L’éthos maternel dans Lettres à sa fille (1916-1953) de Colette
Since the Letters of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, the epistolary practice allows the mother and the daughter to maintain a bond from a distance. In addition to the communicative value at the origin of this bond, the space of the letter involves the self of the writer in the writing’s movement. This particularity is conducive to the development of an image which adapts itself to the goals of the correspondence, adopting a rhetoric that creates an effect on the recipient encouraged to respond, to take position, to build a self-image through the epistolary exchange. Literariness is manifested in this kind of letters, as we demonstrate in our study of Lettres à sa fille (1916-1953) from Colette.  Motherhood step constitutes a fatality for some women who develop love tardily, if ever. Colette belongs to this line of atypical mothers refusing the maternal role in order to dedicate her life to her career as writer. Nevertheless, she maintains a thirty-seven years correspondence with her daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, to answer this social representation that requires the mother to be religiously devoted to her child. A physically absent mother most of the time, Colette builds an epistolary ethos that oscillates between keeping her daughter beside her through words, while maintaining a physical and a sentimental distance with the one who has to find her place in the correspondence. She slips away, but also imposes herself with her omnipresence in her child's world, demonstrating a severity that derives from her authorial posture. The deployment of this facet of the writer in the epistolary exchange, at first private, is possible because of the letter’s generic status: in fact, epistolary writing promotes a relationship from oneself to the other, but also to oneself through various specular effects. The study of the maternal ethos finally leads us to interrogating the ethos of the young girl forced to build herself in a relationship of dependency with the mother’s image.
Colette Colette de Jouvenel Correspondence Intimate writing Mother-daughter relationship Ethos