In 1954, Duras published four short stories under the title Des Journées entières dans les arbres (Whole Days in the Trees).¹ Just as The Tranquil Life tells a story of female subjectivity, one of the stories in this volume, “The Boa,” presents a story of female sexuality. Although the story is told in the first person, both temporal and geographic distance between the adult narrator and her younger self is carefully established at the beginning: “This happened in a large city in a French colony, around 1928” (WD, 71; J, 99). The use of an impersonal, reflexive construction (“cela se passait”) reinforces the distancing of the narrator and is the first mark of split female subjectivity in this text, in which the woman tries to read her own adolescence. In the story, the adult narrator situates her thirteen-year-old self between two spectacles that provided the only terms available to her to understand her awakening sexuality.

The narrator describes her younger self as a poor student at Mademoiselle Barbet's boarding school for girls. The other girls have friends in town, and every Sunday their developing minds and bodies are nourished by endless adventures: cinema, teas, drives in the country, afternoons at the pool or tennis courts. The narrator, however, has no such social life and spends all her time with the seventy-five-year-old spinster, Mlle Barbet. Mlle Barbet provides the girl with the two spectacles that mark her coming of age. Every Sunday she takes her to the zoo, where, with other fascinated onlookers, they watch a boa constrictor consume a live chicken. If they arrive too late, they contemplate the boa napping on “a bed of chicken feathers” (WD, 72; J, 100). They remain transfixed because “there was nothing more to see, but we knew what had happened a moment before, and each of us stood before the boa, deep in thought” (WD, 72; J, 100-101).

The other spectacle is provided by Mlle Barbet herself, with the girl as an unwilling witness. In a routine as certain as the boa's, Mlle Barbet calls the girl into her room. Under the pretext of showing the girl her fine lingerie, Mlle Barbet exhibits her seminude body. The old woman had never shown her body to anyone before and would never show it to anyone else because of her advanced age. She instructs the girl that beautiful lingerie is important in life, a lesson she learned too late.

The narrator adds that Mlle Barbet's body exudes a terrible odor that permeates the entire boarding school; she had noticed the odor before, but could not locate it before seeing the woman's exposed body. The old woman sighs during their secret sessions, saying “I have wasted my life. … He never came” (WD, 74; J, 105). The girl is induced by her own impoverished circumstances to tell the woman that she has a full life, that she is rich and has beautiful lingerie: The rest is unimportant.

This Sunday double feature, repeated weekly for two years, is developed in great detail by the narrator, who spends most of the story linking, contrasting, and interpreting the two spectacles because they illuminate the only two avenues through which the young girl could imagine her future. The narrator insists that one weekly event without the other would have led to other effects. If, for example, she had witnessed only the boa's devouring of the chicken, she might have seen in the boa the force of evil and in his victim, goodness and innocence; she might have understood the world as an eternal struggle between these two forces revealing the presence of God. Or, she could have been led to rebel (WD, 73; J, 102). She could have internalized the weekly lesson at the zoo, that is, as a morality tale, a story of good and evil leading to conformity or rebellion.

The spectacle of Mlle Barbet alone might have led the girl to understand social inequities and the “multiple forms of oppression” that result. Coupled with the zoo experience, the second spectacle shifts the meanings of both because of the terrifying glimpse of aging female flesh, undiscovered by the male gaze and imprisoned in its own virginity. Together, the two events become not a morality tale of good and evil, of inequity and injustice, but a cautionary tale of female sexuality. The terms the narrator uses to reconstruct each event and the conclusions she draws articulate a specific construction of the female body and heterosexuality. Within the terms of the story—shown especially in the contrast between the young narrator and her school friends—she seems to suggest that this is an anomalous construction. At the same time, fatalistic language and implications of social determinism suggest that this is a distilled experience of female sexuality rather than an anomalous one. In any case, the highly individualized definition of female sexuality elaborated in this text will be generalized in other texts by Duras, passing imperceptibly from one woman's story to the story of “woman.” For that reason, as well as the fact that this is one of the few texts with explicit autobiographical references situated in Indochina and written before The Lover, “The Boa” merits close consideration.

From the start, the narrator insists that she is an involuntary, yet complicit, solitary voyeur of Mlle Barbet. The girl undergoes this weekly drama and keeps Mlle Barbet's secret in exchange for Mlle Barbet's silence about her mother's poverty. The girl is in the school because her mother thinks that it is the only way she will meet a husband and thus find a way out of poverty and marginalization in the strictly ordered society of the colony.

The girl shares her mother's belief that Mlle Barbet is better suited to help her find a husband, even though the old woman's “secular virginity” exudes the odor of death that permeates the school (WD, 74; J, 105). The narrator specifies that Mlle Barbet is consumed by lack, by “the lack of the man who never came” (WD, 74; J, 105). Each week, after leaving the old woman, the girl returns to her room, looks at her own body in the mirror, and admires her white breasts. In a gesture that superimposes the boa and female sexuality, she says that her breasts provide the only source of pleasure for her in the entire house: “Outside the house there was the boa, here there were my breasts” (WD, 76; J, 107).² Feeling trapped in the school, the girl goes out on the balcony to attract the attention of passing soldiers.

The spectacles of the old woman and of the snake involve consumption and violence valued in opposite ways. Mlle Barbet is consumed by lack, and the private viewing of her enclosed, undiscovered sexuality inspires disgust and dread. The boa consumes his prey, and his public act is characterized as a sacred crime inspiring horror and respect. The boa itself is described in hyperbolic, highly sexualized terms: “Curled into himself, black … in admirable form—a plump roundness, tender, muscular, a column of black marble … with shudders of contained power, the boa devoured this chicken in the course of a single process of digestion … transubstantiation accomplished with the sacred calm of ritual. In this formidable, inner silence, chicken became serpent” (WD, 72; J, 101). This spectacle in the open daylight attracts spectators who are fascinated, entranced by the vital beauty and violence of the beast. In sharp contrast, the narrator calls Mlle Barbet's secret “hidden” and “nocturnal.”

The narrator does not read the formative stories of her youth as a simple contrast between powerful male and sterile female sexuality, two stories of devouring desire—one the passionate devouring of an innocent, the other the passionless devouring of the self by a hypocritical innocence. In her work on reader theory, Jean Kennard talks about the shaping role of both gender and sexuality in the recognition and interpretation of literary conventions.³ She shows how new meanings can be assigned to conventions to subvert their apparent or traditional sense. The narrator of “The Boa” can be read as a woman thinking back on the cultural texts available to her to understand and revalue her sexuality through a complex negotiation between her needs and the stories available. Duras accomplishes this negotiation by mapping a story of female sexuality onto the spectacle of the boa constrictor so that both stories recount possibilities for female sexuality. Female sexuality is redeemed by the power of the phallus in the first story, condemned by its own inadequacy in the second.

To map a story of female sexuality onto the story of the boa, the narrator must negotiate a complex series of substitutions and displacements. Her narrative sleights of hand recall the convoluted associations and displacements of a Freudian map of female sexuality—one that privileges the penis and defines woman by lack. The slippage that results from this imperfect, if ingenious, mapping compounds the division within the woman/girl's experience of the female body marked thematically by the two spectacles.

In an increasingly intense meditation on the links between the spectacle of the boa and of Mlle Barbet, the narrator expresses the despair she felt as a girl: unable to flee the closed world of Mlle Barbet, “nocturnal monster,” unable to join the fertile world revealed by the boa, “monster of the day.” In a passage presented as a waking fantasy, she imagines the world represented by the boa. She fantasizes a green paradise, a scene where “innumerable carnal exchanges were achieved by one organism devouring, assimilating, coupling with another in processes that were at once orgiastic and calm” (WD, 78; J, 110). The contrast of this paradise with the prison of Mlle Barbet leads her to define two types of horror. One horror—hidden vices, shameful secrets, hypocrisy, concealed disease—inspires a deep aversion. The other—the horror of assassins, crime, the outlaw—inspires admiration. The boa is the “perfect image” of this second kind of horror that elicits respect. In a series of substitutions she expresses contempt for those who would condemn certain species such as “cold, silent snakes … cruel, hypocritical cats.” She establishes one category of human being that could be considered among these privileged outlaws: the prostitute. She parenthetically links assassins and prostitutes, imagining both in “the jungle of great capital cities, hunting their prey which they then consumed with the impudence and imperiousness of fatalistic temperaments” (WD, 79; J, 112). She thus establishes a train of associations that shifts the story from the masculine figure of the snake to the male assassin/outlaw to the feminine figure of the prostitute, from the jungle to the city.

The transfer of value from the snake to the prostitute also takes place at a deeper, linguistic level. The boa consumes a chicken, put in the masculine in the French: “un poulet.” A common word for prostitute in French, which is implied though not invoked in the story, is the feminine form of chicken: “une poule.” The prostitute figure in the story, like the chicken that is ingested by the boa and becomes one with his flesh, is absorbed into the values of the phallic figure of the snake. Another substitution and transfer of values is hinted at more explicitly in the story. The same soldiers who walk under her balcony are also spectators at the zoo. She would attract their gaze, fascinate them, in the same way as the boa, substituting herself for the great serpent in her fantasy.

At the moment that she transfers values from the male figures to the female, the image of Mlle Barbet erupts into her fantasy as a reminder of the body she is fleeing. She tells herself that if she does not marry, at least the brothel would provide an escape for her. This leads her to a fantasy of the brothel: “a sort of temple of defloration where, in all purity … young girls in my state, to whom marriage was not accorded, would go to have their bodies discovered by unknown men, men who belonged to the selfsame species” (WD, 79; J, 112). The brothel, painted green, recalls the zoo garden as well as the tamarind trees that shade her balcony, where she tries to attract the gaze of passing soldiers. She imagines this as a silent place, marked by a sacred anonymity; girls would wear masks in order to enter. Anonymity pays homage to “the absolute lack of ‘personality’ of the boa, ideal bearer that he was of the naked, virginal mask” (WD, 79; J, 113).⁴ The ritual initiation and anonymity shift this from the story of one girl to the story of woman, from a specific sexual awakening to a model of female sexuality. She imagines cabins in which one could “cleanse oneself of one's virginity, to have the solitude removed from one's body” (WD, 80; J, 113).

The oscillation between the brothel fantasy and the memory of her despair on the balcony, between the snake and the prostitute, situates her as both spectator and participant in an initiation where phallic sexuality is worshiped and woman is freed of the isolation and lack of her body. She invokes another, earlier childhood memory as “corroboration” of this way of seeing the world. One day her brother asked her to show him her sex. When she refused, he said “girls could die from not using it, and that hiding it suffocated you and made you seriously ill” (WD, 80; J, 113). The spectacle of Mlle Barbet's body seems to confirm her brother's dire prediction. Her brother's voice, like the “fraternal image” that Francine sees in the mirror in The Tranquil Life and the voice of “virility and truth” that Suzanne hears in Joseph's stories, is the voice of male authority. In an image that recalls Suzanne's pleasure in Monsieur Jo's gaze, the narrator generalizes the power of male authority by saying, as she remembers Mlle Barbet's decaying body: “From the moment a breast had served a man, even by merely allowing him to see it, to take note of its shape, its roundness, its firmness—from the moment a breast was able to nourish the seed of a man's desire, it was saved from withering from disuse” (WD, 80; J, 114).

While admitting the terror of being consumed that the boa inspired, the narrator appropriates that story to imagine the female body and female sexuality redeemed by the male gaze and desire. In “The Boa,” female heterosexuality defined by the phallus is intrinsically linked to a loathing of the female body. The key transition in her fantasy chain of images that allows the narrator to transform the story of the boa into the story of the prostitute and, hence, into a model for female sexuality, is the glorification of crime and the figure of the outlaw. And yet, I would argue, Duras has not written a story of outlaw female sexuality. Her representation of female sexuality is outlaw only in its flamboyant display and excess, without the pretense of monogamy. Far from being deviant, the construction of desire and the deployment of erotic power in this representation remains conventional. Rather than disrupt sexual and social order in this narrative, she imagines a way for woman to fit into the dominant construction of heterosexuality that privileges the phallus and demeans the woman's body.

Notes

1. Marguerite Duras, Des Journées entières dans les arbres (Paris: Gallimard, 1954); hereafter cited in the text as J; and Anita Barrows, translator, Whole Days in the Trees (New York: Riverrun Press, 1984); hereafter cited in the text as WD.

2. Potentially, the maternal body could provide an alternative to the horror of Mlle Barbet's body. She thinks of her mother's body having nourished four children and the freshness of its smell. But this is a quick, undeveloped aside.

3. Jean E. Kennard, “Convention Coverage or How to Read Your Own Life,” New Literary History 13, no. 1 (1981): 69-88, and “Ourself behind Ourself: A Theory for Lesbian Readers,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 63-82.

4. The published translation has “individuality” instead of “personality” in this passage. However, in the French, “personnalité” is set off by quotation marks, adding emphasis both to the word and the choice of that word. Given the anthropomorphism of the image, I prefer to keep the word personality in the English.