The Pure and the Impure — Colette in drag

I’m looking at a famous, gorgeous photograph of Colette in drag. She is very debonair with her cropped hair, and wears a black jacket and trousers, and silk tie. She has a finger in the pocket of her striped waistcoat (is she being suggestive, or searching for her pocket-watch?), smokes a cigarette and looks directly, perhaps challengingly, at the camera. The photograph is on the cover of Colette’s memoir-novel, Ces Plaisirs (These Pleasures), later renamed Le Pur et l’Impur (The Pure and the Impure).

The photograph was taken circa 1910, when Colette was in a relationship with Missy (also called Max) (Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise of Belboeuf). However, these are rare: most photographs of Colette show her in conventionally female clothing. Missy / Max lived her life in drag, but for Colette, dressing up in men’s clothing was a fleeting pleasure rather than a lifestyle.

The Pure and the Impure, first published in 1932 when Colette was 59, is a fascinating account of subversive society in 1900s Paris — prostitutes, opium dens, transvestism and homosexuality. (And a description of the poet Renée Vivien, including her anorexia, in what is perhaps one of the earliest accounts of that illness.) In her memoir-novel, Colette recalls her much younger self, and describes how she would wear “a mannish necktie” and walk around “looking as much as possible like a bad boy” (p.61).

Drag was not a way of life for Colette; I have not seen any photographs of her dressed in a suit after her relationship with Missy / Max ended. Missy / Max’s masculinity was a major part of her self-image, and it is likely that today, she would identify as transgender. However, for Colette, dragging up was not serious: it was playful, exciting, adventurous, sexy.

Colette suggests that, although conventional femininity was not really her, boyishness wasn’t really her either: “How timid I was, at that period when I was trying to look like a boy, and how feminine I was beneath my disguise of cropped hair” (The Pure and the Impure, p.61). As a girl, she was “famous” in her village for her incredibly long, beautiful chestnut hair. As a young woman, therefore, perhaps she was bored of being conventionally beautiful, and found androgynous beauty more interesting, more exciting. Today, we are lucky to be able to choose and change our identities daily: one day a ballgown, the next, a suit.

Colette describes the erotic pleasure she takes in watching “mannish women” in suits, admiring their “strong slender hands” and “exciting scent of [the] horses” they loved to ride, (p.65). Colette is seduced by androgynous or masculine women, rather than wanting to be one herself. Colette sums it up perfectly: “The seduction emanating from a person of unknown or dissimulated sex is powerful” (The Pure and the Impure, p.68).