 EXCERPT FROM:
“The Lover”
by Marguerite Duras
© Marguerite Duras
all rights reserved
this copyrighted excerpt is used solely for informational/education purpose only
and does not assume or constitute any rights whatsoever
no part of this excerpt in whole or in part can be printed, or accessed
This excerpt from the book is copyrighted material, and holds all rights thereto
..."It's not the shoes, though, that makes the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it's the fact that she's wearing a man's flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora, with a broad black ribbon. The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat. How I came about it I've forgotten. I can't think who could have given it to me. It must have been my mother who bought if for me because I asked her. The one thing certain is that it was another markdown, another final reduction. But why was it bought? No woman, no girl, wore a man's fedora in that colony then. No native girl, either. What must have happened is: I tried it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeepers glass, and see that there, beneath the man's hats, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. Has ceased to become a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly, it's deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they're right for me. I wear them all the time too, go everywhere in the shoes, this hat, out of doors, in all weathers, on every occasion. and to town.”
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