"When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature"
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Duras doesn’t just insult; she stages a brutality that exposes the rules of the room. The shock line - “as if an animal were drinking, or a child” - is a deliberately degrading simile, a social reflex put into words. It’s not careful moral philosophy; it’s the voice of a culture that permits male ruin as style but treats female ruin as species-level betrayal. By making the comparison so ugly, she drags a usually polite prejudice into the light.
The sentence turns on scandal. “Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman” isn’t presented as medical fact; it’s a report on the market value of femininity. Scandal isn’t about harm. It’s about trespass. A drunk man is a story; a drunk woman is a stain. The claim that a “female alcoholic is rare” reads less like statistics than like erasure: women are not supposed to appear in public as addicts, so their addiction gets hidden, domesticated, or renamed.
Then Duras delivers the clincher: “a slur on the divine in our nature.” That’s the ideology doing its prettiest work. Womanhood gets framed as sacred - pure, maternal, self-controlled - and that sanctification becomes a leash. If you’re “divine,” you can’t be messy; if you’re messy, you’ve profaned something bigger than yourself. Duras, a writer who lived close to the themes of desire, dependency, and self-destruction, is circling the real target: how quickly “the divine” becomes a weapon, turning female suffering into a moral offense instead of a human crisis.
The sentence turns on scandal. “Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman” isn’t presented as medical fact; it’s a report on the market value of femininity. Scandal isn’t about harm. It’s about trespass. A drunk man is a story; a drunk woman is a stain. The claim that a “female alcoholic is rare” reads less like statistics than like erasure: women are not supposed to appear in public as addicts, so their addiction gets hidden, domesticated, or renamed.
Then Duras delivers the clincher: “a slur on the divine in our nature.” That’s the ideology doing its prettiest work. Womanhood gets framed as sacred - pure, maternal, self-controlled - and that sanctification becomes a leash. If you’re “divine,” you can’t be messy; if you’re messy, you’ve profaned something bigger than yourself. Duras, a writer who lived close to the themes of desire, dependency, and self-destruction, is circling the real target: how quickly “the divine” becomes a weapon, turning female suffering into a moral offense instead of a human crisis.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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