metamorphose de l'amour dans l'oeuvre de colette

Many critical studies of Colette, drawing heavily on psychoanalytic theory in order to explicate the biographical particulars of her life which are present in her works, have sought to brand the writer as feminine archetype of the free-spirited and inconstant libertine of the early twentieth century. But while such studies often note the general importance of the theme of love in Colette's works, they have tended to ignore both the larger literary metamorphosis which the theme of love undergoes and its metonymic links to the act of writing itself. Indeed, in Colette's works the letter and the mirror become privileged symbols through which the love felt by the narrator is channeled and ultimately displaced towards the act of writing and self-apprehension. Paradoxically, the act of writing is what enables Colette's narrator to enact her own liberation, it is also the act of writing in which she encounters isolation.