Eroticizing Trauma in Margurite Duras’s The Lover
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Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is based on a semi-autobiographical story about illicit sensual desire and a sexual liaison between a French girl and a wealthy Chinese man, set in French colonial Saigon during the late 1920s. The narrator transforms the act of prostitution, which must have been a dehumanizing, unbearable, and humiliating experience for the young girl, into an empowering one. By revealing her past, however painful it may be, the narrator eroticizes, not traumatizes, her illicit and scandalous liaison with a Chinese man in The Lover, which subverts the traditional view of a sexually victimized woman, and enhances her present strength. Tracing back through the traumatized period, with a heavy emphasis on female sexuality and the erotic, the narrator reconstructs her past adolescent self as one with rebellious and transgressive power, who can break from her family’s constraints and conventions, and be liberated from the harsh realities of poverty, prostitution, and the patriarchal order of French colonial society. In this way, the narrator transforms her traumatized past self, who was dispossessed of pleasure, voice, and identity, into the desiring subject through her fictional autobiographical writing.
Abstract
Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is based on a semi-autobiographical story about illicit sensual desire and a sexual liaison between a French girl and a wealthy Chinese man, set in French colonial Saigon during the late 1920s. The narrator transforms the act of prostitution, which must have been a dehumanizing, unbearable, and humiliating experience for the young girl, into an empowering one. By revealing her past, however painful it may be, the narrator eroticizes, not traumatizes, her illicit and scandalous liaison with a Chinese man in The Lover, which subverts the traditional view of a sexually victimized woman, and enhances her present strength. Tracing back through the traumatized period, with a heavy emphasis on female sexuality and the erotic, the narrator reconstructs her past adolescent self as one with rebellious and transgressive power, who can break from her family’s constraints and conventions, and be liberated from the harsh realities of poverty, prostitution, and the patriarchal order of French colonial society. In this way, the narrator transforms her traumatized past self, who was dispossessed of pleasure, voice, and identity, into the desiring subject through her fictional autobiographical writing.
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