Marguerite Duras' Novel "the Lover"

Paper Summary:

Examines psychoanalytic concepts applied to novel's narrator. Plot of novel & relationships in the story. Mother-daughter relationship. Bipolar mother. Daughter's defense mechanisms; self-awareness of her sexual power. Narrative perspective. Psychological diagnosis. Internal psychology and external sociology. Freudian elements. Theories of Anna Freud, romm-Reichmann. Gestalt therapy.

From the Paper:

"This research examines psychoanalytic concepts that are relevant to Marguerite Duras's novel The Lover. The research will explore the character of the narrator from the standpoint of a psychological diagnosis, first setting forth the narrative context in which the character's psychological attributes emerge and then discussing the narrative function of the character as well as her behavior in relationships that are explored in the novel.


Set in colonial Indochina in the 1920s and 1930s, The Lover is structured as a memoir of a French girl's adolescence marked chiefly by family pathology and a sexual initiation that has various attributes of socially forbidden love. The focus of the relationships in the story is on the declining mental condition of the narrator's mother and the 15-year-old narrator's..."

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