Desire within Duras’ The Lover and Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School

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The Lover by Marguerite Duras and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker are both transgressive novels and post modernist fiction. Both novels tell a story of a young girl in which is experimenting with her sexuality at a young age. In The Lover the narrator is in love with a man who is giving her money. Blood and Guts in High School is a fictional novel about the main character’s love for her father amongst other men. The goal of this essay is to explore the desires in which drive both of the young women’s sexual behavior that Duras and Acker express through their narrators. Desire can be defined as a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen. A desire can be expressed as a wish, can be longed for or something you feel. A sexual desire is a motivational state and an interest in sexual objects or activities. This includes a wish, need or drive to seek out sexual objects to engage in sexual activities. Sexual desire has been referred to by many different names such as sexual drive, motivation, interest or lust. Sexual desire may be the single most common sexual event in the lives of men and women. It is triggered by external and internal cues. Fantasies are also a part of sexual behavior, this includes what one may consider to be attractive. In Duras’ The Lover her narrator is a young but has intense sexual desire. Early on the main character also has a very strong sense of self confidence and self awareness. It is surprising for such a young girl, but as we learn she is much more curious than the average fifteen year old. She wants to be with an older man even if it is against what her family and others believe. Duras shows how females are portrayed as objects or sex symbols in t... ... middle of paper ... ...nd are very transgressive. In Duras’ The Lover we see the narrator’s desires drive her to be in a relationship with a man who is paying her. In Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Janey’s desires make her fall in love with multiple men and subject herself to loneliness. Acker and Duras explore this through jouissance and plagiarism. Works Cited "Join Academia.edu & Share Your Research with the World." The Postcolonial in The Lover: Hybridity, and Power Exchange through Sexuality. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2014. Muth, Kathy. "Well After the End." Project MUSE. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014 "Purloined Letters: The Scarlet Letter in Kathy Acker's Bloo." Critique 35.3 (1994): 173. ProQuest. Web. 16 Apr. 2014 Ruddy, Karen. "The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras's "The Lover"" JSTOR. Palgrave Macmillan Journals, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2014.

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