Sexuality As Liberator and Labor: Research Proposal

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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.

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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.

But Duras seems in control of her body and sexualized image, as she chooses to wear the fateful dress, hat, and shoes that will attract her lover, while Zurn feels beset by the desires and visions that are the signs of mental illness, as well as a normal coming-of-age to adult sexuality. Always, Duras strikes the reader as a fundamentally 'normal' girl in an abnormal world. Duras sees herself, however hesitatingly, as desirable when she was young, and regrets the loss of youthful beauty when she grows old. Zurn sees herself as strangely monstrous, even as a child: "She is sorry she must be a girl. She wants to be a man, in his prime, with a black beard and flaming black eyes. But she is only a little girl whose body is bathed in sweat from fear of discovering the terrible gorilla in her room, under her bed. She is tortured by fears of the invisible."

There is nothing empowering about female sexuality for Zurn, only escaping it by becoming a male provides a release. Since this is not possible, death is the only 'logical' solution for her torment. Denied the love of a distant father, fearful of becoming her mother, instead of taking proactive action to assert a new vision of selfhood, Zurn's fictional narrator can only find an answer in suicide.

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