Representations of female desire in literature may often be marked by excess, obsession, and transgression. I propose an exploration of female desire as it is constructed in selected works by Marguerite Duras and Marie Darrieussecq, by focusing on its possibilities of destabilizing the subject and reshaping identity. While romantic narratives may traditionally frame desire as a path toward fulfillment or union, ultimately leading to love, the texts analyzed here present desire as an experience structured by absence, waiting, and emotional dependency.
The study focuses on several works, including L'Amant and Agatha by Duras, and Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, Clèves, and Truismes by Darrieussecq. In these texts, female desire frequently emerges in contexts of impossibility or imbalance: incestuous attraction, interracial relationships marked by social hierarchies, obsessive attachment, or bodily transformation. Rather than leading to resolution, desire often intensifies through distance, uncertainty, or the absence of the desired object.
Drawing on concepts of melancholia, attachment, and identity formation, this paper argues that female desire in these works is an overtaking force that organizes a woman's total identity around her need for her lover. The lover becomes central to the subject's sense of self, producing forms of emotional dependency that can destabilize personal autonomy. To further illuminate this dynamic, the analysis also engages with insights from affective neuroscience, particularly research on reward systems, attachment mechanisms, and obsessive patterns associated with romantic attachment.
By bringing together literary analysis and interdisciplinary perspectives, this study suggests that the intensity of female desire depicted in these works reflects not simply cultural stereotypes about femininity, but broader dynamics of human attachment and subject formation. Ultimately, the representations of desire in Duras and Darrieussecq reveal the relational and fragile nature of desire, highlighting the ways in which identity can be shaped, and sometimes destabilized, by the experience of desire.