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The Other Woman: Femininity and Feminism in the Work of Marguerite Duras is a welcome critical addition to Duras scholarship. Trista Selous evaluates the view held by Duras's critics that her writing is “feminine” and or feminist. Selous uses in part a psychoanalytical approach, both Freudian and Lacanian, to analyze the construction of gender and the representation of woman in Duras.
Initially, Selous examines the ideas of the “feminine” within psychoanalysis and in Freud's theories of female identity development. Selous's description of Lacan's theories on the subject is essential to an understanding of gender differences. She analyzes such concepts as the imaginary and the symbolic, the phallus, the other, and desire. She reviews in detail women Lacanians' perspective on feminine identity. The female analysts, including Michele Montrelay, Luce Irigaray, and Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni argue that women's relationship to language and meaning is more ambiguous than that of men and that women's sexuality is dual (the woman as phallus/subject and phallus/mother/object). However, Selous finds the theories unsatisfactory to explain the “dark continent” of femininity.
She enriches the established gynocritical approach to Duras's work by developing how meaning is produced through intertextuality and reader-centered criticism. In a chapter entitled “The Blanks,” Selous' explores the textual creation of silence and how it relates to aspects of the “feminine.” The power of Duras's writing results from her use of understatement. Selous focuses on recurrent structures in the earlier and later novels, including Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Moderato cantabile, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Détruire dit-elle. The “blanks” are produced by such techniques