SOURCE: “Coming of Age Stories: Defining the Woman and the Writer,” in Marguerite Duras Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 13-62, 105-45.

In the following essay, Schuster discusses female sexuality and subjugation in “The Boa.”

In 1954, Duras published four short stories under the title Des Journées entières dans les arbres (Whole Days in the Trees).¹ Just as The Tranquil Life tells a story of female subjectivity, one of the stories in this volume, “The Boa,” presents a story of female sexuality. Although the story is told in the first person, both temporal and geographic distance between the adult narrator and her younger self is carefully established at the beginning: “This happened in a large city in a French colony, around 1928” (WD, 71; J, 99). The use of an impersonal, reflexive construction (“cela se passait”) reinforces the distancing of the narrator and is the first mark of split female subjectivity in...