She tells him to use her for what he wants. From the first moment, she knows more or less, knows he’s at her mercy” (35).Īlong with racial power, before long, Marguerite attains sexual power over the Chinese. She is not even in her own country, but she has established a dominance he cannot take from her: “The image starts long before he’s come up to the white child by the rails, it starts when he got out of the black car, when he began to approach her, and when she knew, knew he was afraid. She is poor and white, he is rich and not. He wears elegant clothing, rides in a fancy car, and smokes European cigarettes tries to cover his shortcomings with his money and status. And, most importantly, he is defined by what she is not. She, from the very beginning, has the power to refuse him or take from him. They, from the very beginning, have swapped genders. The figure of the girl dressed as a man and the trembling Chinese lasts all the way through the book. He offers her a cigarette which she refuses to take from him. He is aware of his skin, she is aware he’s not white, not her. He is always trembling when he interacts with her. The Chinese man trembles when he approaches her. The image is of a young girl dressed in a man’s hat. There’s a difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling” (Duras, 32). He looks at the girl in the man’s fedora and the gold shoes. “The elegant man has got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. We see his money, his limousine, the meals, the clothing. She is leaving his name out to distance herself so that we are distanced. No name, no other relationship to him than the relationship she has. She knows his name, but she chooses to keep it from us so that we see what she sees, color, the body, the emotion.
#The lover duras citation skin#
He is identified only by the color of his skin and his country. It is her power she will use to survive, even if it means what we would call using her body and the man she sleeps with. She, at fifteen, is more sexually aware than most people her age. She, short of many of the resources listed above, has learned to become creative and uses her body as her only tool for attraction and lust. She is aware of her body, on the brink of maturity, and what it does to men. She, at the tender age of fifteen, claims to know more about beauty and attraction than women twice her age.
Marguerite Duras gives the reader this prophecy on attraction in her novel, The Lover, words which she, as we soon find, uses to explain her involvement with a man twelve years her senior. That too I knew before I experienced it” (Duras, 19-20). It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. Either it was in the women who aroused it or it didn’t exist. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery.