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 failure to fight them.
What is a "standard lover" like? "He" is an embodiment of strength and courageousness to do anything in the name of his love. He adores his beloved one and "she" is fragile and feminine. They write letters and poems to each other; looking forward the next time they are going to see each other. Can this description be considered a perfect and exact description of a love relationship?
At least it is the most dominant trend, which is very likely to be observed anywhere. This is just the way things usually are and ordinary nothing should change it. "The Lover" is one of the exceptions from the general regularity. It is a life-story of a woman, a story that has always lived in her heart, the story of her life, which she could not change for better. In the very beginning of the book she says: "Very early in my life it was much too late" (Duras 4). This intensifies the meaning of the forbidden relationship that she had in the past when she was just a fifteen-year-old girl attending a boarding school. This fifteen-year-old French girl is abused by her "beggar"-family and she mostly lives in her imaginary world. But once she meets the son of a Chinese millionaire on a ferry and starts a relationship with him. She herself does not consider this affair to have anything to do with love. She constantly denies she has any feeling except sexual desire for this young man and does not acknowledge it even at the moment of losing him. She recognizes it too late and says: "The story of my life does not exist" (Duras 6). She is as cold as an iceberg, not letting herself show even...
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