A Shadow of a Colonialist in Duras’s The Lover
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The Lover (1984) has been read as an autobiography/ autobiographical fiction of Marguerite Duras. Listening to Duras’s interviews and considering her public reputation as a feminist, Marxist, liberalist, and civil activist, therefore, the Durasian scholars were reluctant to decipher the text in any sense of colonialism and instead they have interpreted it as a feminist text illustrating a journey of a French girl of age fifteen and a half that seeks out for an autonomous individual subject negating patriarchal values and establishing her own hegemony. However, the text shows otherwise: it actually demonstrates the consciousness of a colonizer through the white French girl’s thought and words. The narrator’s and her descriptions of the alleged lover Chinese man and the Vietnamese characters reiterate those of a colonizer’s, othering them and putting them in a place of “unhomeliness.” The Chinese man visualizes an exotic other while the Vietnamese characters are almost invisible in the eyes of a colonizer. In spite of the colonial discourse in the fiction, nevertheless, this paper contends that the novel neither “fails” the reader nor claims Duras as a colonialist.
Abstract
The Lover (1984) has been read as an autobiography/ autobiographical fiction of Marguerite Duras. Listening to Duras’s interviews and considering her public reputation as a feminist, Marxist, liberalist, and civil activist, therefore, the Durasian scholars were reluctant to decipher the text in any sense of colonialism and instead they have interpreted it as a feminist text illustrating a journey of a French girl of age fifteen and a half that seeks out for an autonomous individual subject negating patriarchal values and establishing her own hegemony. However, the text shows otherwise: it actually demonstrates the consciousness of a colonizer through the white French girl’s thought and words. The narrator’s and her descriptions of the alleged lover Chinese man and the Vietnamese characters reiterate those of a colonizer’s, othering them and putting them in a place of “unhomeliness.” The Chinese man visualizes an exotic other while the Vietnamese characters are almost invisible in the eyes of a colonizer. In spite of the colonial discourse in the fiction, nevertheless, this paper contends that the novel neither “fails” the reader nor claims Duras as a colonialist.
참고문헌 (16)
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