Psychoanalytic Concepts in "The Lover"

This research examines psychoanalytic concepts that are relevant to Marguerite Duras's novel The Lover. The research will explore the character of the narrator from the standpoint of a psychological diagnosis, first setting forth the narrative context in which the character's psychological attributes emerge and then discussing the narrative function of the character as well as her behavior in relationships that are explored in the novel.

Set in colonial Indochina in the 1920s and 1930s, The Lover is structured as a memoir of a French girl's adolescence marked chiefly by family pathology and a sexual initiation that has various attributes of socially forbidden love. The focus of the relationships in the story is on the declining mental condition of the narrator's mother and the 15-year-old narrator's relationship with a Chinese businessman who is 12 years her senior. The narrative unfolds from the perspective of the narrator's status as an old woman; indeed, it begins with a reflection on her aged facial features. That alerts the reader that the narrative is to be a mature recollection, evaluation, and confessional. Very quickly, too, it becomes clear that the story is not told in a linear fashion but rather as a discontinuous series of major and minor memories, sometimes in present tense, sometimes in simple past tense, and sometimes in future perfect tense, expressed as a fait accompli but formulated as if the fact contemplated is yet to come.

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f confrontation with the mother. The girl is isolated in another way, which is connected to her self-awareness of her sexual power. She is precocious enough at 12 years of age to infer the power of sexual attraction and notice that her "mother's men friends have been kindly asking me to have tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis at the Sporting Club" (17). She waits until she is 15 to act on this awareness, but the decision to do so is deliberate, and of course it is impossible for her to discuss it with her mother. What complicates the situation is that she is immature in other ways. She has adolescent self-absorption consistent with na�ve sexual curiosity, and she is so na�ve about her sexual attraction to her schoolmate Helene that it does not occur to her that girls could have willful carnal knowledge without the agency of a man. What ensues on this point is an exercise in projection, whereby she attributes her own sexual impulses to the lover: I'd like to give Helene Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It's via Helene Lagonelle's body, through it, that the

Category: Literature - P