The Lover by Marguerite Duras and Simple Passion by Annie Erneaux are feminist novels, written by French women who live in a patriarchal world, but write in the way that the choose subverting patriarchy. However, one could say that patriarchy is represented throughout both novels: both of the protagonists are women who have love affairs that are illicit and both play with the conventions of the novel. What is more interesting is how the two authors subvert patriarchy: both protagonists are speaking autobiographically self-referentially as writers rather than tempering their story through an uninvolved narrator—at least most of the time: Duras’ narrator switches back and forth between first and third person narration. Both authors/narrators are not concerned about the judgment of others even if they do acknowledge it, and both have no regrets about subverting the patriarchal norms. In those places where the subversion occurs, the patriarchal nature of society is made quite obvious and both protagonists are able to claim their position as members of society equal in attitude to their male counterparts.
Duras and Erneaux write in a format that fits their stories. Erneaux’s format is the most conventional. She leaves large white spaces to give readers the sense of time passing between times she is with her lover and the times she obsesses over him. Other than the white spaces, her narrative format is fairly straightforward. Duras, however, subverts a patriarchal norm of orderly time. Her narrative skips around in time without signaling to readers when the events take place. Readers must keep track of the different parts of her life and the events that occur to be able to track her narrative. However, she manages to tell her story without giving away the ending until it is the end. John Hillis Miller, writing in Daedalus, says narration “Flashbacks and retracings of particular events from different perspectives produce a jagged, cubist rendering that suggests that any human event consists of the linguistic perspectives on it. These perspectives are in turn discontinuous, fragmented, as the events move forward in time” (Miller 93). Duras’ story of a young girl who feels neglected by her mother, suffering from poverty and rejection at her school because an older man has seduced her with money, would exist in the girl’s mind as fragments. When the memories of the suffering caused by the events recounted in the novel are recalled, it would be in pieces just as Duras tells the story, which may or may not be autobiographical.
Both Duras and Erneaux suggest that their novels are autobiographical, and that is where another patriarchal norm is subverted. If these are true stories, where is the shame these women should be suffering over their illicit affairs? Patriarchal culture says that women should not feel like men about love affairs especially illicit ones. Men can “love and leave them” so to speak with no strings, no messiness, just over. The older lover that Duras’ protagonist has surely went on with his life, and though he may have missed Duras’ protagonist, he most likely did not feel shame over being a pedophile. The lover that the Erneaux’s protagonist takes was married. He did not seem to have any hesitation over having an affair, and other than being afraid of getting caught, he never felt shame over it either, or at least not that the narrator conveys. But, of course, the novel is not about him (another subversion of patriarchy). The narrator—the protagonist—also does not feel shame. She may regret having entered into the affair as she talks about reliving a trip to Venice where she had vacationed just before meeting the man with whom she becomes obsessed. “Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history. I wanted to turn the present back into the past, opening on to happiness” (Erneaux 44). Yet she does not say that she would chose differently and not enter into the affair. She just wants to relive it now that is over. No regrets, just bittersweet memories.
The prerequisite shame that women in a patriarchal society should feel over not protecting their reputations and their sexual wellbeing is absent from both The Lover and Simple Passion. This is because both Duras and Erneaux give their protagonists (who may be themselves) the freedom to be human without the baggage of feeling guilt or shame over something that occurred in their past. Thomas J. Scheff of Sociological Theory defines shame as “A large family of emotions that includes many cognates and variants, most notably embarrassment, humiliation, and related feelings such as shyness that involve reactions to rejection or feelings of failure feelings of failure” (Scheff 96). Neither protagonist feels like a failure. The point of the autobiographical n
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