The Ripening Seed by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

First published:Le Blé en herbe, 1923 (The Ripening Corn, 1931; better known as The Ripening Seed)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: One summer in the early 1920’s

Locale: A summer house on the coast of Britanny

Principal Characters:

• Vinca Ferret, one of the protagonists, a fifteen-year-old girl who is in love with Phillipe
• Phillipe Audebert, the other protagonist, a sixteen-year-old boy who is in love with Vinca
• Madame Camille Dalleray, the woman in white who seduces Phillipe

The Novel

The Ripening Seed explores the coming of age of its two main characters, Vinca Ferret, a fifteen-year-old French girl with “eyes the color of April showers,” and Phillipe Audebert, a sixteen-year-old French boy in the “full vigour” of youth and impatience. As the novel unfolds, the omniscient narrator moves back and forth between the thoughts and actions of Vinca and Phillipe, revealing slowly the changes which turn these childhood friends into neophyte adolescent lovers. This is the fifteenth summer that their families have spent together in a house on the coast of Brittany, and much that occurs is merely a continuation of the previous summers. Vinca and Phillipe spend their days shrimping in the cliffside tidal pools, swimming or fishing in the quiet waters along the beach, or hiking to their secret spots, where they can sit and talk, or dream of the future, away from their parents’ eyes. Underneath the familiar and comfortable routines of childhood, however, lurks an uneasiness. Knowing that they are fated to marry each other, they find the thought of waiting for five or six more years almost unbearable, and yet their lives are programmed for them: Phillipe must finish school and then enter his father’s business, while Vinca will stay at home and perfect her domestic role. Thus, while swimming, fishing, and hiking, they fall prey to melancholy, self-indulgent fantasies and romantic melodramas.

One day, something intrudes upon their private world of waiting. Phillipe, quite by accident, meets the “woman in white,” Madame Camille Dalleray. At first, she addresses him as “young fellow” when she sees him scrambling through the sand wearing only a pair of shorts. Moments later, however, she looks at him “like a man.” Madame Dalleray tells Phillipe that she has lost her way to Ker-Anna, her summer house, and Phillipe manages to stammer out an answer, feeling both embarrassed and flattered by the attention. Just as the woman turns to leave, Vinca comes climbing up over the cliff demanding, with “anxious, jealous” eyes, to know with whom Phillipe was speaking. For reasons yet unknown to Phillipe, he gives Vinca a somewhat brief and ambiguous answer, keeping to himself some as yet unknown secret.

The next day, Vinca and Phillipe succumb to the gloom of a rainy day, aware that only three weeks of vacation remain. As they watch each other through the rain, their sadness deepens, and when a break in the storm comes, they take refuge on a protected ledge in the cliffs overlooking the darkened sea and sky. As they sit, lost in reveries of their forthcoming separation, Phillipe notices that Vinca “[w]ith eyes tight shut,...was slipping quietly, imperceptibly, deliberately, down the slope of the rocky ledge, so narrow that her feet were already dangling over space.” Phillipe calmly yet firmly pulls her back onto the ledge, forcing her to choose life over death, waiting over having.

As the days continue, Vinca and Phillipe shift from “moody dramatics” to more normal behavior and back again. One day, they plan a picnic, taking along Lisette, Vinca’s younger sister. Climbing over rocks and through fields of flowers, they reach a flat, sandy stretch and settle down for a picnic. Unconsciously, Vinca absorbs herself in “squaw-like chores,” setting out the food, making sure that Phillipe and Lisette get what they want. She then proceeds to clean up after the three of them have finished, while Lisette runs off to play and Phillipe lies back, closes his eyes, and daydreams that Vinca is already his wife. At the same time, however, a naked and undefined form lurks in the recesses of his daydream.

Thus, at least for a short time, life seems to have resumed its normal routine, until one day, Phillipe, who is cycling back from the town, stops to rest beside the walls of Ker-Anna. Just as he begins to catch his breath, a shadow falls across his body. It is the lady in white, Madame Dalleray. She invites him in for a glass of orangeade, calling him “monsieur” as she had on that first day. Phillipe follows her indoors, feeling slightly dizzy, and encounters a room with drawn curtains and closed shutters. As Madame Dalleray hands Phillipe the glass, she dips her fingers into it and removes an ice cube. Again, Phillipe feels faint, noticing for the first time the subtle odor of incense and the deep reds and blacks that decorate the room, adding “to the atmosphere of nightmarish luxury, of startling uncertainty, of equivocal rape.” He manages to stumble through some small talk, gulping his drink, and makes his escape. Down the road from Ker-Anna, he finds Vinca looking for him. When Vinca questions him as to why he was gone so long, he answers: “I was set upon...shut up in a cellar, given powerful potions to quench my thirst, tied naked to a stake, tortured, put to the test....” Vinca laughs at his story, but Phillipe knows that he speaks the “truth.”

From that day on, Phillipe is obsessed with thoughts of the woman in white and the room at Ker-Anna. He is both ashamed and excited by his memories, and he decides to repay her kindness by bringing her some flowers. He chooses the sea holly, which, ironically, is the same shade of blue as Vinca’s eyes. Waiting for a day when Vinca remains indoors, Phillipe guiltily picks the holly and takes it to Ker-Anna. Madame Dalleray accepts the flowers, telling Phillipe to come the next time not bearing gifts like a repentant schoolboy but as a beggar for “another reason.” Shame once again sends Phillipe back to the comfort of Vinca and their childhood, but now Vinca in turn notices a change in Phillipe, a “feminine presence” other than her own. He behaves like a guilty husband when faced with her silent stares, and he keeps his visits secret. On his fifth visit, he deliberately allows himself to be seduced with “slowness and calculated courage.”

On returning to his home that night, Phillipe hears the clock strike two. He thinks of Vinca, asleep “like a child,” and bursts into tears, succumbing to self-indulgent feelings of shame. Looking up, he sees the lights go on in Vinca’s room, and he swears to himself, “never again.” When he finally reaches his room, he falls into a troubled sleep and does not wake until he hears Vinca calling to him from below his window. She teases him about his pale face and fatigue.

Fighting an urge to remain in bed, he goes swimming with Vinca; as he watches her walk across the sand, he notices that she steps on and crushes a small crab and is shocked at her cruelty. Later, at lunch, Phillipe is sickened at the sight of her strong hands tearing away at a lobster claw. A few hours later, watching her trying to hook a conger eel and seeing the “spilt blood,” he breaks down and sobs. Vinca, bewildered at first, listens to his sobs with an ear trained to “the new cadence” which gives meaning to his tears. Without a word, she turns and walks away.

Phillipe’s visits to Ker-Anna continue, and with each visit he returns to Vinca, trying to regain his childhood friend and looking for a sign from Vinca that she “knows all” and will forgive, but finding nothing. Finally, one day, he receives a message that Madame Dalleray has left and does not know whether to be relieved or sad. As he walks back to the house in search of Vinca, he encounters his father, who begins to speak of Phillipe’s future responsibilities: a job and a family. With these last words, Phillipe faints. When he recovers, he and Vinca take a walk, and she admits that she knows of his visits to the woman in white. Phillipe is ready to confess every-thing, but Vinca does not want his confession. What she does want is to know why he did not come to her, instead. Her words both surprise and frighten Phillipe, and Vinca mocks him for his prudishness.

Later that evening, after everyone else has gone to sleep, Phillipe and Vinca take a walk. Vinca leads the way through the dark, guiding Phillipe over and around obstacles. They make their way to a field of threshed wheat, and once again Phillipe allows himself to be seduced, surprised at Vinca’s “feminine senses.” The next morning, Phillipe’s first thoughts are about how he can comfort Vinca, for he has heard that “they’re always said to weep, after.” His solicitous mood is shattered, however, when he sees Vinca smiling and singing on her balcony as she feeds the birds as usual. Phillipe grieves that he is “neither a hero, nor an executioner.”

The Characters

Vinca, like many of Colette’s adolescent heroines, moves from innocence to experience. She is closely linked to the colors and objects of nature: Her periwinkle eyes are the “colour of April showers,” her tanned legs are the “colour of terra-cotta,” her neck is “milk white,” and her hair sticks out like “stiff corn-stalks.” Vinca is also tomboyish: “[S]he was careful to fasten her blouses and jumpers over a non-existent bosom, she tucked up her skirt and knickers as high as she could when paddling with the unconcern of a small boy.” She displays a feminine yet adolescent wisdom about becoming a wife and mother—already playing the part as she mends torn clothes, pours coffee, and serves food—while skillfully catching shrimp or fish, climbing rocks, and swimming. Nevertheless, although she moves comfortably between the physical worlds of tomboy and young girl, she is a bit wary when faced with the new world awaiting her, the world of physical love.

Phillipe is in a similar position: He is a young boy on the brink of manhood who “made a weapon of everything that embarrassed him.” He wants everything that Vinca wants, but he is less sure of himself and his future role as husband and overdramatizes first his virginity and later his virility. Phillipe retreats to fantasy worlds, where he plays the romantic and long-suffering hero. Longing for the freedom and pleasures of manhood, he is reluctant to give up the securities of childhood. Thus his movement between the two stages is more traumatic and, at times, more comically dramatic than Vinca’s.

Madame Dalleray is the most static of the three characters, and in her role as the seductress, she is the antithesis of Vinca. The lady in white has no connection to nature. Her world is an indoor one of velvets, satins, and silks; she closes out the daylight, surrounding herself with reds, golds, and blacks. While Vinca and Phillipe move timidly toward sexual initiation, Madame Dalleray, at thirty, is well versed in sexual exploits. For Phillipe, she represents both pleasure and shame; for Vinca, she awakens feelings of jealousy and competition.

Critical Context

Although The Ripening Seed was not Colette’s first published work, this book marked the first time that she published under her own name rather than using her husband’s. This novel, which was originally intended for magazine serialization (until the editors discovered that it ended with an adolescent love scene), falls into a common pattern of adolescent love triangles which involve older women. Nevertheless, like most of Colette’s love stories, this novel is more, for it leads its characters, especially the adolescent heroine, on a search not only for the self but also for a sexual identity and equality within a traditional relationship. Without consciously addressing the issues of feminism, Colette explored them in a symbolic manner through her growing use of nature and sexual ambiguities. Regardless of this inherent symbolism, however, Colette’s novels are set in the real world, a world in which society dictates male and female roles. Although there is a tendency to place Colette among the canon of women writers, such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, her characters and their struggles are limited by the very theme which they explore, love. Colette was aware of the traditions of French literary formalism, of the need for temporal unity and social realism, and she worked within these limits. Yet even within these limitations, she developed a style that was rich in sensuous imagery, very often using nature as her source.

Bibliography

Eisinger, Erica Mendelson, and Mari Ward McCarty, eds. Colette: The Woman, the Writer, 1981.

Goudeket, Maurice. Close to Colette, 1957.

Marks, Elaine. Colette, 1960.

Richardson, Joanna. Colette, 1983.

Stewart, Joan Hinde. Colette, 1983