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In her autofictional book The Lover (1984), author Marguerite Duras examines thematic connections between colonization, sexuality, and female resilience in French Indochina. The novel's protagonist, a teenage girl named Marguerite Donnadieu, begins a sexual and illicit relationship with a wealthier and much older Chinese man, referred to as "the lover," the term that gives the novel its title. Within this relationship, Marguerite enjoys a comforting emotional and physical space away from her unhealthy family environment. At the same time, with her friend Hélène Lagonelle, a French teenager who lives in the same boarding school, Marguerite develops a relationship that we can call "queer" and "homosocial."[1] It is this homosocial relationship that allows Marguerite to explore her queer desire for Lagonelle's body. Through her relationship with Lagonelle, who is still unaware of her body's sexuality, Marguerite regains a youthful innocence otherwise threatened by a traumatic childhood and her newfound sexuality with the Chinese lover. Both relationships—with Hélène and with the Lover—are forbidden by the social rules of colonial Indochinese society at the time. However, Marguerite exploits them not only to survive but to regain her agency in familial and social environments that marginalize her. Her privileged status as a white French colonizer excludes her from certain parts of Indochinese society as well, but it is through this exclusion that she is able to regain stability. This stability is based on Marguerite's fluidity across boundaries that delineate the socioeconomic and racial structure of the colony and the protagonist's romantic, sexual, and queer relationships.
In this context, we will use an intersectional framework to consider the themes of queer sexuality and coloniality in The Lover . To better illuminate how we apply the term “ queer ,” it should be noted that David Halperin defines it as follows: “ Not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices ” (62). Through her queer and illicit relationships with the Lover and Lagonelle, Marguerite regains a power that was initially lost because of her marginalized status, but is ultimately reclaimed and revived. It is these physical and emotional relationships that make Marguerite a fluid and queer character who crosses cultural boundaries and seeks courage amid the social and familial instabilities that mark her milieu.
In fact, the impalpable socio-economic boundaries were essential for the French empire in Indochina to exert its hold over the indigenous population. These boundaries were defined by racial and socio-economic identities: on the one hand, the wealthy white colonizers, and on the other, the poor natives. As a white French teenager, Marguerite was nominally a member of the privileged class. However, her family's poverty clearly set her apart from other white settlers. These contradictory identities placed Marguerite at odds with colonial society, to the point where she was not a member of any racial group in the colony: she found herself rejected by both the Asian natives and the settlers. Sitting in the front of the " native bus " to cross the Mekong, her presence in the car represents what separates her from the two racial groups (Duras 8): on the one hand, she takes the bus because of financial necessity, which isolates her from those who can afford to use a private car; on the other hand, she cannot associate with her socio-economic equals, namely the Indochinese natives, because of her status as a white girl.
Marguerite's positioning in the social hierarchy becomes ambiguous as she constantly moves across ethno-racial boundaries. It is this ambiguous positioning that presents itself as a priori threatening in the eyes of the French empire: the erasure and natural shifting of boundaries results in the danger that postcolonial theory calls the " indifferentiation " between the colonizer and the colonized (Cooper 145). Marguerite, who corresponds neither to an indigenous subject nor to a typical colonizer, finds herself rejected and marginalized by the racial and socioeconomic division of the colony. As Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler note:
The criteria used to determine who belonged where underscored the permeability of boundaries, opening possibilities for assertion among interstitial groups of “mixed bloods” and “poor whites” as well as those more squarely identified as “the colonized” (6).
Marguerite's " poor white " positioning inherently threatens the status quo of French Indochina. However, it is the decision to engage in sexual intercourse with a Chinese man that further reinforces this marginalization of the protagonist.
What deeply informs Duras’s diegesis is the socio-historical context of her childhood in French Indochina, which is characterized by constructed and seemingly immutable boundaries that are tied to gender and also race. As French men symbolize France’s superior power through its colonial authority over the natives, white women become a source of stability necessary to prevent the French from being transformed into natives through their relationships with Indochinese mistresses, what Cooper explains as “ [i]ndigenization […] the ultimate manifestation of acculturation ” (159). These sexual and interracial relationships were described as “encongayement,” a word derived from the Vietnamese word “ con gaï ” meaning a white man’s concubine (Cooper 154). Encongayement thus symbolizes France’s conquest of Indochina, reflected in the domination of the female native body by the white colonist. Encongayement also represents the dangerous influences, both physical and moral, that tempt colonists to reject French culture and homeland and to flee with native women and adopt their " native way of life " (158). The settlement of white women in the colonies restores, as Cooper suggests, fragile imperial authority by protecting white colonists from the danger of " indigenizing ."
Yet Ania Loomba notes that with this installation comes a new danger, that of the symbolic contamination of France by the contamination of the Whites: " Women on both sides of the colonial divide demarcate both the innermost sanctums of
race, culture and nation, as well as the porous frontiers through which these are
penetrated " (159). Thus, as the indigenous women represent colonized Indochina, the white women become symbols of colonizing France itself. For example, Duras notes that white women in Indochina "do nothing, they only keep themselves [...] for Europe [...]. Some are dumped for a young servant who keeps quiet" (15). These women "do nothing" because they fulfill their role of preserving stability in the colony simply by their existence. Moreover, if they decide to participate in the daily life of the colony and the natives, they risk the penetration of the " porous frontiers " that they represent.
Marguerite, however, rebels against this imposed role as a white woman when she chooses to become a prostituted body for the Chinese Lover. Duras reverses the colonial dynamic; she grants Marguerite a unique positioning that is defined by her identities as an impoverished, white, and colonizing woman. Since she is a white girl, her relationship with an Asian man remains impermissible in the eyes of whites. Shunned by those in her social circle who are scandalized by her behavior, she is known as "this little pervert [who] goes to have her body caressed by a dirty Chinese millionaire" to the point where no woman "will speak to her again" except for her best friend, Hélène Lagonelle (Duras 69). For Marguerite, this ostracism represents punishment for having acted against the social rules of the colony.
Marguerite's family reacts violently negatively to her sexual relationship with the Chinese Lover. Their disapproval and abuse show the dangerous repercussions for those who violate these racial boundaries structuring the colonial order. Her mother "beats [her] with her fists [...]. [She] hits her with all her might" and her older brother listens from outside, hoping that the punishment "will go on and on until the danger" (45-46). As a response to the family abuse, Marguerite exchanges the marginalized position of an impoverished white girl that she occupies for that of a girl who manifests these qualities, but who is also a queer girl . In this way, she benefits from the comfort associated with her queer relationships based on the desire to replace the emotional void caused by her abusive family: the first with the Chinese Lover and the second with her friend Hélène with whom Marguerite begins a homosocial relationship.
The sexual relationship between Marguerite and the Chinese Lover is strictly against the rules of French society because of the ethno-racial difference between the two characters. The Chinese Lover knows that as a Chinese, his advances toward Marguerite would be severely punished if she openly pointed out the transgressions. This awareness, as well as fear, is reflected in his actions. The first time he speaks to her, “his hand trembles. There is this difference of race, he is not white [...] That is why he trembles” (26). Duras writes that “from the first moment [Marguerite] knows [...] that he is at her mercy” (28). The ethno-racial boundary that the two characters are dangerously approaching is almost palpable in the physical relationship and the subversive power dynamic between the two where “he is at her mercy” (26).
Although a white colonizer, Marguerite is also an adolescent and the younger partner in the romantic relationship with the Lover. Through her power over the trembling and submissive Asian body, Marguerite reorients her vulnerability in order to regain an agency she had lost due to her marginalized socio-economic positioning and her family's rejection. At the same time and transactionally, the young girl sacrifices her innocence in the sexual relationship to survive in a society that marginalizes her doubly, which becomes a notable trauma for her. To regain some of this innocence, she turns to her friend Hélène Lagonelle. With Hélène, the only white girl in the boarding school who does not ostracize her for her poverty or for her sexual relationship with a Chinese man, Marguerite finds the acceptance and friendship she does not enjoy in her familial and social settings.
The sexual awakening of the young Marguerite through her relationship with the Chinese Lover triggers a simultaneous awakening of her desire for the same kind of body, namely a desire that takes as its object the body of Hélène. Duras writes that
[t]he most beautiful thing given by God is this body of Hélène Lagonelle [...]. Nothing is more extraordinary than this external roundness of the breasts carried [...]. I would like to eat the breasts of Hélène Lagonelle as [the Chinese Lover] eats the breasts of me. (56)
Marguerite's fantasies of exploring Helene's body in the same way that the Lover explores hers reinforce the inner connection between her awakened attraction to Helene and her sexual encounters with the Lover. Duras describes Helene's ignorance about the sexual nature of her own body, which gives Marguerite a certain power in this girl-on-girl relationship. As the narrator points out, "She is shameless, Helene Lagonelle, she does not realize it, she walks naked in the dormitories" (56). Referring to Marguerite's voyeuristic gaze on Helene's body, Rachael Criso argues that Marguerite is " in awe of Helene's body and mesmerized by her innocence, often comparing her own sexual
knowledge to Helene's chasteness " (47). Marguerite's interest in Hélène's misunderstanding of her own sexuality makes her voyeuristic desire for her friend's body even more explicit.
This depiction of Marguerite and Hélène's voyeuristic tendencies contributes to the novel's main theme of scopophilia, defined here as the pleasure of being looked at, particularly in women. Laura Mulvey qualifies this notion of scopophilia by describing the phenomenon as " to-be-looked-at-ness ":
There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at [...] In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (344-346)[2]
In The Lover , scopophilia manifests itself in the relationship between Marguerite and Hélène, but it also appears outside of this relationship within Indochinese society, where Marguerite lives as a white adolescent: "People look at white women in the colonies, and little white girls of twelve too. For three years, white people have also been looking at me in the streets" (Duras 14). Marguerite and other white women in Indochina cannot escape the constant voyeurism that defines their existence. Even when they are alone, far from the male gaze, "they wait [...] they look at each other. In the shadow of these villas, they look at each other for later" (15). Thus Marguerite becomes both an object and an agent of voyeurism, which she learns through the example of other white women in colonial society. As white people have coveted her since the age of twelve, Marguerite inevitably looks at herself and others, especially Hélène, with a sexualizing gaze.
Duras reveals that Hélène Lagonelle has managed to escape from this perpetual state of objectification and scopophilia through "the law of error. Delayed in childhood" (16). Through this escape, Hélène retains her youthful innocence, which Marguerite can access again to protect herself from the knowledge of her own " to-be-looked-at-ness " through the homosocial relationship. This escape is, however, temporary. Note that Marguerite returns to scopophilic habits when she looks at Hélène's naked body, still unaware of her sexuality. In her lustful gaze fixed on Hélène's breasts, Marguerite takes more pleasure while knowing that the other girl does not recognize the fact that she is being studied:
These forms of flour flower, she wears them without knowing anything, she shows these
things for the hands to knead them, for the mouth to eat them [...] without knowing
them, without knowing either of their fabulous power. (Duras 57)
In this way, Marguerite enjoys a certain power through her one-sided desire since Helen is ignorant of this desire. Marguerite then has the power to decide how their relationship will proceed.
Yet, Marguerite does not choose to act in accordance with her desire: her relationship with Hélène remains strictly within the order of homosociality. Indeed, this homosociality becomes an asylum that allows Marguerite to escape her harmful and unstable family and social environments. Among the three most important relationships in her life—those with her family, with the Lover, and with Hélène—Marguerite finds herself pushed by the abuse of her family toward her loving and desirous relationships. At the same time, the trauma of her new sexuality with the Lover pushes her toward her comforting and homosocial bond with Hélène. Duras thus places in contiguity on the one hand a queer and homosocial bond and on the other hand an illicit Franco-Asian relationship. This bond allows Marguerite to create a passage toward stability and survival where she negotiates between two anti-normative sexual modes while maintaining a protective distance from her toxic family.
In The Lover , it is precisely Marguerite Donnadieu's ability and willingness to cross the constructed and permeable boundaries of French colonial society in Indochina that allows her to regain her agency threatened by her social, financial, and familial environments. Her queer sexuality is thus understood in the context of her heterosexual, illicit, and interracial relationship with the Lover and that of her homosocial bond with her friend Hélène Lagonelle. Within the framework of this visual text, Mulvey's theory of scopophilia reveals as "queer" the romantic encounters between Marguerite and the Lover and also the homosocial relationship with Lagonelle. It is in this act of making "queer" that the reader, who becomes in some way a spectator of these acts, crosses these boundaries as a voyeuristic and "queer-ified" participant in the company of Marguerite. Queer sexuality operates not only within the diegesis of the story, but also, as we suggest, outside it. For Marguerite, sexuality becomes representative of the resilience through which her seemingly lost agency and innocence are regained. The end of the novel shows an older Marguerite recalling memories of her familial, social, and sexual relationships. These retrospectively transcend spatiotemporal boundaries and touch her deeply, reminding her of how her queer nature has marked her agency, courage, and survival.
[1] Regarding the term “homosocial,” we refer to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition that “homosocial” does not only represent a social bond between two individuals of the same sex, but also a relationship that exists on a “continuum” between platonic social bonds and erotic bonds (Sedgwick 1).
[2] Mulvey’s theory of scopophilia and to-be-looked-at-ness is a fortiori rooted in the cinematic male gaze. However, we apply it here to support an intersectional analysis of Duras’s visual-literary treatment. This analysis is possible thanks to the photographic and visual nature of Duras’s writing style as well as the presentation of the text. The novel draws on two photographs of her life in Indochina, one real and one imagined (Cohen 58-61). For an analysis of Duras's photographic structure in The Lover, see Susan D. Cohen's “Fiction and the Photographic Image in Duras' The Lover.”
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