takes a more affirmative form. The woman welcomes not merely an admirer or a friend, but someone eager to witness her life and person. Beauvoir uses this admission to describe the exhilaration of being seen through a lover’s attention: the woman feels able to value herself because her beloved serves as a witness. Colette’s example also exposes the vulnerability within that pleasure. When self-regard depends on another person’s gaze, the witness may become a source of affirmation without becoming the foundation of an independent life.

Beauvoir sets this experience against the danger of making a lover absolute. Drawing on The Vagabond and My Apprenticeships, she describes the disillusionment that follows when a woman discovers the beloved’s ordinary limitations after having invested him with supreme value. The disappointment is especially severe because she chose the person to whom she gave herself. Colette’s work helps Beauvoir distinguish this idolatrous attachment from a relationship between two human freedoms: love becomes destructive when admiration denies the other’s fallibility and turns him into a law or truth.

The same tension governs Beauvoir’s account of flirtation as a possible attempt to recover independence. A woman who feels reduced by her devotion may try to regain her alterity by attracting other men; absence or renewed desirability can make her seem mysterious to a blasé lover. But the maneuver is unstable: if he sees through it, he may view her as ridiculous, and if he responds, the woman risks either losing the idol she still venerates or losing herself through continued submission. Colette’s heroines provide a contrasting possibility within Beauvoir’s discussion of recovery from failed love. They have enough pride and resources not to be broken by disillusionment; Renée Néré is saved by her work. Sido, too, understood that Colette was more than a woman in love. Work and self-possession offer alternatives to making another person the sole source of meaning.

Performance, desire, and relations between the sexes

Colette’s writing also informs Beauvoir’s analysis of the effort to perform femininity for men. Beauvoir describes an independent or intellectual woman who may try to appear less intelligent and more conventionally charming, but whose conscious effort can make her seem stiff rather than spontaneous. When discomfort sets in, she may turn to what Beauvoir calls masculine weapons: speaking rather than listening, displaying clever ideas, contradicting a man, or trying to outdo him. Mme de Staël is offered as an example of someone who could combine these approaches successfully. The larger point is that a woman’s performance of femininity is shaped by the expectation that she should please, while her effort to assert herself can provoke resistance from men who have helped create the defiance they then resent. Colette’s presence in this discussion belongs to the broader challenge of imagining a woman who can be a subject without having to choose between self-assertion and desirability.

The practical conflict between love and work recurs in Beauvoir’s account of women’s erotic lives. She describes Colette’s Vagabond as wanting a man’s warmth while fearing the constraints of marriage. Giving in may return a woman to a dependent position; refusing may leave her to face isolation. Beauvoir argues that a working partner’s occupation can support both people’s independence, and that a self-sufficient wife can release her husband from the older marital arrangement in which her own subordination was the price of harmony. Yet domestic expectations persist: women are still commonly expected to manage the house and children while remaining elegant, devoted partners and mothers. Colette’s fictional example makes this bind concrete as a choice between companionship and the risk of losing the conditions of a working life.

Artistic discipline and achievement

For Beauvoir, Colette’s most decisive example is her development from amateur to professional writer. Women may take up painting or writing to fill empty days, or hope that artistic success will compensate for other frustrations, but Beauvoir argues that desire and talent do not replace training. She describes the amateur at an easel, surrounded by brushes and a still-life arrangement of flowers or apples, or at a desk imagining stories, as someone who may confuse the signs of working with the difficult work of making something. An artwork must be constructed and must communicate to others; it cannot be produced through self-display alone.

Colette’s career provides the counterexample. Beauvoir stresses that she became a major writer not through gifts or personality alone: writing was often her livelihood, and she treated her pen as a craft tool requiring care. From Claudine to Break of Day, her movement from amateur to professional demonstrates the value of a strict apprenticeship. Artistic spontaneity, in this account, does not mean leaving every impulse untouched. Colette can draw on immediate impressions while also rejecting or accepting them through judgment; her spontaneity is thoughtful because it subjects raw feeling to selection and labor.

That distinction clarifies Beauvoir’s criticism of vanity as a substitute for creation. A woman who believes her value comes from an inner grace may imagine that expressing herself means simply revealing who she already is. She may resist revision because crossing out a sentence feels like repudiating part of the self, or treat criticism as an irreparable failure rather than an opportunity to improve. Colette’s practice offers another model: the work is not a mirror of a finished identity but an object made through technique, choices, and persistence. Her example therefore carries a wider significance in The Second Sex: independence is not secured merely by refusing a prescribed role; it also involves acquiring the means and discipline to make something in the world.