The Misunderstanding

As a character, Martha exemplifies Camus’s idea of Existential Rebellion and Renunciation of the Absolute. Accepting both her guilt in fratricide and the impossibility of her fantasy of the seaside, Martha nonetheless chooses life over death (See: Background). However, she fails to take the next step toward solidarity, choosing instead to live out her life in solitude. 

Given the precision and thematic resonance of Camus’s use of language, a defining part of Martha is her diction. Unlike Jan, she speaks clearly and bluntly. Even when her words convey a hidden meaning (such as when she admits to Jan that he has reignited her dream of the seaside), she intends this obfuscation. Such duplicity distinguishes her from Jan, who, paradoxically, equivocates in the hope of being understood. While Camus presents Martha’s clear speech as admirable, he also presents it as lacking emotional and moral dimensions. Aloof and self-seeking, Martha has forgotten the language of emotion and morality. As she tells Maria, “I have a hard time with words like love and joy and grief” (222), and she chastises her mother for talking of “crime and punishment” (211). In her stubborn avoidance of morality and emotion, Martha estranges herself from an essential part of her humanity.

In the first two acts, Martha’s relationship with Jan defines her character. Specifically, she exemplifies the philosophical attitude of resentment, which Camus defines as estrangement from oneself, “wanting to be something other than what one is” (The Rebel, p. 27). This combination of envy and self-doubt provoked by a sibling’s carefree absence resembles the dynamic between two pairs of siblings in the Bible: the Prodigal Son and his elder brother (See: Background), and Martha and her sister Mary. Like her biblical counterparts Martha and the elder brother of the Prodigal Son, Camus’s Martha resents that her departed sibling finds the happiness the world denies her: “Everything life can give to a man has been given to [Jan]. He left this country. He’s known other places, the sea, people who are free. Me? I stayed here. I stayed, small and dark, bored, sunk in the heart of the continent, growing up in the thick of the land” (213). 

The motif of freedom and confinement, of expansive seaside and oppressive horizons, mirrors the biblical motif of salvation and doubt illustrated by the biblical Martha and Mary and the Prodigal Son and his brother. Just like the elder brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Martha resents not just her brother himself but her parent for not honoring her dutifulness: “Don’t forget that I’m the one who stayed and [Jan is] the one who left, that you’ve [the Mother] had me by your side your whole life while he left you in silence. A price has to be paid for that” (212). Martha not only believes her mother is indebted to her—but she also envisions her mother as a crucial part of her happiness by the seaside. In choosing to die by suicide, the Mother reneges on this tacit promise. To Martha, this represents a grave affront and sparks her existential rebellion.

For Camus, Martha embodies a person who—accepting their limitations—nonetheless asserts the value of their life in an indifferent world. After being defined by resentment, Martha revolts against this self-defeating attitude in the denouement. The first step of her rebellion is abandoning her fantasy of the seaside—illustrating the dispelling illusion necessary for Camus’s existential rebellion. She soliloquizes: “Nobody’s ever set me on my feet, not I who suffers such injustice. I will not kneel. Deprived of my place on this earth, rejected by my mother, alone with my crimes, I’ll leave this world unreconciled” (218). Martha despairs at the inescapability of being outcast by an indifferent world but nonetheless chooses to live in her symbolic refusal to kneel. This heroic stance (which Camus reflects on in The Rebel) symbolizes her rejection of the comfort of illusion. 

Martha chooses to live out her life in solitude before taking the next step of rebellion: solidarity in the shared experience of absurdity. Martha accosts Maria not to dodge culpability (she readily admits her guilt) but to impose the truth that suffering in an absurd world is the foundation of solidarity. Martha doesn’t attack Maria with the fact of Jan’s murder but with the fact that everyone suffers a world negligent to their desires, saying: “Understand, then, that neither for him nor for us, neither in life nor in death, is there ever any peace or homeland” (227). Unlike the rebel that Camus heroizes in his essay of that title, Martha fails to move from this recognition of shared estrangement to communal life. Instead, she chooses retreat into solitude and live out her life until death. This arrested rebellion makes Martha the rebel manqué (the French word for “missed”)—a person who falls short of fully achieving an expectation or endeavor.

Disillusionment defines the Mother, manifesting in her submission to Martha’s will, her obliviousness, her fatigue, and her habitual indifference. Over and over she expresses her desire for peace and quiet. This motif echoes through the play as a despairing cry for unconsciousness. Unlike her young daughter, the Mother doesn’t envision happiness in the fantasy of the seaside. Instead, she dreams of retreat and oblivion:

At a certain age, there is no home where rest is possible, and if you’ve been able to build yourself a simple brick house furnished with memories, a place where you can occasionally drift off to sleep—well, that’s quite a lot already. Of course, it would also be something to be able to find both sleep and forgetting together (153).

In turning away from life, the Mother estranges herself from her heart, preventing her from recognizing her son. Following the revelation of Jan’s identity, the Mother accepts her guilt—while still avoiding responsibility. She says, “Well, I always knew it would turn out like this, and then I’d have to go and end it” (209). Her fatalism betrays the bad faith described by Sartre and Beauvoir of those who, fleeing the anguish of choice, think they escape the accountability by which everyone is bound. Jan’s murder is not an inevitability, and the Mother’s death by suicide is not the necessary response she thinks it is. However, under Camus’s definition of tragedy, both decisions are understandable (See: Background). For him, the Mother’s death is tragic, not the just punishment she believes it to be.

The Mother isn’t defined by her title until she realizes she has killed her son, underscoring Camus’s use of archetypes to undergird his central themes. In an act of bad faith, the Mother reclaims the false security of this predefined role and, in doing so, denies her free will (See: Background). However, prior to the revelation of Jan’s identity, the Mother also lives in bad faith. In existentialist philosophy, to live according to habit is to deny one’s free will. This abdication of the duty of choice is apparent in her description of receiving Jan as she says: “A second crime is all that’s needed for a habit to form. With the first, nothing begins. No, it’s more that something ends […] Yes, it really was habit that led me to respond […] that assured me he wore a victim’s face” (151). Desolated by life, the Mother lets habit choose for her in an abdication of her human duty not to harm others to the best of her ability, resulting in extreme consequences.

Under Camus’s philosophy, Maria’s character arc is regressive: She begins as a person who loves life and love and deplores the misery of isolation and fantasy, and she ends as a person who forsakes life out of her pain. Like the other characters, Maria exemplifies an archetypal worldview and response to the world’s senselessness: the loving wife destroyed by her husband’s death.

Maria is the only character in The Misunderstanding who remembers being happy. In love with Jan by the seaside, she was happy because unlike Martha, the Mother, and Jan, she didn’t seek happiness somewhere other than the present. The play asserts that people are often dissatisfied because they can’t help but look beyond their present for satisfaction. Maria avoids this trap by giving herself fully to love. She reproaches Jan for withdrawing from her into his fantasies:

[M]en never know how to really love. Nothing satisfies them. All they know how to do is dream, how to conjure up new duties, how to look for new lands and new homes. While we, we know you have to dive headfirst into love, share the same bed, join hands, fear absence. When we love, we dream of nothing else (161).

Maria frames her argument as the difference between men and women, but since “men” can mean people generally, it also reads as a description of most people. Her assessment of “men” describes Martha and, in Act III, herself. Her conversation with Jan contains one of the many ironies in the play: Jan jokingly refers to her as “you animal” when she states that leaving him is too much to ask (162). His flippant remark is ironic because it is he, in his desperate attempt to escape his existential anxieties, who acts like a trapped animal—not she.

Jan’s death upends Maria’s understanding of the world and drives her away from the humanity and solidarity she once embraced. Her fantasy of a life without grief resembles Jan’s fantasy. In her final plea, Maria cries: “Oh, God, I can’t live in this desert. Hear me calling on you, and I’ll find my words” (229). Separated from her beloved, Maria sees no choice but hope for salvation. Estranged from his family and homeland, Jan sees no choice but to pursue an impossibly perfect reconciliation. For Camus, both Jan and Maria fall prey to a tragic error: Jan addresses the right people with the wrong words, and Maria addresses the wrong person with the right words. Jan’s cryptic speech prevents his family from recognizing him, and Maria’s clear but mistakenly addressed words ask for salvation from a world that can only respond “no.” As the Old Servant’s final refusal underscores, the universe can grant no relief in Camus’s world—one can only appeal to people for help.