Writing Ambivalent Selves: Marguerite Duras's The Lover

• Main Authors: Liu Hsin-yi, 劉欣怡
• Other Authors: Chu Wen-chuan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/06048596667171977456

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === The thesis elaborates the ambivalent selves in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. The scenario of The Lover is Vietnam as the colony of French in the early twentieth century. The Lover describes the little girl’s lived experience from childhood to adolescence. In this thesis, I attempt to delve into the little girl’s ambivalent selves in The Lover and contend that The Lover should be deemed an autobiography for Duras. It means that the little girl is referred to Duras in The Lover. Mostly narrated in the first person “I” of the little girl, The Lover, however, is sometimes voiced in the third person “she” of the other woman with detached feelings and opinions to tell the little girl’s story. Such split and disjointed narrative, which seemingly lacks of a coherent sequence and connection, in my opinion, reveals the little girl’s severe mental and physical suffering as well as the ambivalent feelings in the self-development. In The Lover, the little girl’s ambivalence stems from the suffered experience in Vietnam, including French colonial government’s exploitation, the entangled mother-daughter relationship, and the forbidden love with the Chinese man. My thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction. In the second chapter, taking the little girl’s mother for example, Duras depicts the poor whites’ privation and enforced separation under the French colonial government’s exploitation as well as the marginalization in the white society. Meanwhile, the little girl is attached to the mother. The mother’s inclination to identify herself with the Vietnamese also affects the little girl to treat the Vietnamese as her family. Yet, the harmony related triangle among the little girl, the mother, and Vietnam is ruined by Pierre, the little girl’s old brother, who makes a break in the little girl’s relationship to the mother and Vietnam. In the third chapter, the little girl’s fondness and reliance on the mother is replaced by the intense resentment. Simultaneously, she becomes abhorred everything in relation to Vietnam, including the mother. Because of Pierre, the little girl is deprived of her identification with the mother, family, Vietnam, and France. The forth chapter continues the little girl’s tragedy while she has sexual relationship to a Chinese man. The mother’s trashing and the humiliation from other people have the little girl suffered in the dispraise and further lose her identification in ambivalence. The fifth chapter concludes that the little girl is majorly shaped by her relationship to others, and furthermore, in the midst of the relationship, the relationship to others also leads the little girl to live in the contradiction and disturbed ambivalence. By the voice of the little girl, Duras keeps writing the lived experience in Vietnam so as to provide herself an opportunity to unveil the suppressed and hidden self behind the distressed experience.