Sisters of Salome -- Excerpt 5
Within two short years had Colette completely changed her life to its own opposite. She gave up autonomy, women, sexual freedom, the music hall, and even, briefly, writing novels, for the more conventional experience of monogamy, marriage, and motherhood. Her freedom established, she now gravitated to new circumstances, perhaps to test its strength. Colette proudly described her husband as “the master of all...His presence relieves me of the need to think, to plan, to act other than to arrange the bedroom or arrange my figure. The rest is his domain.” The outrageous rebel appeared tamed, if not enslaved, by what was probably the first good heterosexual sex she had ever known -- Willy certainly had not shown her that side of love.
“Are you a feminist?” she was queried in an interview only a year earlier. “Ah! No!” she replied with gusto. “The suffragettes disgust me. And if some women in France decide to imitate them, I hope they will understand that these customs do not have a place in France. Do you know what the suffragettes deserve? The whip and the harem...” Seemingly conservative words from a woman whose life traces a clear, though complex, trajectory towards her own emotional and physical liberation. But Colette was sly and knew the lure of “the whip and the harem” -- they could be another route to sexual freedom.
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