Love and its Sorrows in Colette's Cherf
In innovative fiction Colette continually explores how intimately love is connected to sorrow. In Cherf Colette presents lovers as antagonists while offering her readers a non-idealized view of love which more closely resembles human experience than the love routinely depicted in gothic romance. Magnetized by the polarizations she found characteristic of the love experience, Colette tries in this novel to show love sullied by its desire for purity which remains unattainable. At the turn of the this century Colette was one of the first to show how women were much less likely than men to idealize love. Forced to live out its deceptions, contradictions, and ambiguities, women were at a much greater disadvantage than men if they chose to see it unrealistically. Cherf and LTa serve as representatives of how much easier it is to live a life of passion than honesty.
Colette begins Cherf by immediately immersing the reader in the intertwined lives of an unlikely couple, Cherf, a young male and LTa, an aging courtesan. Cherf is seen playing with LTa's pearls. It is as if in donning LTa's pearls, he will be capable of taking on the best of her qualities. Wearing the pearls suggest that Cherf will become as wise as LTa and know the beauty usually reserved for women. Cherf teases LTa that she suspects that he will steal them as if carting them off could make him her equivalent. Colette immediately establishes the tone of polarities which characterizes all of her writings. He is first seen as "a graceful demon, black against a glowing furnace." (1) Yet as he moves back toward the bed, he re-emerges into the light now becoming "white again from top to toe, in his white silk pyjamas and white Moorish slippers" (1). This use of polarization here also underscores his instability.
Colette creates a sense of immediacy in Cherf by depicting the action in the middle of its unfolding. LTa an...