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Marguerite Duras, a feminist in spite of herself?

2021-03-03T15:17:20.736Z


Twenty-five years ago, to the day, the novelist died. The muse of contemporary feminism, no doubt, if she had lived, she would have dissociated herself from it.


Marguerite Duras did not feel

“not feminist at all”

, and yet, twenty-five years after her death, she finally passes as such, by dint of having slaughtered in her work the machismo of her century.

“A feminist is to be avoided.

This is not the right way if we want to change things, ”

she proclaimed during a program on France Inter in 1987.

Read also: The voice of Marguerite Duras

Does she feel out of step in the face of a more radical feminism that appeared in the early 1970s, with shocking slogans, in which she did not recognize herself?

Does she refuse this label, like all the others that we wanted to stick to her?

The term, in any case, displeases her, even if she signed in 1971 the

"manifesto of 343 sluts"

for the right to abortion.

"It seems to me that no, the feminist commitment was not decisive for her"

, estimates Aurore Turbiau, doctoral student in literature whose research supports feminist writers.

On the other hand, feminism

"has shed a new light on part of her work"

.

In her fictions, the novelist, who died on March 3, 1996 at the age of eighty-one, subtly defended the feminine cause at times when she was despised or absent from the debate, including literary.

To read also: Fanny Ardant: "Duras goes to the heart of what hurts"

Spirit of independence

Male domination, Marguerite Duras had tested it very young, seeing her mother, a widow, marginalized in French Indochina by colonial officials (men) who had knowingly sold her infertile land.

Her older brother, meanwhile, exhibited brutal misogyny, as she later recounted in

A Dam against the Pacific

, published in 1950.

After this Indochinese youth, deeply striking,

"her spirit of independence was strengthened since she studied political science, which at the time was rare for a woman"

, underlines Olivier Ammour-Mayeur, of the university. ICU in Tokyo.

This same spirit is then manifested in his literature.

“Most of Duras's texts can pass for feminists, for the simple reason that the central figures are women, and not stooges, but always characters who do not enter into the codes of what should be a woman according to the morals of the time, ”

adds the professor of French literature.

To read also: Thomas Morales: "Will the treasure of the written language disappear?"

Thus Lola Valérie Stein, in

Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein

(1964), an elusive heroine, is told by a man, in a logic opposite to that of many novels of the twentieth century, where it is the hero who cultivates the mystery facing female characters who are often stereotypical.

Duras does not deviate from his convictions

"The female characters of Duras have a desire for subversion, a quest for the absolute that can go through marginality, violence, prostitution"

, notes Chloé Chouen-Ollier, professor of letters in secondary school and whose doctoral thesis covered about the author.

“Duras feminist perhaps?

We still have to define what feminism we are talking about, and ask ourselves if today some of its texts could appear, such as

The Man Sitting in the Hallway

or even

The Lover,

”she

adds.

The first to which reference is made, a very short novel published in 1980, tells of a violent sexual relationship.

The second, Prix Goncourt 1984, relates the love affair between a fifteen-year-old teenager and a twenty-seven-year-old man.

Even in the scandal of the article

"Sublime, necessarily sublime Christine V."

, in the midst of the murder of little Gregory in 1985, Duras does not deviate from his convictions.

“People thought she was speaking out on Christine Villemin's guilt.

That's not what she writes at all.

His point is that if Christine Villemin is guilty, she is right to kill this child, in the name of all the women crushed by the patriarchy ”

, comments Jean Cleder, lecturer at the University of Rennes 2. And to add:

“There were a lot of men who laughed at his writing in the 1950s. Where are they today?

It is this which imposed itself: it has four volumes in the Pleiade, and all of them together, zero ”

.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-03-03

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