{"id":137339,"date":"2019-06-17T11:00:59","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T15:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=137339"},"modified":"2019-06-17T10:20:58","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T14:20:58","slug":"the-post-menopausal-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/06\/17\/the-post-menopausal-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Postmenopausal Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Paris, 1935.<\/p><\/div>\n

There are few books for those of us on the other side of fertility. There\u2019s a whole literary genre, the coming-of-age novel, that details with wonder and reverence the moment in which girls become sexual, and yet both male and female writers have been reluctant to take on menopausal characters. As I entered my own transition, I began reading the whole tiny canon of menopause literature. In Edith Wharton\u2019s book Twilight Sleep<\/em>, fifty-year-old Pauline Manford is so obsessed with staying thin and avoiding wrinkles that even her daughter compares her to a \u201cdeserted house.\u201d Menopausal Rosalie Van T\u00fcmmler in Thomas Mann\u2019s The <\/em>Black Swan<\/em> thinks her period has come back because of her infatuation with a younger man. On the night of their rendezvous, Rosalie begins to hemorrhage from her vagina, eventually slipping into a coma on a bed soaked with her own blood. The original German title of Black Swan<\/em> was Die Betrogene<\/em>, \u201cthe betrayed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pathetic. Depressed. Doomed. These examples may seem extreme, but I could not find a single story that did not equate menopause with disease and death. I\u2019m all for darkness, but these stories made me feel hopeless. I\u2019d just about given up trying to find a book that would honor both the physical struggles and the spiritual complexity of the change when I came across Break of Day<\/em>, by the French writer Colette.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

We know from her letters that at the age of fifty, Colette missed a visit from what she called her \u201ccousin Pauline.\u201d Afraid she was pregnant, Colette went to the doctor. He \u201cpoked two fingers into the place of mystery\u201d and told her, \u201cIt\u2019s possible your period won\u2019t come back.\u201d Colette, unlike her mother, did not go complacently into middle age. She had an illicit affair with her seventeen-year-old stepson, Bertrand, a liaison perilously close to statutory rape. A quack doctor gave her transfusions of blood taken from young women and she had a lifting<\/em>, French for a face-lift.<\/p>\n

By 1927, at fifty-two, Colette had changed course. She broke it off with Bertrand and began to write Break of Day<\/em>, a work of autofiction in which she used herself as a main character and wrote out her philosophy of menopause. Unlike the other menopausal characters I\u2019d read about, Colette was not miserable. She was contemplative. She was alone, \u201cnot abandoned.\u201d Her life as a romantic \u201cmilitant\u201d was over. \u00a0She would no longer waste her time pursuing or pining over love. She sensed the beginning of a \u201clong rest between herself and men.\u201d Colette\u2019s newfound equilibrium made her lose interest in \u201cordinary lovers.\u201d She wanted either someone who would not make her suffer or to be completely alone. Her late-life emotional independence reminded her of an earlier phase, of childhood. \u201cCan it be,\u201d she wrote, \u201cthat I have attained here what one never starts a second time?\u201d<\/p>\n

At La Treille, her summerhouse in Saint-Tropez, the Colette character in Break of Day<\/em> feels like a younger self, a girl more interested in animals than humans. She no longer wants to marry a man but still dreams of marrying a very big cat. A hawk moth drinks ros\u00e9 out of her cupped palm, her cat gives her censorious looks, and a human animal, a younger man named Vial, lies on her divan clutching a cushion as if \u201changing onto a reef.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colette is happy having Vial\u2019s tan animal body lounging around her house until another member of their set, twenty-five-year-old Helene Clement, admits she has feelings for him and that, until his recent infatuation with Colette, he had felt something for Clement as well. Colette mulls over her position. Is she interested in Vial romantically? As a woman in her fifties, is her sexual life over? \u201cWhat do people suppose we are thinking,\u201d Colette writes in Break of Day<\/em>, \u201cwhen we look at men\u2014and women\u2014we older women centered in a precarious solitary sort of security face to face with the youth of other people?\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Colette had little respect for female convention. When her mother was alive, Colette rarely visited her and did not answer even her most desperate letters. She was ambivalent about her own daughter and motherhood in general. \u201cI have a little rat and I paid the price for it. Thirty hours with no relief. Chloroform and forceps.\u201d She refused to have the emotions expected of women. She cast off maternal love as well as grief; she was always happy to contribute money for a friend\u2019s abortion, but never for a friend\u2019s funeral.<\/p>\n

Earlier in her life, Colette had flaunted her feminine body, even appearing topless in a play based on one of her books, but internally she often felt like a \u201chermaphrodite.\u201d In the Claudine novels she made clear that girls have ferocious desires equal to those of boys. In The Pure and the Impure<\/em>, she states that women like herself can be a homosexual threat to heterosexual men. In Break of Day<\/em>, she writes of her body becoming more masculine, with a \u201cthicker neck.\u201d She moves without feminine grace. Rather than claw her way back into a false femininity, Colette accepts these menopausal changes and revels in a calm and celibate existence.<\/p>\n

But does she? Is the Colette character of Break of Day<\/em>\u00a0really Colette the author? Always the provocateur, Colette wants it both ways. \u201cIs anyone imagining as he reads me that I\u2019m portraying myself? Have patience: this is only my model.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In many ways Break of Day<\/em> is a decoy. In its pages Colette turns Vial down. But in life Colette did not reject the younger man who pursued her. Maurice Goudeket, a thirty-five-year-old poet and diamond merchant, fell in love with Colette the same summer in which Break of Day<\/em> takes place. \u201cEverything is there \u2026 in Break of Day<\/em>,\u201d Goudeket writes in his book about his time with the author, except the \u201crenunciation.\u201d In letters from the period, Colette tells her friends about Goudeket, who would become her third husband. \u201cHow incorrigible I am,\u201d she writes, \u201cand how happy I am to be so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critics accused Colette of lying to her readers. But both versions of her life are true. She chose both solitude and love. Julia Kristeva writes in her book about Colette that the central paradox of the author\u2019s life was the \u201cperpetual evasion of the love relationship and a constant tearing away from the life of the couple.\u201d At fifty-five, Colette wrote, \u201cAt no time has the catastrophe of love, in all its phases and consequences, formed a part of the true intimate life of woman.\u201d She goes on to explain that by concentrating on \u201csex\u201d and \u201clove\u201d in her novels, she was able to hide more elemental mysteries that even she herself did not understand. By using romance as a smoke screen, Colette protected her intimate, unknowable self.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Break of Day<\/em> is both decoy and testament. It is also Colette\u2019s most technically adventurous work, a novel that uses postmodern techniques, mixes philosophy with autobiography, and blurs the line between the real and the fictional. The book received mixed reviews. But Colette never let the culture define her work or her private life. She had an ability to absorb negativity and then regenerate. Unlike her contemporary Simone de Beauvoir, Colette did not believe women were the second sex. She believed they were as strong as men if not stronger, and much better at transformation. \u201cShe devours the weaker male,\u201d Judith Thurman writes in her biography of Colette, \u201cand incorporates his powers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where did this power come from? Her second husband pointed to her \u201cmonstrous innocence,\u201d which some might call narcissism. Others saw her as an earth goddess sucking up sustenance from nature. Colette, like the mystics before her, was not selfless but self-interested. She was a wild being rolling over everyone in her path, driven to pursue the largest, freest life possible. And this was true even in menopause, a period often referred to in her era as \u201cthe dangerous age.\u201d The source of Colette\u2019s ability to regenerate is not mysterious. In letters, she mentions her husband and lovers occasionally, but her main focus is always on her work, a long-standing and passionate relationship that continued to sustain her until the very end of her life. \u201cI look at myself without laughing in the inclined mirror,\u201d Colette wrote in Break of Day<\/em>, \u201cthen I turn to my writing again.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Darcey Steinke is the author of the <\/em>New York Times\u00a0Notable\u00a0memoir\u00a0<\/em>Easter Everywhere, as well as five novels. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and her web-story <\/em>Blindspot was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been both a Henry Hoyns and a Stegner Fellow and a writer in residence at the University of Mississippi, and has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, Barnard, the American University of Paris, and Princeton. <\/em>Flash Count Diary\u00a0is her most recent book.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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