This thesis studies the construction of female subjectivity in The Sea Wall (1950) and The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras, articulating feminist theories with a narratological analysis. The research question asks to what extent the construction the articulation of feminist theories and narratological tools makes it possible to reveal the construction of a female subjectivity shaped by patriarchal oppression, colonial domination and class relations.

The theoretical frame of reference cumulatively rather than additively mobilizes six feminist approaches: Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of the woman as Other, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality of class and gender, Colette Guillaumin’s notion of sexage and the idea of nature, Christine Delphy’s analysis of the domestic mode of production, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s criticism of Western feminist perspective, Camille Froidevaux-Metterie’s phenomenology of the lived and seen body and Françoise Vergès’s decolonial feminism. Gérard Genette’s narratology is used as a tool serving this ideological analysis.

The analysis shows that the external focalization on the mother, pronominal changes between “I” and “she”, syntactic fragmentation, silences, repetitions and ellipsis and the unsaid are the formal translation of a dispossessed feminine condition. No single framework is sufficient to account for this condition. It’s by their cumulative articulation, comparable to the blocks of a pyramid, that makes it possible to understand the complexity of the mother’s and the young girl’s subjectivity in colonial Indochina.