When we meet Meursault in The Stranger, he is strikingly unemotional and indecisive from the very beginning. He barely reacts to the news of his mother's death, and his most striking emotion about the news is his momentary guilt about sending her away to a home in the first place. Throughout his entire journey and experience at her funeral, he remains unemotional, and the reader begins to understand that this is one of his defining character traits.
In the second chapter, however, he rekindles an old flame with a woman, Marie. But instead of being a spark or energetic force in his boring life, Marie remains just another item that Meursault is indecisive about.
Throughout the entirety of Part I, Marie's sole purpose seems to be to further demonstrate how boring Meursault is. He rarely wastes a thought on her when she is not with him, and when she is with him, her defining trait seems to be her love for Meursault. Her repeated questions about his love for her or his willingness to marry her create a completely one-dimensional female character who exists as a defining trait for a male character.
As Meursault spends more time with Marie later in Part I, he insists that she is both beautiful and funny, almost as though she might soon be described as a real person with a true impact on Meursault's life. Instead, she remains objectified by several of the other men with whom she interacts, and she continues to not have much of an impact on Meursault's actions.
The inclusion of the female character so early in the story creates an opportunity to really develop the female character as a human and not an object, but thus far in The Stranger, Marie's sole purpose and development mostly serves to highlight how unresponsive the male character, Meursault, is.
This is a really interesting point. I didn't even think about her which shows that she isn't a well defined female character.
ReplyDeleteI found this discussion of Marie's objectification extremely interesting. Like Anna, this was not something I thought about during my first read, which goes to show the lack of emphasis on strong female characters in novel culture. It's almost as if we are teased with the potential of Marie for she enters the book as a motivation of Meursault, even if it is only in a sexual manner (which is dissappointing in itself). Being connected with the only motivation for Meursault that we've seen thus far, makes me hope that she can have a more meaningful influence later in the novel, but sadly, I doubt she will.
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