ABSTRACT
Sido was published in 1930, two years after La Naissance du jour, and seven years after La Maison de Claudine. It is therefore the third of the books sometimes known as the ‘maternal trilogy’. It comprises a collection of portraits in which Colette evokes her childhood amongst the members of her immediate family. If it is true that the three chapters are devoted respectively to the mother (‘Sido’), the father (‘Le Capitaine’), and the brothers (‘Les Sauvages’ [Wild Creatures]), making a systematic sequence, it is also the case that it is a collective portrait in which five characters gravitate around a centre. This centre is Sido, whose presence pervades the whole book, the title directing readers’ attention to the lines of force that organise the relationships around her. While classical family portraits are likely to show the paterfamilias as head of the family, placing other members of the family in appropriate spatial subordination to him, Sido is clearly dominant here, bearing all her responsibilities like ballast (p. 509) or a bunch of keys at her waist in which ‘mon père pesait comme nous, et ne nous soutenait guère’ [‘my father weighed about as much as we did, and scarcely gave us any support’] (p. 528). Colette writes that Sido was the centre of a Wind Rose (p. 515), gathering the family around her in the house and the garden — themselves imagined as the centre of the social and the natural world.
