Sexuality as Liberator and Labor:

Sexuality as liberator and labor: Marguerite Duras' novella the Lover vs. Dark Spring by Unica Zurn

The potency of sexuality as a metaphor in literature derives from its simultaneous ability to represent both new life and death. It can lead to the birth of a new human being, but it also implies a death of an old identity and self -- and of course, all human beings who are born eventually die. In the French author Marguerite Duras' novella the Lover, sexuality is a life-giving force that enables the heroine to escape the confining world of her friends, family, and culture. It gives her a new identity that remains with her forever after, even when her life is difficult and she grows old. In contrast, Dark Spring by Unica Zurn, sexuality for the adolescent girl is intertwined with her descent into depression, despair, and dissociative mental illness. Zurn's protagonist feels pursued by her budding sexuality throughout the work, and her misery only ends in her self-induced demise: the twelve-year-old narrator commits suicide by jumping through a window.

In both female-authored works, sexuality is a vehicle of self-expression, and helps define the emerging character of the still-unformed young protagonist. But Duras' unnamed narrator uses her relationship with an older man from another culture to solidify her independence and autonomy, while the actions of Dark Spring are done 'to' the central character. The character feels attacked by the world around her, and seems incapable of reacting in ways that are not self-destructive.

Adolescent, transgressive sexuality is represented as a kind of 'healing' and life-defining force in the Lover. The Lover is set in French Indochina. Emotionally estranged from her depressed mother, the narrator asserts her desire by taking a lover at the age of fifteen -- a Chinese man who is her senior, as well as a cultural outsider to her world. This experience, as well as her loss, alienates her from her school friends. The affair marks her permanently, as delightful as it was: "Very early in my life it was too late. At eighteen it was already too late. I aged. This aging was brutal. It spread over my features, one by one. I saw this aging of my face with the same sort of interest I might have taken, for example, in the reading of a book. That new face, I kept it. it's kept the same contours, but it's like it is destroyed. I have a destroyed face" (Duras 2). This destruction is not entirely negative; rather it symbolizes the separation of the narrator from others and her greater wisdom. Unlike those Frenchwomen who believed what they heard about Asians, Duras' narrator ignores conventional beliefs. Rather than worrying about ruining her reputation, she dons her mother's silk dress, wears high heels and make-up, and does everything she can to appear older and mature in the eyes of men. When she first meets her lover, the son of a Chinese millionaire, she is going back to boarding school. But she looks nothing like a child: she is ostentatiously dressed in gold lame shoes and a man's hat.

There is clearly a deep and pressing need motivating the impulses of the narrator to vie for male attention. The narrator's father is has died, leaving her mother to raise the family, alone in a strange land. Rather than bringing them closer together, death divides the family: "My younger brother died in three days, of bronchial pneumonia. His heart gave out. It was then that I left my mother. It was during the Japanese occupation. Everything came to an end that day. I never asked her any more questions about our childhood, about herself. She died, for me, of my younger brother's death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don't mean anything to me any more. I don't know any more about them since that day" (Duras 26). Her mother had openly favored her sons, leaving the narrator in an emotionally barren state. Her mother works as a school administrator, and the girl wants nothing to do with a life of women or of the French colonials living there. This neediness, rather than leading her to an unproductive affair, at least opens her eyes to the possibility of a new life, despite her mother's influence. Both sets of parents are smothering forces upon the two lovers: the Chinese man's father forbids his son to see the white girl, making their affair forbidden. Of course, this only makes their attraction all the more enticing, since both of them stand to lose everything if the affair is revealed.

Duras herself grew up in French Indochina during the 1930s, like her narrator. This immediately raises the question as to the degree that the book is autobiographical. Rather than explicitly call it a memoir, Duras allows for a certain amount of ambiguity as to its truthfulness Even if the 'bare bones' of the story are factual, Duras assumes a fiction writer's right to know what all of the character's in the tale are thinking: "The lover from Cholon is so accustomed to the adolescence of the white girl, he's lost. The pleasure he takes in her every evening has absorbed all his time, all his life. He scarcely speaks to her any more. Perhaps he thinks she won't understand any longer what he'd say about her, about the love he never knew before and of which he can't speak" (Duras 97). Duras skillfully assumes supreme power in the context of the story: she knows what her lover is thinking as well as herself. Although she may not have been able to marry her first love, her affair gives her confidence to write down her story, and to create a world in which she can take revenge upon her rejecting mother, and render the thoughts and feelings not only of her younger self, but her lover whom she images as obsessed with her every thought and move.

For Duras' fictionalized version of herself, the affair is the one sunny place in a dark world of family coldness, worthless land that continually floods, poverty, and brothers on the precipice of death. But sexuality limits rather than expands the worldview of the narrator of the fictionalized memoir Dark Spring. Dark Spring by Unica Zurn likewise blends the conventions of memoir and fiction. She also had a stormy relationship with her mother, like Duras. When observing a "large Rubens painting depicting the Rape of the Sabine Women, the" two naked, rotund women are said to remind her of her mother and fill her with loathing. For Zurn, sexuality is a guilt-ridden subject. Even though the narrator is only twelve-years-old she states that "pain and suffering bring her pleasure," and she feels helpless against the masochistic impulses that afflict her.