Deframing Baudelaire: The Queer Hors-Champ in Colette’s La Vagabonde

This article reads Colette’s 1910 La Vagabonde as a response to Baudelaire’s heteronormative aesthetic practices. While the novel is predicated on a heterosexual love story, I argue that queer sexuality is present in the novel’s margins and connected to the topos of photography. Using the film theory notion of the off-frame, I show how Colette constructs an alternate mode of looking that subverts nineteenth-century realist tradition, allowing for queer sexuality to evade a heteronormative gaze, thus protecting those who might be most vulnerable by moving them just beyond the reader’s view.