Ernaux presented a restaging of female desire, initiated by the porn film she watched and introduced in the first sentence of the novel. The entire first paragraph is a window to how modern society has accepted the image of male and female desire, yet the conception is viewed from the male aspect, the male gaze. In spite of this, Ernaux has written a text which has removed the male gaze from existence. The central theme has become the sexual desire of women, and how this desire can be accessed by those who identify with it. As Elizabeth Richardson Viti has contended in ‘The Many Stages of Annie Ernaux’s Desire’ when discussing the opening paragraph, “there are no comparable scenes when the narrator recounts her own love affair. The male sex organ essentially vanishes from the text.” She continues to argue that Ernaux has shifted the focus to a desire that exists on waiting and anticipation, rather than with a focus on the male phallus, and male expectations.…show more content… Rather, the focus is on the emotive, on how a women experiences desire, on removing the traditional perspective of desire, and replacing it with an honest narrative. Thus, female desire is viewed from a new perspective, one which relates to time, yet refuses to yield any specific dates or chronological orders, one which is sustained through the moments in between the liaisons, a perspective where desire cannot be contained within the idea of the phallus, “je ne connaissais que la présence ou l’absence. J’accumule seulement les signes d’une passion, oscillant sans cesse entre « toujours » et « un jour »”. This representation of an affair is one that would not be found through the perspective of a
