Hi Romance Studiers,

Going into reading “The Lover” by Marguerite Duras, I was warned by my girlfriend who had read it during her IB English class in high school. My takeaway a third into the book was “I cannot believe they made highschoolers read and analyze this text” and it did not get better. Even after Professor Beasley’s words of cautions during last week’s Wednesday lecture, I was still not fully prepared to spend three hours reading about a thirteen year old girl’s relationship with a man twelve years older than her, and the societal pressures she felt during and after the relationship. I honestly cannot give a genuine analysis of this story as all my notes on the book were just brief plot summaries of the story followed up by multiple exclamations and question marks.

I do think there is interesting discussion to be had in terms of how the story portrays societal gender expectations on the main character. The latter part of the story explores how she had to navigate her life in school after breaking up with her older boyfriend, and the way she was ridiculed and isolated for partaking in such relationship. What stood out to me during that section was when the mother bluntly said to her daughter, along the lines of “you know you can no longer marry in Cholon right?” I think it really emphasizes how local drama impacts the lives of women in the 1920s, not just as gossip but lingering beliefs about one’s character that persists with no end in sight. It makes me wonder if this has gotten better or worse in our current day, as with society’s interconnectedness due to social media, arguably myths and gossips spread farther than its localised area of origin. It has become so much harder to run away and create a new life for one’s self and if this book were to take place in today’s day and age, would the main character’s future life look the same as it did in the book? The story also acts as a time capsule for race depiction in the 1920s, as the older boyfriend was Chinese. There was much commentary on how the white family on the girl’s side perceived the man, not just as an older guy but also as a rich, Chinese man.

What made me uncomfortable was a multitude of things, but mainly the graphic sex scenes between the girl and the man, as well as her takeaways from the relationship at the end of the book. By the end of my reading, I truly asked myself “do all books deserve to be written?”. While I think novels as a medium allow for creative fictional storytelling and create interesting discussion, I do not know if Duras’ “The Lover” creates any productive discourse that I would enjoy partaking in. Especially with the sex scenes, I do not know what is gained by giving such explicit context for what happens in that bedroom. If anything it just perpetuated with stereotype of the Chinese effeminacy which was popularized to disempower Asian masculinity in the West. Overall I just disliked this story, I did not enjoy it, I wish I did not read it, and I do not know if I really want to know what drew the author to write such a story.

My question for the class is why do you think this story was made? Because I do not know and am looking for some type of answer. Interested to see what type of discourse will be brought up this Wednesday and see you all there 🙂