Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time by Anne Freadman

2015; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 88; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tfr.2015.0315

2329-7131

John T. Booker,

Historical and Literary Analyses

Reviews 269 how staging of Voltaire’s Brutus privileged Brutus’s suffering as a father over his virtue as a citizen, thereby giving political leadership a sentimental orientation. The final chapter, centered on changes in acting technique, argues that Garrick’s and Talma’s abandonment of classical declamation in favor of more natural gestures, postures, and diction not only paved the way for the emergence of melodrama in the theater but also, and perhaps more importantly,embodied the values so esteemed by the Revolutionaries as the basis for moral, political, and social regeneration. The Sentimental Theater models scholarship on its highest plane; it is incisively conceived, clearly documented, finely analyzed, and highly readable. It concludes with an extensive bibliography and a substantial index; these could have been supplemented by a conclusion evoking some of the more long-term ramifications of sentimental theater. This, however, is but a minor regret,inspired by the excellence of Feilla’s original,enlightening,and thoroughly convincing perspective on a transitional period of literary and political history. Smith College (MA) Mary Ellen Birkett Freadman, Anne. The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time. London: Legenda, 2012. ISBN 9-781-906540-93-7. Pp. xii +178. $75. If just one of Colette’s works, Mes apprentissages, bears a title of an autobiographical nature, a number of others might be considered“collections—of anecdotes and portraits, of ruminations and daily details,”in which the“pervasive preoccupation is the experience of time”(ix). Such is the foundational premise of this study, modeled imaginatively on the five-part movement of the sonata form.Colette’s“livres-souvenirs,” as Freadman prefers to term them, “‘collect time’ by construing a life as a source of memories rather than as a plot” (2). After a selective overview of existing genre terminology , she begins by piecing together “an imagined (auto)biography for Colette” (22), drawing on “Le Miroir” (from Les vrilles de la vigne [1907]), La maison de Claudine (1923), and especially Mes apprentissages (1936), where Colette “finds a way of ‘telling time’that contests the very project of the life story, and hence of the genre that provides the narrative frame of autobiography” (43). In the second, more substantial part of her study, Freadman returns initially to La maison de Claudine, the first of the major livres-souvenirs, in which Colette weaves together threads of two life stories: her own, naturally enough, but more especially that of Sido, her mother. By its very fabric, this work invites a “random reading that selects and savours” (58), a phrase that aptly characterizes the sort of approach that Freadman obviously prefers. In the “family album”(87) that is Sido, published a few years later (1929), seemingly disparate anecdotes about family members—mother, father, brothers, half-sister—gradually paint a picture of the author’s own childhood experience. For Freadman, the composition of this multifaceted work represents nothing less than “Colette’s response to modernity, the creation of a community of memory out of the dispersed materials of a scattered, indeed shattered, family”(109). Freadman then turns to the last two works published by Colette, who was by then in her seventies, L’étoile Vesper (1945) and Le fanal bleu (1949); fragmented, apparently meandering, diary-like in certain respects, they amount to “reflections upon the reduction of vitality and the shrinking social, spatial, and temporal horizons of old age”(111). In lieu of a conventional conclusion, and faithful to the underlying model of the sonata form, Freadman ends with a substantial “Recapitulation,” focused on La naissance du jour (1928), which epitomizes both the generic indeterminacy of Colette’s work in general and her characteristic manner of piecing together a multiform record of her life experience. Freadman’s book is clearly organized, with English translations following original French quotations, notes at the end of each chapter, bibliography, and index. Given the free-flowing analysis and essay-like treatment in general, this is an approach that will be appreciated most by those already familiar with a substantial part of Colette’s extensive corpus; for such readers, Freadman’s rapidly-moving treatment and often ludic touch should provide a good measure of enjoyment. University of Kansas John...