Trespassing and Voyeurism in Woolf and Duras

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Trespassing and Voyeurism in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras Author(s): Deborah Gaensbauer Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1987), pp. 192-201Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246341Accessed: 20-04-2015 15:23 UTC

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Trespassing and Voyeurism in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras

DEBORAH GAENSBAUER

In spite of the many obvious differences in style, as well as of historical and social circumstances, the works of Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras spring from a common source and invite comparison. For both Duras and Woolf, the impetus to write derives from the apprehension of and compulsion to express the emptiness at what should be the core of human existence, particularly the feminine experience of it. To render this affective emptiness in a peculiarly feminine way, both Woolf and Duras chose to experiment extensively with aspects of voyeurism as theme and narrative perspective. Because tradition and clinical definitions of

voyeurism present it as a "perversion . . . found only in males . . . ," the reversal of roles in the works of Woolf and Duras, where the voyeur is most frequently feminine, a "voyeuse," communicates with an intense poignancy the parallel of the feminine experience of deprivation and incompleteness to a voyeur's inadequacy.1 As pathological behaviors go, voyeurism is not among the most threatening. Indeed, psychiatric literature that once labeled that particular sexual behavior a deviation or perversion is increasingly referring to it as a variation.2 And yet, it has been reported that "the shame is so great that some voyeurs prefer to be charged as burglars."3 Perhaps what is especially terrible in the act of voyeurism is not necessarily what is being seen or the idea of being seen so much as the need it represents, the incompleteness of the voyeur having to fabricate or "steal" an existence. In just this way the effect of certain of Woolfs and Duras' works is similar and terrifying.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1987. Published by The Pennsyl- vania State University Press, University Park and London



WOOLF AND DURAS 193

A comparison of their experiments with aspects of voyeurism shows Duras to be a naturally aggressive heiress of Woolf s more limited exprès- sion of what it is to "see" or not to be able to see as a woman. Duras* textes come very close to fulfilling the hopes raised for women writers by Woolf in A Room of One's Own when she said:

Yet who shall say that even now "the novel" (I give it inverted commas to mark my sense of the word's inadequacy), who shall say that even this most pliable of all forms is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her.4

Duras has indeed "knocked" the novel into a uniquely feminine shape, creating a condensed eroticized style and a typography much closer to

poetry than traditional prose. Duras preferred, for example, to call her Moderato Cantabûe a poem rather than a novel. However, if Duras* writ-

ing seems to issue so naturally from Woolf s prophetic vision for the feminine novel as to seem its fulfillment, this is probably less the result of a stylistic advance than of a revolutionary receptivity to the feminine condition. The direction and importance of the Durasian perspective can be appreciated by comparing her literary treatment of voyeurism to Woolf s.

The reader of Virginia Woolf is inevitably struck by her preoccupation with the act of seeing. In The Waves, for example, after the symbolic "scenic" introduction, the story opens with a chorus of:

"I see "

"I see "

"I hear "

"I see "

"I see "

"I hear "

"Look at "5

Any number of books and articles about Woolf include the word "vision" as

part of the title. Her novels abound with windows and party scenes where

guests peep at other guests. In a discussion of To the Lighthouse, Avrom



194 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Fleishman signals that "of all the elements of the house, windows are most

prominent and evocative. . . . Mrs. Ramsey makes it a principle that windows should be open, as doors should be shut, an arrangement combine ing vision and protection, illumination and security. . . ." 6

Jean Guiguet speaks of "a gaze or consciousness at the center of every paragraph of Jacob* s Room" and notes that "it is characteristic that almost all Virginia Woolf s windows are uncurtained." 7 The fundamental element of voyeurism in Woolf s perspective is evident even in her autobiographical writings. Vir-

ginia Hayman, discussing Woolf s A Sketch of the Past, has noted that "most

autobiographies record what the subject has done. . . . But here . . . Woolf neither records nor accounts for her actions but rather . . . treats herself as a perceiver acted upon by external forces. . . ."8 Woolf s written world is typically arranged in a voyeuristic setting; the narrative voice echoes a trespassing vision and much of the action consists of watching. The voyeurism intrinsic to her perception helps to explain her rejection of "realistic" fiction. A voyeur's material is fragmented, speculative, necessarily distorted and incomplete.

Woolf s use of this voyeuristic vision is relatively straightforward. In her middle novels - Jacob's Room, Mrs. DaBoway, To the Ligjhthouse, and The Waves - where Woolf imposes the style and vision that seem most

uniquely hers, the narrative voice slides from one character to another or to an unnamed generally feminized voice. But, whatever the voice, the narrative act usually stems from the situation of an outsider looking on, speculatively participating in another's existence in an effort to fill in emotional or physical lacunae. It is an outward-directed, trespassing look, typified by Clarissa Dalloway, who "... sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on." 9

In Jacob's Room, the very title establishes a climate of voyeurism, a room (actually rooms) being peered into or occasionally out of. Jacob's Room is not so much about a habitat or really even about Jacob as it is a rendering of the experience of supposing and living vicariously. Jacob's Room echoes again and again Woolf s frustration with character - both real and fictional: "Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart. . . . " 10 But the greatest force of the novel lies in its recognition of the vacuity implied in the narrator's attempt to create for herself, with awe and envy (also affection), a young man's life. "

Jean Guiguet has raised the issue of Jacob's insignificance. 12 Woolf



WOOLF AND DURAS 195

seems to have recognized the problem of this insignificance in the process of writing the story:

But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all - for

though, certainly, he sat talking to Bonamy, half of what he said was too dull to repeat; much unintelligible . . . what remains is

mostly a matter of guesswork. (72)

Why is one impelled to hover, vibrating at the window of another's existence? Because, Woolf implies, women are like old Miss Marchmont, a character encountered by Jacob in the library of the British Museum.

"What was she seeking, through millions of pages, in her old plush dress and her wig of claret-colored hair, with her gems and her chilblains? . . . She could never quite say, though it was not for lack of trying. And she could not ask you back to her room, for it was 'not very clean, I'm afraid.' "

(104)

Jacob's various rooms are neither orderly nor sumptuously furnished, but

they are the site of male pleasures - animated discussions, sex, and tussles with friends. Miss Marchmont can only "catch you in the passage, or take a chair in Hyde Park" (105). In Woolf s experience and writings, to be a

woman is to be dispossessed, always emotionally, usually materially - thus the need to peep in and live vicariously.

In Mrs. DaUoway, the narrative perspective is that of an assembly of viewers peering at each other in hopes of co-opting a fuller existence. Only

Septimus Smith genuinely looks inward, but he is insane, a victim of shell shock who is unable to derive from the outside world even a voyeur's satisfaction. For Clarissa Dalloway, to experience herself directly is to

experience nothing of significance: "She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen, unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now . . . not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway" (14). Indeed, Mrs. Dalloway has become princi- pally a watcher, at best an orchestrator of scenes at her parties.

When Mrs. Dalloway learns, at her party, of Septimus' suicide, her




vivid imagination allows her to view, and thus to experience, this act as her own.

Always her body went through it first, when she was told suddenly of an accident. ... He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of darkness. So she saw it. (280)

Mrs. Dalloway is too lucid, however, to derive more than a very limited satisfaction from the suicide: "It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered; she was never wholly admirable" (282). Mrs. Dalloway pilfers experience as another might spoons from one of her parties. Lady Bradshaw, one of Mrs. Dalloway's guests, presents her hostess with a grotesque mirror image. Totally done under by her pompous, destructively self-assured husband, Lady Bradshaw has been reduced to echoing her husband's success and taking photographs.

Once, long ago, she had caught salmon freely; now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband's eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through. . . . (152)

The watchers in Woolf s novels are by no means all female. In The Waves, for instance, the ruminations of Neville, Louis, and especially Bernard as they spy upon others constitute a major portion of the text. But Neville's is an effeminate sensitivity and Louis watches others princi' pally to know how to act in society. A writer, Bernard is a watcher by nature and vocation. Because he is a male, and a particularly well- educated male, most of Bernard's physical and emotional needs will be met through personal aggression, not peeping: "... by some inscrutable law of my being, sovereignty and the possession of power will not be enough; I shall always push through curtains to privacy and want some whispered words alone" (44). In the implicit comparison of her female characters or narrative voices to Bernard, Woolfs feminist perspective is clearly posited. Bernard, alone in his rooms at Cambridge, is able to call



WOOLF AND DURAS 197

upon an I, a self, a fvill identity: "But you understand, you myself, who always comes at a call . . . ." (77). There is no female character in Woolf s novels with a sufficient sense of self to make such a statement. It is precisely because they so anxiously need to complete that "I" that they are driven to their trespassing vision.

In Marguerite Duras* writing, from her very early La Vie Tranquille, where the withdrawn and solitary Francou observes the other hotel guests, to the failed voyeur in La Maladie de la mort, the voyeuristic act is as

prevalent as in Woolf s. And, as for Woolf, the writing process itself is a visualized kind of second-hand experience of her own psyche: "Écrire est

pour elle une sorte de démultiplication ou encore d'étagement de soi: elle se voit lectrice-auditrice de son 'être écrivant,* . . . "13 The visual quest in Duras' work tends to be a ritualized act of devouring, an attempt at the kind of satisfaction experienced by the adolescent girl in Duras' short story "Le Boa," watching the snake in the Botanical Gardens guttle a chicken: "transubstantiation accomplie dans un calme sacré. Dans ce formidable silence intérieur, le poulet devenait serpent. Avec un bonheur à vous donner le vertige."14

Duras' novels through the sixties exploit voyeuristic elements in a manner similar to Woolf s, although Duras' works are more aggressively voyeuristic and erotic. Characters with an insufficient sense of self or limited affective capacity anxiously covet what they see. Hovering over others' experiences, they trespass visually in an attempt to expand or

complete their inadequate identities. Anne Desbaresdes, for example, in Moderato Cantabile, sees a crime in the street and attempts to redeem an emotional experience for herself from a fabricated voyeuristic explanation of the event. Maria in Dix heures et demie du soir en été, watching her husband with his new lover or imagining that she is watching Rodrigo Paestra, and Max Thor and Alissa in Détruire àt*eUe, making love for Stein in front of an open hotel window, are typical. However, already by 1964, with the creation of Loi in Le Ravissement de Loi V. Stein, Duras was

beginning to push beyond a voyeurism that is a fairly traditional treatment of the peering witness.

In Le Ravissement de Loi by Stein, the narrative framework is still somewhat conventionally voyeuristic. The events are presented by a

clearly designated male narrator, Jacques Hold, so obsessed with Loi that he is determined to tell her story, openly fabricating what cannot be verified. But the "absent" presence of Loi breaks down the narrative




pretext because Loi is too empty to be capable of incarnating a story: "devenue un désert dans lequel une faculté nomade l'avait lancée dans la poursuite interminable de quoi?"15 Jacques Hold's attempted resolution of his dilemma is a kind of rough draft for the content and narrative framework of Duras' subsequent works. Driven to impose a story in Lol's empty shell, he arranges the elements that will make it possible for Loi to witness a passion that migfit be her own. While Loi watches from her hiding place in a rye field, Jacques Hold makes love to a former schoolmate of Lol's, in front of a hotel window. Subsequently he seeks Loi, in order to re- experience the scene with her, prompting her to appropriate the vision as her own experience. In the much sparer and totally feminine context of Savannah Bay, a play written some eighteen years after Le Ravissement de Loi V. Stein, Duras was to use a similar layering of voyeuristic elements to render the tragedy of a disabled voyeur's emptiness:

Je veux vous dire, ... de sa douleur à propos d'une autre femme qu'il aimait et qui nous permettait à lui et à moi de vivre un sentiment d'amour sans en vivre l'histoire. 16

There is an important shift in the focus, as well as in the intensity of the voyeuristic vision, as one turns from Woolf to Duras. Increasingly, with Duras, one enters a world of the absent self. The kind of "self that Bernard was able to conjure up for himself in Woolf s The Waves, for example, is unimaginable in Duras' work. Even Woolf s most inadequate feminine characters are not totally empty. They have concrete memories which stimulate and enrich their voyeuristic vision, whereas a major impetus to the voyeurism in Duras' work is her characters' obsession with somehow seeing experiences that they are otherwise unable to remember. Discussing Agatha and L'Homme assis dans le couloir in an interview, Duras said of her female characters: "Elles ne sont pas en perte: elles sont définitivement perdues, absolument, même à elles-mêmes."17 Selfless, they have become, of course, incapable even of retrieving memories. In Duras' L Amour, Loi has been reduced to "La Femme." "Force arrêtée, déplacée vers l'absence. Arrêtée dans son mouvement de fuite. L'ignorant, s'ignorant."18

Since there is so little capacity for affective retrieval in Duras' recent texts, every sensation is necessarily a fiction imposed from outside. Duras' characters become involved in a second-hand voyeurism - using another



WOOLF AND DURAS 199

to help them "see" what must pass initially for memories and "self."

Consequently the voyeur's visual path becomes increasingly labyrinthine. Duras multiplies the loci of the voyeuristic vision and reverses its expected angle, directing it inward rather than outward. In Agatha, for example, in a bizarre form of narcissistic voyeurism à deux, a brother and sister attempt to "see" for one another, trying to reconstruct, in order to experience, their earlier incestuous relationship. However, "récitants imbéciles de leur passion," they need to imagine others watching them in order to recreate Agatha's story: "d'autres que nous qui connaîtraient cette histoire

pourrait dire. . . . "19

The theatrical voyeurism in Agatha, as in other of Duras' works, is a

wounding process that is rendered as a formalized, ritualized cry of pain. But, in the contortions and distortions of the vision, there is also a

groping toward renewal that distinguishes Duras' perspective from Woolf s. The image of the woman in Duras' L'Homme assis dans le couloir, almost literally turning herself inside out to show something else, "autre

chose," is brutal and disgusting, but also suggests the force for discovery or

rediscovery of self through desire that is woven into each of Duras' texts.

Les yeux toujours fermés, elle lâche la robe, ramène ses bras le long de son corps dans la coulée de ses hanches, modifie Pécartement de ses jambes, les oblique vers lui afin qu'il voie d'elle encore

davantage, qu'il voie d'elle plus encore que son sexe écartelé dans sa plus grande possibilité d'être vu, qu'il voie autre chose, aussi, en même temps, autre chose d'elle, qui ressorte d'elle comme une bouche vomissante, viscérale.20

In Duras' voyeurism there is a "life" that is absent from Woolf s. It may be as agonizingly a perverted sense of life as in the term "life sentence," but it is not death. The only character who is formally sentenced to death in Duras' recent works is the male protagonist of La Maladie de la mort. His

gaze, significantly, is never turned inward nor is he even capable of really seeing the young woman he has purchased. And so he is condemned to the "maladie de la mort" which is fatal because "celui qui en est atteint ne sait pas qu'il est porteur d'elle, de la mort. Et en ceci aussi qu'il serait mort sans vie préalable à laquelle mourir, sans connaissance aucune de mourir à aucune vie."21 This affliction of the "maladie de la mort" created by Duras sheds light on the limits of the trespassing vision as it exists in




Woolfs novels for it would be a very appropriate diagnosis for Woolf s female protagonists as well.

The "maladie de la mort" is fatal because its source is an ignorance of change that cannot be externally acquired, purchased or conquered - a fundamentally male perspective. The feminist perspective communicated by Woolfs trespassing vision is essentially that of a "have not" in a material sense. Women are underprivileged, stifled, unfulfilled, and there* fore unfulfilling. Woolfs approach reminds one of an admonition she cited in her essay, "The Leaning Tower": "But let us bear in mind a piece of advice that an eminent Victorian who was also an eminent pedestrian once gave to walkers: 'Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.' "22 The compulsion to trespass visually in Woolfs novels is at best a limited form of acquisition, at worst a pathetically ineffectual kind of feminine revenge.

The voyeuristic conquest in Duras' work has increasingly turned away from the kind of covetous visual trespassing characteristic of Woolf s work or that of Duras' own early female characters in a search for an "owned" affective existence. The text and writing process in Duras' works gropes toward the possession of a visualized internal discourse. Marcelle Marini has described the Durassian discourse as a " . . . discours de la méconnais- sance, fait des pièces rapportées de tous les discours d'autrui comme des illusions qu'elle se forge à elle-même." But Marini also recognized the power of this discourse to open "au travers ses erreurs, par ses espacements, ses fragmentations, ses répétitions, son rythme même, la voie à une parole vraie."23 Duras' depiction of feminine existence as dependent on an imbecilic inwardly focused voyeurism is far more desper- ate than Woolfs. Nevertheless it has produced not only a uniquely feminine shape for the novel but continues to explore a revolutionary and potentially healing kind of narcissistic feminine curiosity, a path sug- gested but still uncharted in the novels of Virginia Woolf.

Regis College



WOOLF AND DURAS 201

NOTES

1. James W. Hamilton, M.D., "Voyeurism," American Journal of Psychiatry, 26, No. 2 (April, 1972) 286.

2. Harold I. Kaplan, M.D., Alfred M. Freedman, M.D. and Benjamin J. Saddock, M.D., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Baltimore and London: Williams and Wilkins, 1980) 1725.

3. Irvin D. Yalom, M.D. "Aggression and Forbiddenness in Voyeurism," Archives of General Psychiatry, III, No. 3 (Sept. 1960) 305.

4. (New York and Burlingame: Harcourt Brace and World, 1957) 80. 5. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960) 6. All further references to this work appear in

the text. 6. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1975) 100. 7. Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (New York and London: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1976) 221, 416. 8. "The Autobiographical Present in A Sketch of the Past,n The Psychoanalytic Review,

70, No. 1 (Spring, 1983) 29. 9. Mrs. DaUoway (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925) 11. All further

references to this work appear in the text. 10. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960) 63. All further references to this work appear in

the text. 11. There is a great fund of affection permeating the book, which was written with

Woolf s deceased brother Thoby in mind. 12. Jacob's Room, 224. 13. Marcelle Marini, Territoires du féminin (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977) 50. 14. Des Journées entières dans les arbres (Paris: Gallimard, 1954) 101. 15. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 14. 16. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982) 79. 17. Suzanne Lamy et André Roy, éd., Marguerite Duras à Montréal: Editions Spirale,

1981)40. 18. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 10. 19. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981) 33-34. 20. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980) 15. 21. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982) 24. 22. Collected Essays, ii, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966) 181. 23. Territoires du féminin, 25.



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