The girl, who was old by the time she was eighteen, has completed her journey by then; she has taken the phallic leadership of her elder brother from him and is proprietor of it, and of her own pleasure. This is the denouement, but to pinpoint the climax -- the final moment when the transfer of power can be said to have happened -- is difficult; perhaps at the time when, looking at her mother sitting in a chair, the girl is startled by what seems to be a body-snatcher. The mother she knew is suddenly gone, replaced. "My terror & #8230; [came from the fact] that that identity irreplaceable by any other had disappeared and I was powerless to make it come back," (Duras, p.85). The authority of the mother has been completely deflated, and what's left is a husk. Certainly by this point in the novel the girl is fully the winner of her family's livelihood, she occupies the man's place even if, with her elder...

While sharing the minimalist aridity of Camus, of Hemmingway, she writes the story of a woman's empowerment; of a girl who flies in the face of society's role for females; of a girl who wears an engagement ring when she is not engaged. Her greatest success, perhaps, lies not in the appropriation of minimalism but rather in the distinctly feminine high notes. She has written a story that Camus could not write, nor Hemmingway. No, the "man" of this story -- its hero -- retains the distinctly feminine ability to weep in secret, having loved a man without knowing it. Duras's hero -- heroine certainly not -- has complexities and layers of emotional range which, arguably, many of Hemmingway's characters did not. And it is this ability to re-create, as opposed to merely mimic, that makes the work's and the main character's feminist usurpation most successful.
Bibliography

1. Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. New York: Random House, 1985. Print