why the mother not only overlooks her daughter's sexual adventurism but rather encourages it, and then, embarrassed by dependence on the money, attacks her daughter's behavior. But that does not sufficiently account for the psychology of maternal behavior in the matter of the affair. The mother quite pragmatically instructs the boarding school not to interfere with her daughter's comings and goings, and the Chinese takes the entire family out for dinner from time to time, which suggests that--however disastrous the social dynamics of these occasions--the mother and brothers are functioning more or less as pimps.
Such behavior flies in the face of expected patterns of manifest mother-daughter relationships. This is, however, consistent with references to the mother's daily "deep, despondency about living" (Duras, 1986, p. 14), partly but not solely on account of her father's death, contrast with the mother's somewhat energetic approbation of the girl's flamboyant dress (Duras, 1986, p. 23-4), in a way that suggests a bipolar disorder. Freud speaks to this
...