The Id houses the libido the source of psychosexual energy.’ In light of this it can be argued that the desire to save her mother is rooted in the Id and drives her libidinal attraction to the man from Cholon. The Id is the ‘completely unconscious part of the psyche that serves as a storehouse of our desires, wishes and fears. Freud’s model of the psyche is divided into three elements, the first of which is the Id. This need for saving the mother has a strong physical effect on the girl. When she first meets the man from Cholon, he talks and she is listening, ‘watching out for anything to do with his wealth, for indications as to how many millions he had.’ This knowledge gap between the reader and the lover does not exist for long, however, because the young girl soon lets her lover know of her intentions when she tells him that ‘ poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Her relationship with the man puts shame on her and the mother but her good intentions towards her family, in particular her mother and younger brother, are repeatedly clarified in the text and so is her interest in the man’s wealth in particular. This lack of cultural understanding could be argued to also be a result of the father’s death, who according to Lacan ‘represents cultural norms, laws, language, and power.’ With the death of the father, there is no representation of these, leaving the girl with a lack of understanding thereof. However she goes about this the wrong way, firstly by choosing a man who was never able to give her permanent financial security through marriage and also by sleeping with the man, thus removing any chance of a possible future marriage.
The Chinese man is the only option she has to establish financial security for the family, which has been left in poverty. Her relationship with the man from Cholon is partially a result of her father’s death.
She has done this so often that she describes her mother in The Lover as having ‘become just something you write without difficulty, cursive writing.’ Duras as an author has picked these issues up repeatedly throughout her novels in order to work through the problematic relationship with her mother. This troubled relationship leads to some ambivalent desires for the young girl. During the phallic stage of psychosexual development ‘the little girl considers herself, if only momentarily, as castrated, in the sense of deprived of the phallus, by someone, in the first instance by her mother and then by her father.’ With the death of the father occurring at this stage, the transference of blame never took place, putting additional tension on the already existing ‘love-hate relationship’ between the child and the same-sex parent. In light of this we can apply the death of the author’s father as having been the same in the literary character’s life.ĭuras’s/the girl’s father died when she was only four years old, leaving the child fatherless in the middle of the phallic/oedipal stage. This allows the reader to analyse the young girl in more depth. This leads me to believe that while not everything in the written text may be factual, the reader may attribute biographical information of Marguerite Duras’s life to the past and future not detailed in the novel. Additionally I will support my points by using the 1992 film adaptation by Jean-Jacques Annaud as a cinematic analysis of the original text.ĭuras, who has made a point of ‘deliberately confusing the borderline between fact and fiction to arouse discussion and disagreement concerning the real-life content of her novels’, has done the same in this novel, labelling The Lover a fictional autobiography. I will support my argument by looking at the socio-economic context of colonial Indochina, conducting a short psychoanalytical study of text and author and through close examination of the book.
In this essay I will argue that the young girl’s actions are not driven by sexual desire, but that her actions and relationship with the Chinese are a result of her unsatisfiable desire to support her family by aiming to masculinize herself and to replace the lack of a patriarch in the family. Paired with scenes of sexual pleasure in both the novel and the 1992 film version by Jean-Jacques Annaud, it is easy to fall into a trap of identifying desire as a need for sexual satisfaction and to focus on this sexual pleasure as the driving force and main theme in the novel. ‘Desire’ is a word that appears repeatedly in Marguerite Duras’s 1984 novel The Lover. Unachievable Masculinity as Driving Force in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover