Marginal spaces in Colette’s "The Pure and the Impure": a trip to the centrality of the underground

Abstract

In The Pure and the Impure, a much underappreciated text in Colette’s oeuvre, the author insightfully explores marginal worlds. She is retrospectively a spectator but also a participant: the fact that she wonders about her own identity as a woman writer allows her to discover that the limits between womanhood and writing are not so clear. She inverts the sexual characteristics and values of both worlds. She ultimately refuses to either normalize or marginalize the separation between both realms. Far from the frequent idealization of the world in representations of the normal, she prefers the world’s complexity and impurity; and the body is the new central place to access the world’s reality. Thanks to the variety and intensity of sensations, Colette can indefinitely be in contact with both world and life, which are ready to be described rather than elucidated.