The girl, who was old by the time she was eighteen, has completed her journey by then; she has taken the phallic leadership of her elder brother from him and is proprietor of it, and of her own pleasure. This is the denouement, but to pinpoint the climax -- the final moment when the transfer of power can be said to have happened -- is difficult; perhaps at the time when, looking at her mother sitting in a chair, the girl is startled by what seems to be a body-snatcher. The mother she knew is suddenly gone, replaced. "My terror & #8230; [came from the fact] that that identity irreplaceable by any other had disappeared and I was powerless to make it come back," (Duras, p.85). The authority of the mother has been completely deflated, and what's left is a husk. Certainly by this point in the novel the girl is fully the winner of her family's livelihood, she occupies the man's place even if, with her elder...
While sharing the minimalist aridity of Camus, of Hemmingway, she writes the story of a woman's empowerment; of a girl who flies in the face of society's role for females; of a girl who wears an engagement ring when she is not engaged. Her greatest success, perhaps, lies not in the appropriation of minimalism but rather in the distinctly feminine high notes. She has written a story that Camus could not write, nor Hemmingway. No, the "man" of this story -- its hero -- retains the distinctly feminine ability to weep in secret, having loved a man without knowing it. Duras's hero -- heroine certainly not -- has complexities and layers of emotional range which, arguably, many of Hemmingway's characters did not. And it is this ability to re-create, as opposed to merely mimic, that makes the work's and the main character's feminist usurpation most successful.
Sexuality 'the Lover" by Marguerite Duras "The Lover" is the novel that can be considered a rebellion against the world of stereotyped relationships and ordinary understanding of love. It is the story that questions love standards. It is a love story without any real continuation but with millions of them in the head of each of the lovers. At the same time it is also a story of opposing social abutments and
She has no such power in her own family, but she can exercise this power when with this man. The two meet on a ferryboat, one of the democratizing and leveling institutions where virtually everyone might be at some time or another. She begins to make her way to the Chinese section of the city to his bachelor quarters for trysts, usually at her instigation and on the basis of
This neediness, rather than leading her to an unproductive affair, at least opens her eyes to the possibility of a new life, despite her mother's influence. Both sets of parents are smothering forces upon the two lovers: the Chinese man's father forbids his son to see the white girl, making their affair forbidden. Of course, this only makes their attraction all the more enticing, since both of them stand
Feminism/Humanities Love and the Developing and Unstable Female Sense of Self 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. Although this point-of-view may be said to be that of a misogynist, both Marguerite Duras'
Lover" and "The Awakening" Both Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Marguerite Duras' The Lover address what happens when a woman searches for a way to leave her present life behind and seek a new one that may, or may not, be any better. In The Awakening, 28-year-old Edna Pontellier struggles for selfhood but does not have the strength to accept the ramifications of this possibility. In The Lover, the 15-year-old
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