The Lover Duras

In The Lover, Marguerite Duras tells the narrative from the point of view of the protagonist, a fifteen and a half year old, high school student in Indochina whose French dysfunctional family was bound in poverty. The father was dead, an older brother whom she fears and a younger one whom she deeply loves, and a mother whom she loves but pities and dislikes at the same time.
The narrator has a strained relationship with her mother whose favoritism for her older son and alternating support and abuse of the narrator weaken the family. The mother wants her daughter to have a secondary education and a degree in mathematics even after knowing that her daughter excels at French. However, the girl conveys a strong desire to write, “I want to write.
The narrator tells her lover, “Today I tell him it’s a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life.” (Duras 44). The narrator portrays her mother’s madness which is translated into sudden attacks in which she even locks her up. She attacks her and shouts, “She’s going to throw her out, she wishes she’d die, no one will have anything to do with her, she’s disgraced, worse than a bitch.”(Duras 58).
But that’s not the only strain in their broken relationship. She also blames her mother for the death of her younger brother who succumbs to pneumonia. “She died, for me, of my younger’s brother's death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then.” (Duras 27)
There is a multitude of complicated family dynamics in The Lover, especially in the mother-daughter relationship. Both in its content and its construction, the novel expresses a process by which the daughter discerns herself from her mother while staying connected to her. It is a continuous, unsettled and conflictual process in which the daughter never escapes the context of maternal body