Paris (AFP)
Marguerite Duras did not feel "not feminist at all", and yet, 25 years after her death, the French writer finally passes as such, by dint of having slaughtered in her work the machismo of her century.
"A feminist is to be avoided. It is not the right way if we want to change things (...) I am not a feminist at all", she proclaimed during a broadcast on the radio. France Inter public in 1987.
Does she feel out of step in the face of a more radical feminism that appeared in the early 1970s, with shock slogans, in which she does not recognize herself?
Does she refuse this label, like all the others that we wanted to stick to her?
The term, in any case, displeases her, even if she signed in 1971 the "manifesto of the 343 sluts" for the right to abortion.
"It seems to me that no, the feminist commitment was not decisive for her", estimates Aurore Turbiau, doctoral student in literature who does her research on feminist writers.
On the other hand, "he shed a new light on part of his work".
In her fictions, the novelist, who died on March 3, 1996 at the age of 81, subtly defended the feminine cause at times when she was despised or absent from the debate, including literary.
- "Spirit of independence" -
Male domination, Marguerite Duras had tested it very young, seeing her mother, a widow, marginalized in French Indochina by colonial officials (men) who had knowingly sold her infertile land, and her older brother exhibiting a brutal misogyny, like she tells it in "A dam against the Pacific" in 1950.
After this Indochinese youth which marked her strongly, "her spirit of independence is evident since she studied political science, which at the time was rare for a woman", underlines Olivier Ammour-Mayeur, of the university ICU in Tokyo.
Then it manifests itself in literature.
"Most of Duras's texts can pass for feminists, for the simple reason that the central figures are women, and not stooges, but always characters who do not fit into the codes of what should be a woman according to the morals of the time ", adds this professor of French literature.
Thus Lola Valérie Stein, in "Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein" (1964), an elusive heroine, is told by a man, in a logic opposite to that of many novels of the twentieth century, where it is the hero who cultivates the mystery in the face of often stereotypical female characters.
- Four to zero -
"The female characters of Duras have a desire for subversion, a quest for the absolute that can go through marginality, violence, prostitution", notes Chloé Chouen-Ollier, professor of letters in secondary school whose doctoral thesis focused on Duras.
"Duras feminist perhaps? Still it is necessary to define what feminism we are talking about, and to wonder if today some of its texts could appear, like + The man sitting in the corridor + or even + The Lover +", adds she does.
The first, a very short novel published in 1980, tells about a violent sexual relationship.
The second, Prix Goncourt 1984, the love affair between a 15-year-old teenager and a 27-year-old man.
Even in the scandal sparked in 1985 in France by his article entitled "Sublime, inevitably sublime Christine V."
and evoking the mother of a child, little Gregory, whose murder has not been elucidated, she does not deviate from her convictions.
"People thought she was speaking out on Christine Villemin's guilt. That's not what she writes at all. Her point is that if Christine Villemin is guilty, she's right to kill this child, in the name of of all the women crushed by the patriarchy ", comments Jean Cleder, lecturer at the University of Rennes 2.
"There were many men to make fun of her writing in the 1950s. Where are they today? She is the one who imposed herself: she has four volumes in the Pleiade, and all of them together, zero ", he concludes.
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