Colette : félins des villes et bêtes humaines

According to Baratay, urbanisation has produced real feline individualities, and the city plays an essential role in Colette’s literary representation of pets. From Dialogues de bêtes to La Chatte, it is the Parisian rhythm that shapes the existence of these animals: in the first collection, it is the everyday life of a bourgeois couple that defines the ironic exchanges between cat and dog. In La Chatte, it’s the topographical asymmetry between the house in Neuilly and the modern flat in central Paris that shapes the perfect but suspicious understanding between Alain and his cat Saha, while emphasising the incommunicability between the young man and his wife. Adopting a zoopoetic approach, we see Colette’s city as a catalyst for a writing style capable of recreating the point of view of a feline or a dog, through configurations that convey hybridity.