These factors succeed in making her seek love from the lover: inexperienced yet flirtatious, she rides with him to Saigon, knows him deeper as a rich, educated bachelor, and eventually, makes love with him. Likewise, she is at the brink of womanhood, and it is understandable that she should be interested with her burgeoning sexuality. When she encounters the China man aboard a ferry cruising in the historic Mekong River, she becomes curious whether she can exercise some power over her life even as she is virtually powerless and her life, out of control because of her social position. The narrator has developed initial contact with her lover the China man by virtue of the quintessential desire because she feels unloved, and her escapist stance against a colonial Indochina and an impoverished, oppressive family automatically shoves her into finding love in the nearest available source. Also, these factors offer a tremendous challenge that unloved she may be, the narrator is somewhat capable of reaching out to her fellow individuals. These factors, nevertheless, make ambivalent impacts to the contact she tries to establish with other characters. It helps that her adolescence-her blossoming sexuality-and her feeling of being relatively unloved render her vulnerable to the clutches of desiring for whatever form of love she may have, not to mention the socio-historical milieu in which the protagonist is situated. Set in Indochina at the turn of the 20th century, The Lover proves that desire is the one unifying element the keeps humans alive, as may be gleaned in the palpable albeit varying proportions of human contacts made by the narrator with other individuals.ДЄ supportive critique of The Lover which may be found in Critical Guide to French Texts attests to the fact that yes, the young female protagonist does attain certain degrees of contact with her lover the Chinaman, her schoolmate Helene, her mother, and her elder and younger brothers.

One such controversial writer is Marguerite Duras in her scathing tale The Lover, whose protagonist, an impoverished French lass barely in her sixteen, learns the truth about love with an older Chinese man with whom she feels mutual sexual desire at the onset. The modern current and its confrontational interrogation of traditional modes of world culture gave way to frankness about human sexuality, and writers the world over seized the opportunity to explore sensually related themes in order to discover redeeming qualities about such a topic rendered taboo by conservatives for reasons no less than restrictive, often hypocritical social mores.

The lover duras helene lagonelle