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Marguerite Duras, Colette, and Janet Flanner an Honors Thesis

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Marguerite Duras, Colette, and Janet Flanner an Honors Thesis Women Writing Under Occupation: Marguerite Duras, Colette, and Janet Flanner An Honors Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Florida By Alexandria Rasmussen April 15th 2019 Rasmussen 2 “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.” —Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” Women Writing Under Occupation: Marguerite Duras, Colette, and Janet Flanner War narratives have generally been written from a masculine, individualistic perspective surrounding being a soldier in battle, while women’s narratives in wartime have been granted less attention. The lack of attention given to women’s stories effectively excludes them from history, and specifically, histories of war. Women writing their experience is a way to encapsulate it within history. An active part of the feminist effort has been rediscovering women’s writing and asserting its importance within literary history, writing about women’s work, and creating a feminist history, separate from the male-dominated canon. This paper is an exploration of the ways in which women experienced the German occupation of Paris and translated their experience into writing. Specifically I will engage with Marguerite Duras and Colette, two influential French writers and journalists, as well as Janet Flanner, an American journalist who was stationed in France for most of her life but fled to the United States during World War II for her safety. Though Flanner was stationed in the US, she was still the War Correspondent for The New Yorker and used a host of sources to acquire information about the situation in France and disseminate it to the American audience. All three of these women had partners arrested and interned by the Nazis, informing their experience of the war. Their writing is primarily concerned with the trauma and memory of war and its manifestations. They focus on the experience of civilians, primarily women, as opposed to those within military, and are Rasmussen 3 interested in the shared experience and suffering of those residing in France during the Occupation. Marguerite Duras Marguerite Duras (born in 1914 in Vietnam—died in 1996 in Paris) is a revered French writer. She resided in Paris during World War II and the Occupation. Duras and her husband Robert Antelme were members of the French Resistance, becoming a part of the Mouvement national des prisonniers de guerre et déportés (MNPGD) headed by François Mitterrand. Antelme was arrested by the Gestapo on June 1st, 1944 and initially interned at Fresnes and Compiègne, then deported to Buchenwald Internment Camp as a political prisoner. As the Allies were advancing, he was taken from the work camp Gandersheim to Dachau, where he was rescued by Dionys Mascolo, George Beauchamp, and Mitterand, which Duras recounts in The War: A Memoir (Crowley 5). During the last leg of the Occupation and the Liberation, Duras did not receive any updates on her husband’s status or location, leaving her uncertain if he was dead or alive. The War: A Memoir is derived from a journal that she claims she wrote during the aftermath of WWII, published forty years later. Comprised of six autobiographical narratives translated from the French La Douleur, the collection recounts her experience during the Occupation and fallout of World War II and her involvement in the Resistance movement. The first narrative, which will be the focus in this paper, describes the abject despair she feels as she waits for her husband to return from a concentration camp. Duras also wrote the screenplay for Alan Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) about the intersection of a fictional Japanese man and French woman’s account of World War II, demonstrating her preoccupation with the historical trauma of the war. Rasmussen 4 Working from models proposed by Freud (repetition compulsion) and Melanie Klein (mourning), in her work titled, “Forgetting and Marguerite Duras” Carol Hofmann developed the notion of “Durasian forgetting”. Hofmann writes that two distinct kinds of forgetting exist in Duras’ texts: forgetting-as-repression, which, “In this state, as defined by Freud, forgetting seemingly takes place in one’s conscious waking life. A memory trace, however, lingers in the unconscious. Being refused admission to consciousness, it maintains itself indefinitely in an unchanged state” (Hofmann 2). The purpose of psychotherapy is to confront those memories within the unconscious, as only through their emergence can they be forgotten. The second form of forgetting in Duras’s oeuvre is forgetting-through-remembering, “a forgetting made possible through the remembering of an event that had been repressed because of its traumatic or painful nature” (Hofmann 2). The notion of Durasian forgetting set forth is then derived from this model of forgetting-through-remembering, which in Klein or Freud’s terms would ultimately lead to some resolution, but in Duras is “open-ended, ever changing, a fusion and acquiescence to pain and to memory” (Hofmann 86). This concept of Durasian forgetting is useful considering that most of Duras’ characters exist within a state of mourning, pervading the atmosphere of the text. Hofmann analyzes Hiroshima mon amour within this context of mourning theory, as “mourning, repetition, memory, and forgetting are obvious and important components of the story” (Hofmann 86). Hiroshima, the site of atomic bombing by the US, is used as the backdrop and counter-narrative to the woman’s traumatic personal history. Duras revealed in an interview that she had originally intended to begin the film with the image of the “fameux ‘champignon’ de Bikini” to give the spectator “le sentiment à la fois de revoir et de voir ce ‘champignon pour la première fois” (Hofmann 87). Ultimately the film does not begin this way, but the imagery presented of Rasmussen 5 Hiroshima has this intended effect nevertheless, as the viewer is confronted with archival footage of the aftermath; it feels like reseeing and seeing for the first time. This contradictory notion of reseeing and seeing for the first time set forth by Duras relates back to Hofmann’s categories of “forgetting-as-repression” and “forgetting through remembering” and “to prepare the reader/spectator for the mourning process so much a part of this Duras work” (Hofmann 87). Hiroshima mon amour at once makes the viewer cognizant of their memory(-ies) and their own forgetting. The process of forgetting is explored within the script, as Elle (the female character) says, “De même que dans l’amour cette illusion existe, cette illusion de pouvoir ne jamais oublier, de même j’ai eu l’illusion devant Hiroshima que jamais je n’oublierai. De même que dans l’amour” [Just as in love this illusion exists, this illusion of being able never to forget, so I was under the illusion that I would never forget Hiroshima (Hma 19)] (Hofmann 87). Just as one does not forget the atrocities inflicted on those in Hiroshima in order to honor them in memory, some level of forgetting is necessary to adapt and reconvene back into life, successfully complete the mourning process, rather than remaining in a state of melancholia. This premise is then applied to the woman’s personal history, as she speaks of “the désir d’une inconsolable mémoire” [an inconsolable memory (Hma 23)] (Hofmann 88). During the war in her hometown Nevers, the young French woman had been romantically involved with a German soldier whose death she witnessed on the day of liberation. She has idealized the memory of her first love and made a great effort to hang onto the memory of her trauma. She has lived in a state of repression for her adult life, now being in her thirties, and has previously refused to speak of her experience with anyone, including her husband. Her encounter with the Japanese man in Hiroshima during a film shoot provides the springboard for recounting her trauma, bringing the memory to consciousness so she can proceed with the mourning process. Rasmussen 6 “The point in the mourning process where we find her in the text/film is the most painful one, according to Klein, that of genuine grieving. Moving from the state of repression through repetition, she painfully accepts the inevitability of change and forgetting, leaving behind the idealization and denial of the first stages of mourning in Klein’s model” (Hofmann 88). Repetition is an essential premise to the film, the mourning process, and the woman’s life. Her encounter with the Japanese man resembles and echoes in many ways the original love with the German soldier, being another foreign man and former enemy, another impossible love. “‘Hiroshima’ allows the ‘woman of Hiroshima’ to repeat a situation similar to the traumatic one of her youth. Having happened at the end of the war, having been the end of the war, Hiroshima provides a time frame and context easily associated with wartime France where her story took place” (Hofmann 89). The trauma inlaid in the city of Hiroshima, as well as the man’s personal trauma associated with the atomic bombing, remind the woman of her own war traumas, forcing her to confront these repressed memories. Duras’ storyline of the woman’s head being shorn also illustrates the ways in which trauma can be gendered. Following the death of the German soldier she was involved with, her head was shaved in the town square and she was locked in the cellar of her home.
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