The Light, Motherhood, and Abortion

Something else interests me in the two lines I pointed out from The Stranger--both bring up the question of control and responsibility. Meursault states that it comes down to a choice: he can either shoot or not shoot. He has the ability, the free will, to do one or not do one. In this way, it is simple. Do or do not. He can choose--but does he? After he pulls the trigger, regardless of why, he states that he himself shattered his own happiness. He accepts the agency for his actions. The "why" doesn't matter.

R.'s point about the light as connected to Meursault's mother brings me to another similarity between The Stranger and Play It As It Lays. The main character, Maria, also connects her mother, and her mother's death, to the sunlight: "Maria did not know whether any of that had actually happened but she used to think it, used to think it particularly around the time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying in the desert light, the daughter unavailabe in the Eastern dark."

One of the book's main themes is motherhood, and the entire novel centers on Maria's abortion and subsequent need to play the role of the perfect mother for her daughter, Kate, who is in a hospital for a mental and physical condition and cannot be what Maria wishes. Still, as if in penance for the abortion, Maria determines that she will get Kate out of the hospital, live with her on her own, and take up canning, the kind of domestic act that would prove her fit for motherhood. It is Kate that gives Maria purpose, if not reason.

One last quote about the light, as tied to life, death, and motherhood: "She cried because something had just come through to her, there in the sun on the Western street: she had deliberately not counted the months but she must have been counting them unawares, must have been keeping a relentless count somewhere, because this was the day, the day the baby would have been born."

More thoughts later on abortion--and what it might mean to be addicted to it.

--C.