Chapter 11: a Woman's Perspective (forgive the randomness...o, and no offense to the men who read this)

Chapter 11 cracked me up...sadly, it also made me feel almost ashamed to be of the same gender as this woman.
The way Barnes depicts Louise Colet is just...wow. What a bitch! She is so arrogant and rude. On page 148, she says Flaubert called her the "third sex, with the flesh of a woman and the mind of a man". The way she talks, I don't doubt it. So selfish and vain. It's like talking to a peacock, fanning out his magnificant plumage and strutting every feather. She speaks of her capture of Flaubert with no humitly (although she reminds the reader that she was his catch-she still speaks of it as if he should be so lucky). She brags about the outrageous affair between the two of them as I imagining men sitting at a bar late at night would compare their one-night stands with random woman, or as Barnes puts it: "...Men, I know, speak of such things with eagerness, with a little contempt; it is as if they were describing the last meal they had, course by course" (139). She is obviously a critic of the male, desribing on pg.140 that men classify how good of a lover they are by how often the love-making is renewed in one night. She detests this, as do I: does nothing else matter???? But I digress...
No matter her proud plumage, the preening of her feathers, this peacock is a smart, if not scathing and decietful one. She describes showing her anger at him at some small, hardly relevant thing by not answering any of his letters. And as the days turned to weeks, she made him come crawling back. Good God; this is a human being! Men are not as needy and weak as we women assume them to be....okay I actually take that back, but still. They deserve to be treated with as much respect as they should treat us.
I disagree strongly with her image of men. She sees them as nothing more than play things, a one night pleasure that can be renewed every so often...wow; that sounds exactly like a stereotypical, manly trait.
Scary.
Flaubert wasn't exactly good to her: she says he humiliated her often, but with one with such a giant ego, I'm not surprised. But that doesn't make her treatment any better.
But as Madame Boylen once said, "Show that you are strong by giving support and steering your man in the direction by showing them that they are worthy, not stamping their little feet. That is the art of being a woman." Obviously, Louise Colet needs some lessons.