There is a Punch cartoon that depicts a business meeting in which the lone woman at the table is sharing an idea. Her boss responds: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Mrs Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.”
Watching Colette, this joke kept popping into my head. Starring Keira Knightley, the film tells the story of French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in the years following her marriage to “Willy,” a literary celebrity 15 years her senior. When Willy’s Claudine novels take Paris by storm, he indulges in toasts and parties, gathering up young women to dance the can-can on restaurant tables. The only issue is that the books are, in fact, written by Colette.
While the publishers – and the public – fall head-over-heels for Willy, we the audience are Colette’s collaborators, witnessing her suffering as he demands she keeps up supply and silently cheering on her eventual victories. In this respect, Colette echoes last year’s The Wife, in which a writer wins the Nobel prize for literature with novels written by his former-student-turned-spouse. It also shares a wider recuperative project with other recent films such as Big Eyes (2014) and Mary Shelley (2017) – both featuring women whose output was initially credited to their husbands – as well as with recent books about women overlooked by history, including Bad Girls Throughout History, the Forgotten Women series and the bestselling Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.
With a feminist interest in debunking misapprehensions about women’s lives profitably lodged in the mainstream, it is not surprising that film producers are increasingly turning to questions of authorship, credit and gender. But while it is satisfying to exorcise the injustice of the past, how such works speak to our present is less clear. Part of the subtlety of Colette, which could have been too neat a morality play, comes from the fact that Willy’s name helps Colette overcome the barriers a young woman writer would have faced. In The Wife, we are encouraged to similarly understand the woman’s choice to publish under her husband’s name in the context of the politics of the time, with an older woman writer warning her that male literary gatekeepers will never take her seriously.
This past is not yet dead. In 2017, the VIDA Count found that the majority of literary publications it surveyed “failed to publish enough women writers to make up even 40% of their publication’s run”. And although the prize for literature has the highest percentage of female winners among the six Nobel categories, since 1998 women have made up only 25% of winners. Female film-makers fare even worse, with the most recent report by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism suggesting only 4% of major Hollywood films over the last decade were directed by women.
The kind of discrimination faced by Mrs Triggs in the Punch cartoon is harder to quantify. A study by the University of Delaware, for instance, showed that men are given more credit than women even if they are expressing similar ideas. In an interview with Science Daily, researcher Kyle Emich said: “When I discuss this with women, they are not shocked.” Of course not. The shocking thing would be seeing it challenged.
However, “forgotten women”-type films and books often fall short of capturing the texture of a world in which women’s ideas are routinely co-opted and under-cited. This insidious dynamic is as difficult to protest about as it is to represent, partly because the practice by its nature obscures, but also because many instances of intellectual theft are petty. (Perhaps Rebecca Solnit will have to gift us a follow-up collection, Men Repeat My Suggestions in Meetings.) It is easy to comprehend a manuscript with the wrong name on it; harder to trace the theft of an observation, a joke, a rhythm, a critique, a sense of the world. Yet it is the latter that enrages Colette: “Everything I thought, and felt, went into those books. They were me.” The greatest injustice is not the theft of her labour, but of her personality and mind.
Her personality is also what tips off Colette’s lover, Missie, to the fact she is the true writer of the Claudine series. (In The Wife, a journalist unearths the truth in the Smith college archives.) It is a detail that disrupts the easy comfort of the film by suggesting that maybe it was possible to have known even before; that a woman’s mind leaves an indelible stain that a thousand end-papers cannot cover up. Concealed within Colette is an invitation to imagine the truth, to seek unauthorised forms of knowledge, to have faith in what we suspect, to venture that “anonymous” is a woman.
Neither film stages a big reveal. In Colette, we are told in the closing credits that Sidonie-Gabrielle later won a court case proclaiming her the “true author”. Although we spend most of The Wife wondering if the couple’s setup will be revealed before the medal is in his hand, we are left unsure as to whether it will ever be exposed. Of course, we knew all along. But then again, don’t we always?
