by Yocheved Schlachter

Created on: December 12, 2008

The past for all of us carries memories both happy and sad. Certain memories can invoke feelings of joy and contentment, while others may invoke feelings of sadness and depression. Still others contain that peculiar quality of duality that renders them neither entirely happy, nor entirely sad; they are bittersweet. In The Lover, Marguerite Duras reflects upon her childhood, and particularly her mother, with just such bittersweet emotions. Her memories of her mother are comprised of times both happy and sad, times when she feels love for her and times when she feels hatred, but most of all, the times when she feels both. I, too, have memories that I can not quite pinpoint as either happy or sad. The qualities of each emotion are contained within, no one sentiment prevailing. Memory is unique in this aspect, that its very nature of subjectivity often causes it to remain so ambiguous.

Duras refers to her mother very often throughout the novel as my mother, my love.' The natural way of the world is for a daughter to love her mother, as much as the mother may not deserve that love. Describing the clothes she wore back then, the gold lame shoes and the men's fedora, Duras reflects upon the conditions that led her to dress the way she did. She describes the way her mother would sometimes become overly attentive, buying for Duras any random trinket that caught the girl's fancy, namely the shoes and the men's hat. Other times, her mother would fall into a state of extreme depression and would barely be able to pull herself out to perform the basic functions necessary to care for her children. Because her mother acted in conflicting ways, Duras' memories of her feelings towards her mother were conflicting emotions of love and hate. She says as much in one passage: "In the books I've written about my childhood I can't remember suddenly what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don't know if I wrote about how we hated her too"
I have similar bittersweet memories. When I was a young girl of about five or six, we would often have a guest for the Sabbath meal. He was a young man who worked with my father and had recently become interested in religion. Many a weekend he would join my family for the festive lunch, always singing the same song we all came to associate with him. He always came prepared with some sort of small toy for me and as a middle child, I relished the attention. I idolized him, drawing him pictures and sending him

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>