COLOR SYMBOLISM +
volume of the series finds Claudine in her
seventeenth year in Paris, where a long
illness causes her hair to be cropped and
her contacts limited to her father's older
sister and the latter's grandson, Marcel, a
pretty and effeminate youth who is ab-
sorbedin his own affairwith amaleschool-
mate, which has already made trouble for
them at the lycCe and provoked the wrath-
ful contempt of Marcel's father. The series
continues in the same vein with ho-
moerotic as well as heterosexual interac-
tion among the characters.
Stella Browne, in a psychological
study of women authors with lesbian
tendencies, mentions Colette as having
been involved with two women, the film
star Marguerite MorCno and an unnamed
foreign noblewoman, of whom character
sketches drawn with great discretion fig-
ure in Ces Plaisirs (1932). The entire set-
ting of Colette's life work is the amoral,
sensual world of a coterie of Parisian lite-
rati and rentiers in the years before World
War I--an ambiance in which homosexu-
ality was a subdued, but certainly not a
major element. Colette herself enjoyed
the company of male homosexuals, espe-
cially Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, in her
literary set during the years of her renown
as one of the great living French authors.
BIBL1OGRAPHY. Jeannette Foster, Sex
Variant Women in Literature, Balti-
more: Diana Press, 1975j
Sarde,
Colette, libre et entmvh, Paris: Stock,
1978.
Evelyn Gettone
COLOR SYMBOLISM
In addition
their aesthetic
aspect/
acquire
which are culturally variable. In Western
civilization blackis the color of mourning,
while in some Asian societies white is.
Many men
avoidwearinglaven-
der or pink because of their "fruity" asso-
ciations. Yet Over the centuries so
hues have been linked '0 homosexual it^
that it would be almost impossible to
eschew them all.
According the poet Martial, sev-
eral colors were associated with effemi-
nate homosexuality in imperial Rome. He
limns an exquisite "who thinks that men
in scarlet