The man both constructs a mirror of a kind of beauty for the older woman, yet tears her down as well, calling her "ravaged," that is marked by the life she has lead. An old woman who is "ravaged" finds beauty in the mirror, in the eyes, of a man. The scenario is essentially a fantasy creation for the narrator. In this beginning as well, the woman who narrates the tale is immediately recognized by the reader from the outside as incomplete, old, lacking in the conventional ideals of the woman as young and beautiful. Ravaged.'" Duras highlights the beauty of the face that will soon become so significant over the course of the narrative, as the young woman of her narrative enters into a relationship with an older man, a man who, incidentally, is not described as ravaged in contrast to the young woman's beauty. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. "He introduced himself and said: 'I've known you for years. Yet both The Lover and Love in a Small Town essentially tell the same story of identity fulfillment, of an unstable sense of female self that is solidified only in the presence of the male touch and the male gaze.Īt the beginning of The Lover, the central protagonist, often thought to be a stand-in for Duras herself, notes that "one day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me." Note the significance, incidentally, of the public nature of this act of recognition, a recognition of the self that does not initially occur in private. Its presentation of the 'lack' within the heart of the central character and her confined existence may be more obvious. This story offers a far more conventional narrative, telling the tale of a frustrated working wife and mother.
Thus, Duras' work is ultimately not so different from the narrative of the more conventional romance, Love in a Small Town.
A phallus that is fulfilled by a male body can only fill this physical, psychic, and societal lack. Yet her novel is still fundamentally guided by the principle that the nature of what is a mature, adult 'woman' is a physical and societal absence, or a 'lacking,' as the philosopher Jacques Lacan might call it. Her heroine becomes involved with a man of another race and ethnic identity.
Marguerite Duras presents a vision of forbidden love that on its surface may seem to challenge the reader's conventional assumptions of identity.
#THE LOVER DURAS CITATION MLA FULL#
Both author's works suggest that, only by being exposed to a new, sexually awakened sense of body and self, does a woman gains her full identity as a human being. Although this point-of-view may be said to be that of a misogynist, both Marguerite Duras' The Lover and Love in a Small Town provide the same textual narrative for the reader, as did Byron's 19th century version of the young, dashing Don Juan.
Lord Byron, in his epic poem "Don Juan," famously noted that although love may be an all-consuming passion for men and women, only for women does it provide the reason for their existence, only for women does love constitute their reason for the self's existence alone. Love and the Developing and Unstable Female Sense of Self