Psychoanalytic analysis of The Lover of Marguerite Duras: Dolorous Story of the Formation of Subjectivity

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of French Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran;

2 Ph.D. Of French literature,Shahid Beheshti university, Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jor.2023.348101.2345

Abstract

Marguerite Duras' unique novel Lover allows us to enter her autobiographical world. What has a significant frequency throughout the story is the narrator's encounter with her mother and her reaction to motherhood. The narrator's descriptions of her mother inspire the reader with a different image from what is usual, descriptions that all indicate an inner hatred towards the mother. A hatred that neither the narrator nor the reader knows the exact cause. To discover this reason, we use Julia Kristina’s theories. In her book titled "The Power of Terror", she talks about a process called "Abjection". From her point of view, the child is initially intertwined with his mother in a symbolic space called "Chora" where there is no boundary for the child and he is one with the mother. In order to be able to become an independent subject and body, the child must then draw boundaries between himself and the first other, or his mother, and in this process he turns to abjection. In this research, taking these concepts into consideration, we first study the narrator and his relationship with his mother in order to find out whether the occurrence of emotions such as disgust and hatred and mental states such as depression can be an estimate of the same mechanism in the unconscious mind of the teenage narrator and finally we will see how writing is used as a solution to overcome these emotions and negative states by the author of the work.

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Research in Contemporary World Literature

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 20 February 2024

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