Interiors

In Michelle Porte's 1976 documentary, Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras, filmed in the novelist's dreamlike house in Neauphle-le-Château, with its draped furniture and trailing flowers, Duras speaks of women's relation to the houses they dwell in: ‘Il n'y a que les femmes qui habitent les lieux, pas les hommes’ (‘Only women inhabit places, not men’). Invoking the names of the protagonists of a number of her novels and films, she says that her house has been inhabited by Lol V. Stein, Anne-Marie Stretter, Isabelle Granger, Nathalie Granger. Duras has literally used her house, and its ranging grounds, as the setting for a number of her films; more imaginatively she suggests here that her characters inhabit this location, this material setting, that she has created.

Duras is considered elsewhere in this volume in discussions of the modern novel and of autobiography; she returns here in a chapter which reflects the contribution women have made to French literature and culture through the twentieth century and in the first part of the twenty-first, in particular in those works where they have reflected some difference or specificity of female experience. This grouping of the work of women is not intended to uphold any argument for an essential difference between men and women, or indeed between male and female writers. Rather, it is intended to explore ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary works by women have brought into view areas of experience, often affective and corporeal, which have been neglected in previous periods.