Gender, Colonialism, and Italian Difference: Duras and The Aspern Papers

Les Papiers d’Aspern (1961) is Marguerite Duras’s untranslated play based on Henry James’s 1888 novella The Aspern Papers. French scholars generally have viewed this play as a direct translation of an earlier English-language adaptation by Michael Redgrave, but the differences between the two versions are substantive. Quite differently than Redgrave, Duras interprets James’s novella as an account of gendered racialization and linguistic difference that resonates with the emergence of French and Francophone postcolonial writing in Paris during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her reading of James presents a systematic, period-specific analysis that should be considered within the larger histories of both feminist scholarly interpretations and French readings of his work. Additionally, in its analysis of Italy and the Italian language, this under-read play merits attention in discussions of Duras’s ambivalent portrayals of colonialism and ethnic gendering.