Mama’s Boy: Reading Woman in L’Etranger

Abstract

In his last interview, when asked what he felt critics, had most neglected in his work, Camus replied: ‘La part obscure, ce qu’il y a d’aveugle et d’instinctif en moi.’¹ Many have since sought to approach this dark, enigmatic side from the perspective of psychoanalysis, emphasising, as Freudian and Lacanian orthodoxy requires, the oedipal moment, and in so doing repressing or devaluing the maternal bond, giving primacy to the phallus and the threat of castration. To my knowledge, however, no sustained effort has been made to view Camus’s writing from the perspective of psychoanalytic feminism, stressing rather the importance of the ipre-oedipal stage in which the primary figure is not the father but the mother and the primary relationship is a dual not triangular one, between mother and child.² Feminist critics have most often adopted this approach to study the mother/daughter dyad in women writers. Shifting the context, I propose here to effect a kind of ‘naive’ reading, to ‘overread’ Camus, as if he were a woman writer, for traces of the relationship between the feminine and text production, bracketing psychoanalytic orthodoxy to allow the ‘underread’,³ the feminine maternal, to emerge from the shadows of critical repression and be seen in Meursault’s revolt in L’Etranger, the text’ ambiguities, and the author’s concept of the Absurd. By referring positively to Meursault as a ‘mama’s boy’, lam drawing upon the hero’s infantile vocabulary to suggest the transgressive potential in this relationship and to question the term’s pejorative cultural connotations of a somehow ‘effeminate’ boy whose excessive attachment to the mother extends scandalously beyond the ‘normal’ time.