Marie Cardona. An Ambivalent Nature‐Symbol in Albert Camus’s L’étranger

Although a relatively minor character in Camus’s novel L’étranger , Marie Cardona, the protagonist Meursault’s lover, was the author’s favorite creation. She represents love of life and unabashed sexuality in the novel to a greater degree than any other character. Recently, feminist scholars have viewed her from complex, sometimes contradictory perspectives. They are unable to decide whether Camus designed her as an autonomous figure or a mere cardboard sexual plaything for the neurotic Meursault. Some critics link Camus’s alleged anti‐Arab racism to his supposed depiction of Marie as a helpless, passionless woman lacking an independent identity. This article depicts Marie as a “natural woman,” who ultimately appreciates Meursault’s blunt honesty, even when he says he does not love her. Contrary to most critics, Marie demonstrates an active sexuality rather than serving as Meursault’s sexual object. Indeed, the converse may be closer to the truth. After their initial encounter at the swimming pool, Meursault is often shy and passive and has to be coaxed into sexual behavior by the more aggressive Marie. After his mother’s death, Meursault seeks a close personal relationship with a woman, and hopes to find it with Marie. He rejects his brutish friend Raymond’s suggestion that they go to a brothel because he wants a more meaningful relationship. An essentially passive individual, Meursault requires the stimulation of a lustful, affectionate, life‐affirming young woman like Marie to awaken his sexuality. That Camus, an admirer of ancient Greco‐Roman myth, may have intended Marie to represent a Greek fertility goddess figure is suggested when she smites the asphodel flowers with her handbag on the way down to the beach where Meursault kills the Arab. The asphodel was the flower sacred to Persephone/Proserpine, wife of Hades/Pluto. Ironically, she was goddess of the Underworld and the dead and also daughter of Demeter/Ceres, goddess of fertility and the harvest. Since previous critics have linked the descent of Meursault and Marie to the beach from the bus‐stop to Dante’s descent from the “asphodel plateau” into Hell in the Divina commedia , this is a plausible interpretation of Marie’s subliminal identity. Marie embraces the sun and the sea and merges with them in a successfully consummated relationship. Unlike Meursault, for whom she may resemble his mother in her youth, she is at peace with herself and the world. For Camus, her dark, tanned skin symbolizes her identification with Nature and the body and rejection of thoughts of death. In her love of life and her play with the asphodels on the deathly plateau leading to the fatal beach, Marie reveals an essential innocence and ambivalence as a Persephone‐like, life/death Nature symbol, and a female, life‐assertive Antichrist.