The Space of Transgression

Abstract

The title of Albert Camus’s 1957 collection of short stories to which “The Adulterous Wife” belongs, Exile and the Kingdom,1 indicates that the characters of the six texts that form the volume are all defined by their relationship with the space in which they evolve. The terms exile and kingdom designate experiences both physical and spiritual (which can also be interpreted as both horizontal and vertical). This thematic link between the stories constitutes in itself the spatial unity of the book. Isabelle Daunais contends that, in Camus’s work, exile places the observing protagonists outside the place they occupy in reality, and that the kingdom is that rare moment when the space they desire to occupy and the space they actually occupy are one and the same.2 However, one further dimension needs to be taken into account: the passage from one to the other. Through an analysis of “The Adulterous Wife,” I would like to argue that the movement from one to the other is in fact a transgressive one and that it is therefore attached to different kinds of moral considerations.