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Marguerite Duras The Lover

Decent Essays

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"

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