In contrast, while the narrator’s lover is wealthy, his race establishes him as an outsider. Although the narrator could be construed as powerful compared to the native Vietnamese because she occupies the position of a coloniser, her financial status distances her from the normative image of white elites. The historian Nicola Cooper states that for male colonisers, the term con-gai came to represent “an Indochinese version of the traditional and mythologized indigenous woman: the compliant sexual conquest of the dominant white male coloniser.” The Lover, however, subverts the con-gái model since the participants are not in clear positions of power. During this encounter, the Chinese man acknowledges this transgression, stating “it’s very surprising, a white girl on a native bus.” By acknowledging the narrator’s incongruity in an almost exclusively Asian crowd, the man reinforces the idea that the narrator’s race sets her apart.Īccording to Jack A Yeager, the norm for colonial literature in Vietnam during the time the novel was published was the con-gai novel, a novel laden with the male coloniser’s exploitation of indigenous women. While recalling their first encounter, the girl writes: “There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling.” The transgressive nature of their relationship is established. The relationship between the couple, to an extent, is founded on this difference. For the pair, race supersedes any other trait as a means of identification, indicative of the pervasiveness of these constructs. Instead, the narrator describes her lover using epithets like ‘the Chinese from Cholon’ and refers to herself as ‘the white girl.’ These terms underscore the way the characters are defined according to colonial categories, as well as the way they view each other. The characters never refer to each other by their names. A heightened awareness of racial identity permeates the novel’s narrative, with numerous references to the Chinese man’s race and his consequent foreignness to the narrator. By depicting an interracial relationship, the novel transgresses these norms and undermines the idea of the immutability of racial constructs. In The Lover, race works as a social determinant, with fixed racial identities determining one’s position in the social hierarchy.
Duras’ portrayal of an interracial relationship could be construed as a critique of the racial hierarchy imposed by colonial administration, destabilising these constructs. The novel is set right after an uprising by the native Vietnamese against the colonial administration, a critical juncture in the Vietnamese nationalist movement.
The book concerns an illicit relationship between a young French girl and a Chinese businessman set in Vietnam under French rule in the 1920s. Marguerite Duras’ The Lover is a semi-autobiographical account of her life, characterised by a disjointed, confessional narrative style.
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