Colette and Saint-Tropez

Abstract

This article takes the novelist Colette, who bought a house outside Saint-Tropez in 1925, and examines moments and feelings from her time in that place. Inspired by Hewitt's approach, and by his example of ‘the unique hold exerted by Marseille on the nation's imagination’, it traces, through Colette, imaginative modes of inhabiting a space, seeing it as a psychic as much as material location, a repository of feelings. Colette's work invests a place with meaning through writing, so that it becomes an imaginary space, intimate, sensory, and consciously feminine. Since Colette's feminism resides most surely in her pursuit of pleasure, this place can be a house of feelings, about love, about present pleasures shaded by past experience, a space accessed through the senses. In this way, her house in Saint-Tropez appears as a space of speculation and exploratory relations, in which to think too about the lived and dreamed realities of other female lives.