Love and its Sorrows in Colette's Cherie

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 whi

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lover since she is ashamed of his need to leave her daily and work. She tries a sampling of other men, but is left unsatisfied by them. Their sorrows reinforce those of the novel's central couple. Liane appears to be in love with Patron, but still cannot resist trying to reshape him into her fantasy of the ideal lover. Patron feels rebuffed and internalizes his hurt. Ironically, this allows him to keep his distance emotionally and to feel even less inclined to obey her every bidding. Central to the narrative structure of Cherf is the building and unresolved tension between the lovers. It is a novel where everything is intentionally kept in abeyance. Colette seems to be offering her readers a simulated experience of the uncertainties which one experiences when one falls in love. LTa is sufficiently wise to know that her liaison with Cherf is but a passing fancy, a transitional stage for him. She attempts unsuccessfully to give it boundaries for her own heart's safekeeping. "She kept on setting a limit to his stay, and then exceeding it. She was waiting" (33). LTa recognizes that Cherf is different than her other lovers. Other men eventually confided in her, revealing every intimacy to her. In contrast, Cherf appears

Category: Literature - L