The story of Marguerite Duras is one of extreme emotion and endless entertainment, and after experiencing this novel it is a story that you cannot make up. Not to my surprise The Lover replicates the events of Duras’s life. In The Lover the young girl does not have a normal understanding of love, and believes she must rebel in order to make a future for herself. Duras challenges the stereotype of a normal relationship and even the understanding of love by perplexing the social and racial bounds of a young white girl and a wealthy Chinese man. The Lover is a disheartening love story due to the fact that the future of the relationship is known to be doubtful while their opposing social abutments prevent them from fulfilling their desires to …show more content…
In fact, she consistently denies any feelings of love besides only sexual desire. Even as he says he loves her she states; “I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women.” (Duras 37) Which begs the question, what is it she desires? The answer is money and opportunity. “He says, you only came because I’m rich? I say that’s how I desire him with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money so I can’t say what I’d have done if he’d been different.” (Duras …show more content…
She says, “we lived out of doors, poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for themselves. Shameless, that’s what we were.” (Duras 45) This is not a love story, it is a story of lust and greed, but oddly intriguing because these emotions are alive inside of us, and at the age of fifteen this young French girl, deriving from an abusive “beggar” family does not care about the judgment, only how the future could change for her. She states, “Never shall I travel in a native bus. From now on I’ll have a limousine to take me to the high school and back from there to the boarding school. I shall dine in the most elegant places in town.” (Duras 34) Oddly enough the gender roles are reversed, she desires to be treated as “one of those women”. She is emotionally absent, as she just let’s him love her without giving any tenderness and understanding in response. In difference, the lover is desperately looking for love and affection. He seems to almost beg as she tells the reader. “He didn't speak of the pain, never said a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver; he'd close his eyes and clench his teeth. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes. It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he'd loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me"
In Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra’s classic novel, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote is a wonderful tale about a man who abandons his normal life to pursue life as a knight. The characters in the novel such as Dulcinea, his love, Marcela, Maritornes and Sancho Panza his squire happens to play a great and important role in the novel when exampling the theme of love. The themes of love, care, infatuation and loyalty are greatly expressed throughout the novel. Throughout the novel, Cervantes is able to examine how one can differentiate true love from false and infatuated love.
Regardless, her poor emotional state is proven through many lines in this lai, especially when she tells the knight “I grant you my love and my body” (115). She has finally come up with a method to “get away” from her husband in this decision. Throughout the rest of the story it is not once said that the wife came to love her new husband or her family, on the contrary, she does not seem happy in the following scenes. However, being afraid of her husband and his emotional violence, it is rational that she would try to find safety with someone else, even if that means giving away her “love,”—likely the appearance of such rather than actual love—and her
In the three stories “Eveline”, “A Rose for Emily”, and “Desiree’s Baby” three single women go about love in three different ways. Their struggles for love are similar; the decisions they made you will not believe. One thing you can say about all the women is their poor love lives. With their fathers in their way, the women find it hard to find love. Love is a four letter word that everyone wants, but some never get to experience the happiness. While Eveline, Miss Emily, and Desiree have controlling fathers, they want love; one walked away from her happiness, one kills for it, and another kills herself.
This essay will be going through the different types of love, and the power that they wield. Throughout the novel, different characters hold different powers of love. First, Clara’s love towards Ferula and Pedro Segundo will be discussed. And second, Esteban’s obsessiveness with Clara will be looked at closer. The bonds of love are stronger in relationships that aren’t acceptable compared to relationships that are acceptable in society.
The narrator is totally crushed by the gender discrimination. She longed to be seen by her mother and her grandma. The narrator is heartbroken that her mother loved her brother more than her and failed to notice her. “When she went into Nonso’s room to say good night, she always came out laughing that laugh. Most times, you pressed your palms to your ears to keep the sound out, and kept your palms pressed to your ears, even when she came into your room to say Good night, darling, sleep well. She never left your room with that laugh” (190). Her agony can be easily seen by the way of her narrating. She does not get the affection that she deserves. She really needs the affection from her own mother, but she is not getting it. She compares the love which her mother shows to his brother and herself. This is gender discrimination can be seen with her grandmother too. She hated her grandma as she would always support her brother and find fault with her. Even though what the brother did, no matter what crime. Her mother and grandmother always supported her brother and never supported or showed interest towards
As the sky continues mourning, tears are running down her face. She caresses her beloved's face and stabs her heart with a dagger, for she would rather die than be alive without the love of her life. Every human being goes through heartbreak and the joyus wonders of ‘true love.’ Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet, is the perfect embodiment of both unrequited and romantic love. Paris trying to get the affection of Juliet and Romeo being so in love with Juliet are types of love that are very different but in a way alike.
This lay introduces two types of love: selfish and selfless. Selfish love is not courtly love. It lacks devotion and true loyalty. It lacks suffering and self-denial. Marie de France portrays this kind of love in the old husband of the woman whom Guigemar loves. The man locks his wife away in an enclosure guarded by a castrated man. By doing this, the husband shows a mean, limited
Furthermore, what would love be if one could not gather any satisfaction from this event? In The Lais of Marie de France the happiness of love is a very significant factor, it is the determination that drives the passionate relationships that flourish within the lais. In the story of “Laustic”, the lovers are never in physical acquaintance but seem to gaze at each other every night
Love is perhaps one of the most contested issues in the world. No one has a precise definition of what love really should look or feel like. Most people have resorted to use their own experiences in love to effectively derive its true meaning. Through these experiences, philosophers have argued that the definition of love varies greatly depending on whether it was given by a man or a woman. This is however not the case. As proven by the narratives of Beauvoir and Sartre, the definitions of love derived from the experiences of both men and women are quite similar. Consequentially, Beauvoir’s account of the woman in love sheds important light on Sartre’s conflicting thought about love. By first highlighting the concepts of love as stated by Beauvoir, this text seeks to establish how Beauvoir’s account of love lays a vital foundation for Sartre’s.
In the story the author portrays the protagonist differently from the other characters because she talks about the physical appearance of other characters and when it comes to the narrator we have no idea what she looks like but she is developed partially through her relationship with other characters, although we the readers do come the find out that the narrator is around the age of 15-17 years old and we can assume that she has a bad relationship with her parents because first of all she talks about them maybe once or twice in the whole story and second of all we know that they sent her to boarding school so that alone proves that her relationship with them is lacking. As readers we also know that she has trouble opening up in the story she say “To open your heart. You open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anyone, to open your heart” (237). This is a prime example of how author characterizes the protagonist as broken and emotionally damaged. And as the story progress the author becomes more honest with us the readers and herself, she starts the reveal the pain she is in and how lonely she feels. The narrator gives us an example of how she feels after sex by saying “After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickness at
Love is expressed differently by all, some like Salamono may tuck it away, only to release it when the lover has left forever. Others , like Marie, choose to boast it to the world without hesitation. This quality is her confidence is herself shining through. She never fails to attest to what she wants “Then she said she wondered if she
Marie, Meursault’s girlfriend, is extremely emotionally attached to Meursault, and this is a weakness. Marie is dependent on Meursault as her source of happiness, even though Meursault does not show that he really cares about Marie. When asked if he loved her, he replied “it didn’t mean anything and that [he] probably didn’t love her” (41). Most people would despise being in a relationship in which they’re unloved by their partner. However, Marie stays with Meursault, even if he does not actually love her. Marie staying in a relationship where she is not even loved, is the result of her being emotionally attached to someone who does not feel the same way about her.
As cultural critic Edward Said once wrote, “[Exile’s] essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Mariam, the daughter of an affair between a wealthy businessman and a lowly servant, is exiled from her home of fifteen years into a marriage with someone who she has never met. She is left heartbroken, melancholic, and feeling alienated. Before her forced marriage, Mariam is huddled into her father’s house where she spends a few weeks coping with her mother’s death. The narrator describes the events leading up to her temporary residency with her father Jalil, “Two days before, Mariam has slept on the sidewalk waiting for him. Two days before--when
From a feminist critical perspective, it is clear to perceive that her husband’s death was a release of freedom from her marriage. The text describes that at times, she did and did not love her husband. However, love had not mattered anymore because she was now free. Whether they loved each other or not, she would have still been his property. This restriction of freedom was no longer her cross to bear. The death of her husband would pave her a path for a new life.
In Romeo and Juliet, written by William Shakespeare, two star-cross’d lovers of enemy households are no longer entities, and cascade into each others souls, and more specifically, fall deeply in love. They develop an obsessive relationship with their feelings for one another; they have a constant desire to be together, even though their emotions are based on sight alone. The addiction was so enslaving, that their only solution to their family fued was to turn to their one and only lover. Romeo and Juliet’s addictive relationship has lead to their unavoidable departure, because it has caused their secret marriage, failed Mantua escape plan, and suicide.