"Worn Out With Desire... To Write"
From “Worn Out With Desire... To Write”
Overall I thought this documentary was very interesting and gave a lot of insight into who Marguerite Duras was and why she wrote about the things that she did.
The documentary started out by explaining what life was like for Marguerite growing up in Indochina. The film starts by explaining Duras’ family financial status. Her mother, who was a teacher, was widowed when Marguerite was about 4 or 5. Since her mother was the only person in the family that could work, the family did not have a lot of money and her mother sometimes could not feed or dress her kids. The film also explains how her mother saved her money so that she could buy land but was given land by the sea, which made it hard to grow produce. Marguerite says that her mother eventually got “sick” because of the injustice that she faced and was “murdered socially.” From that moment on Marguerite knew that she wanted to have a different life than her mother did.
In the film Marguerite says that she did not want a man, but she felt that she needed one because that's what women in society did. Marguerite started to see a chinese man and her mother hated her because she did not want to get married at first. She was seen as a disgrace to the family because she was having an affair with a minority.
The documentary did a good job of explaining that the themes of her writing come from her life and her past experiences. Her life shaped who she was and what she wrote about, including the desire and death of her younger brother. She experienced so much during her life and she wrote about these themes because they were what she knew.
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Duras mother did not want her to get married, specifically to a Chinese man. I agree, this was such an issue to her mother because he was a minority. Her mother hated her so much after she slept with the Chinese man that she went around the village telling everyone her daughter was a whore. As soon as Duras came back home her mother said that she could smell the minority on her. Her mother was disgusted. Eventually, Duras mother came around when she realized her daughter marrying him would bring in some more money than they would have other wise, especially after the struggle her mother went through with the land and government. That must have been so difficult for Duras to go through, it seemed very back and forth in arguments with her mother.
ReplyDeleteI like the point that you made about feeling that she needed a man because that was what was expected in society. This reminds me of themes in the book "Pride and Prejudice," where people were expected to marry and uphold certain societal expectations, and class was a very defining structure in peoples lives. This seems similar to what Duras experienced, as poverty was a defining factor in her life, and she was expected to follow societal expectations.
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