SOURCE: "Mama's Boy: Reading Woman in L'Etranger," in Camus's L'Etranger: Fifty Years On, edited by Adele King, St. Martin's Press, 1992, pp. 152-69.

In the following essay, Mistacco offers a psychoanalytical feminist reading of The Stranger, drawing attention to elements of femininity in the pre-oedipal relationship between Meursault and his mother.

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.' 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...