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Cross-undressing in Colette: Performance, gender and music-hall labour practice

Colette’s 1913 memoir, L’Envers du music-hall, documents the behind-the-scenes lives of music-hall performers, contrasting their staged glamour to their private indigence. Generally read as an admiring but uncomplaining depiction of performers’ heroism in early twentieth-century Paris, the text – I argue – deploys mute practices of spectation that ultimately indict the stage’s exploitive labour practice. Such tensions culminate in a rehearsal scene in which an actress, stripping down after long hours of effort, no longer resembles the royal mistress she portrays. Comparing her instead to a young, revolutionary drummer-boy, the text positions her to step offstage, sound the call to revolt, and summon her fellow performers to strike. In ironising the topos of the stripper disrobing for the pleasure of the male gaze, such cross-undressing joins other textual strategies in ‘laying bare’ the polemical energy straining this ‘uncomplaining’ memoir.