It is probably true to say that most critics of Duras have interpreted the importance of love and desire in her work from a largely heterosexual perspective. A different reading of her texts, however, informed by contemporary lesbian theory, shows that the overtly heterosexual Durassian scenario is infused with an underlying lesbian subtext, creating a sense of sexual and textual ambivalence in a number of her key works. A constant feature of this subtext is the presence of female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as Moderato cantabile, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, L'amant and, more recently, L'amant de la Chine du Nord. Whereas in some of these texts lesbian desire figures in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work as a whole appears to be more diffuse and fluid. For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I will use the term ‘eroticism’, following Adrienne Rich's definition, as ‘a diffuse and omnipresent energy unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself ’. Similarly, Rich has challenged the narrow interpretation of lesbian desire as being confined to sexual activity between women. Instead, she understands lesbianism as a ‘primary intensity between and among women’. This broader definition is certainly appropriate to an analysis of Durassian representations of female same-sex relationships which question socially produced boundaries between friendship, love and desire. The aim of this chapter is to provide a detailed examination of the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras, Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. My reading focuses both on the representations of love between women in these texts and on the presence of certain textual patterns as indicative of lesbian textuality in Duras.

Recent work in lesbian theory points to the existence of two apparently distinct approaches to the question of lesbian textuality. The first, which presupposes fixed categories of sex and sexuality, is concerned mainly with a thematics of desire between female figures in literary texts.