Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a woman's perceived lack of desire is often rooted in her longing for an idealized, unknown man rather than the actual man in front of her.
Marguerite Duras explores the complex nature of desire in this quote, positing that frigidity or emotional detachment may not stem from a genuine lack of desire but rather from a yearning for an unattainable or idealized figure. This longing for a man who remains unknown leads to a paradox where a woman may appear non-responsive or uninterested in a man who is physically present, as her heart and mind are still attached to the fantasy of someone else, suggesting that desire can often be more about the dream of someone rather than reality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the complexities of romantic relationships.
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I’m waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I’ll never know.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.
There is a tremendous relief in knowing that {God's} love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.
God does not look at your outer forms, _x000D_ but at the love within your love.
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
No. No games. He wanted her and didn't care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among, the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
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