Essay Questions

What does Colette think about the term "purity?"

In the text, Colette describes how she has never properly understood the term purity, as it is elusive and meaningless. In the following passage she describes how this term has been meaningless to her in a personal sense:

“The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench and optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.”

How does Colette describe the characters int the text?

The Pure and the Impure reads as a collection of case studies, dialogues, and commentaries with various different characters, including a middle-aged woman, a womanizer and an actress. She describes these characters as being "restless ghosts unrecovered from wounds sustained in the past when they crashed headlong or sidelong against that barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible, the human body." She uses these characters to speak about personal issues, including sexuality and gender.