Colette's Power Balance and Self-Knowledge Audrey Roclore College

Colette’s “The Pure and the Impure” is a novel that aims to be a kind of expose of French high society, along with the absurdity of societal expectations as well. Colette has a very poignant understanding of the human psyche and her views on sex and gender are far ahead of her time. What makes the author so successful is not only her connections to the old aristocracy and how those experiences come through in her books, but her ability to reach people of all social classes due to her frankness, which sets her apart from more conservative writers of the period who tended to circumvent many of the realities about sexuality.

The narrator reads people she encounters so clearly that she seems to find pleasure and amusement in psychoanalyzing them. This allows her to remain unmoved by many of the experiences which we, the reader, might find shocking. For instance, the story opens as Colette enters an opium den, the setting for an orgy. This event would be considered scandalous at the time, but Colette, with her vast experiences, has almost no reaction. She seems to be perpetually searching desperately to be surprised, understood, and entertained by the world, and also by a partner. She seeks pleasure out in transactions of power;...