The lover marguerite duras analysis. Gender and Power Dynamic in The Lover by Marguerite Duras Essay 2022-10-16
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The Lover, written by Marguerite Duras, is a novel about a young French girl and her tumultuous relationship with a wealthy Chinese man in French Indochina. The story is narrated by the girl, who is unnamed throughout the novel, and is told in a series of flashbacks as she reflects on the events of her youth.
One of the main themes in The Lover is the complex and often dangerous nature of desire. The young girl is drawn to the Chinese man, known only as "the lover," because of his wealth and sophistication, but also because he represents a way out of the poverty and hopelessness of her own life. As the relationship progresses, the girl becomes more and more enamored with the lover, even as she becomes aware of the many ways in which he is exploiting her.
At the same time, the lover is also deeply conflicted about his feelings for the girl. On one hand, he is drawn to her youth and innocence, and is fascinated by her lack of social and cultural baggage. On the other hand, he is aware that the relationship is inappropriate and taboo, and that it could have serious consequences for both of them.
Another major theme in The Lover is the impact of colonialism on both the personal and political level. The novel takes place in French Indochina, which was a colony of France at the time. This colonial context shapes the lives of both the girl and the lover in significant ways, and their relationship is inevitably shaped by the power dynamics between France and Indochina. The girl, as a poor and powerless colonized subject, is deeply affected by the poverty and social unrest that result from French rule. The lover, as a wealthy and influential member of the colonizing society, is able to use his power and privilege to manipulate and exploit the girl.
Ultimately, The Lover is a powerful and thought-provoking exploration of desire, power, and colonialism. Through the portrayal of the tumultuous relationship between the young French girl and the Chinese man, Duras delves into the complex and often dangerous nature of desire, and the ways in which it can be shaped and influenced by larger social and political forces.
sexuality
The story begins in the 1930s as the young girl boards a ferry, traveling across the Mekong Delta on a return trip to Saigon, where she attends boarding school. Shortly after, she receives a phone call from her long-lost lover, telling her that, despite their distance and respective marriages, he still loves her. People become locked in their private grief — or depression — so that their speech, rather than being a means to some kind of catharsis or coming-to-terms with the horror, is in fact a symptom of it. This physical attraction to the same sex has been picked up by Annaud in his cinematic analysis of the text. However, she seems to recover, and leaves her native town, S.
As she gazes out over the water, a young, elegant Chinese man approaches her; his youthful visage belies the fact that he is twelve years her senior. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. The Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow trope as used in popular culture. She recognizes it too late and says: "The story of my life does not exist" Duras 6. Eventually, their strange, imbalanced relationship comes to light; as expected, the public reaction—particularly among the racist and exclusionary colonial French community—is less than positive.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras (Book Analysis) » webapi.bu.edu
It is the means whereby she can begin to become a witness to her own life. In other words, did Duras remember her past, and to that extent transcend it, or did she rather have a largely affective and nostalgic relationship to it? Duras turns a sordid affair, with the smell of money in the background, into a tale of timeless eroticism. The narrator's family recognizes the relationship for what it is but mutely accepts it because the rich man provides money and a strained type of social access, which they once knew. In this way Duras may well have achieved something that few writers have achieved: a putting into language — however minimal this might be — of the struggle for language. This troubled relationship leads to some ambivalent desires for the young girl. The narrator and her family relate more to the experiences of the poor locals which threatens their enjoyment of the privileges that come with being European. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes.
As her family's fortunes decline, she begins a sexual relationship with a much older Chinese man who, in turn, financially supports the family. There is, therefore, an aspect of the forbidden; of painful things seeing a light they perhaps should not, things that are devastating to remember, and are somehow because of this, all the more vivid as they rise to recollection. The structure of The Lover is not linear. . The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. The gap between their socioeconomic and racial statuses is insurmountably wide; even a whisper about their affair would spark a devastating scandal.
. To explain away his wealth, the young man reveals that he is the heir to a great fortune. To read her recollections is like sitting with someone old, perhaps, as they take out objects from a trunk, turning them over, confessing without guile or pity. At the same time, she and her husband joined the French movement for prisoners of war. An aloof, seemingly uncaring mother, a cruel, dominating older brother and a weak, helpless younger brother make up the family she is at once trying to escape. It provides a thorough exploration of the book's plot, characters and main themes, as well as an examination of Duras' style and her approach to autobiographical fiction. The Heptameron, written by the marguerite de Navarre in the sixteenth century, is today considered one of the treasured products of the French Renaissance.
In order to do this, she needs to masculinise herself. This affair is doomed from the very beginning by social and racial prejudices of the prewar 1930's. At the same time, the fact that the Chinese man eventually marries within his race strengthens the fixity of racial boundaries in colonial Indochina. The narrator refuses to reveal the truth, which bothers her mother, who still accepts the unexpected financial support out of desperation. Just as it is possible to respond to suffering by suffering oneself, so readers may respond to Duras empathetically, in a fascinated rather than an analytical way. . Very quickly, the reader, increasingly on the alert for new evidence that might throw light on the meaning of the story, realises that the story is less about an event than it is about how this event can be told.
Stein, his insight that indeterminacy is a fundamental feature of the novel in question, would only seem to confirm the problematic status of identity typical of the crisis of representation that characterised the end of the twentieth century. When Paris is liberated, the narrator's personal life goes through a period of upheaval. What makes The Lover as explosively impactful as it is, for me at least, is that it holds everywhere this torture of recollection, and most particularly, recollection that was, for a long time, purposely hidden. The second is the date of publication online or last modification online. All of these instances are told from a third-person point of view. Barbara Bray, New York: Collier Books; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International.
Gender and Power Dynamic in The Lover by Marguerite Duras Essay
Once again, she is leaving her family—which, despite their relatively high social status, has been rocked by financial struggle, loss, and mental illness—to pursue education and a better life. . Ultimately, their relationship is doomed because of the disapproval of the girl's family, the opposition of the man's father and the strict conventions of colonial society. Interestingly, he is also the lover of Pierre's wife, Tatiana Karl and meets her weekly in a hotel outside the town's environs. .
(PDF) Deflowered: Reborn, "The Lover" by Marguerite Duras Analysis
. Barbara Bray, New York: Grove Press. For this reason, Duras has come to be seen as a post-modern writer. The girl, thereby, claims a liminal space in Vietnamese society; occupying the interstices of both colonial and indigenous cultural identity. The novel is generally considered highly autobiographical in nature.
Duras herself is telling the other side of the story, the side that undermines and argues with her own earlier versions. At the age of fifteen and one-half, the narrator travels from Sadec to Saigon to return to school. Through open display of her poverty and sexuality the young girl is now able to reassign her place in society and distance herself from the impositions put on French women in the colony. In 1984, Duras received the prix Goncourt for her novel, The Lover. Even the future is already present and decided.
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