Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Yvonne Ivory

Abstract

This dissertation offers a comparative study of Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint- Exupéry, focusing on their representations of women and the ethical visions that emerge through them. While Camus is often associated with the philosophy of the absurd and Saint-Exupéry with transcendence and spiritual hierarchy, this study argues that both writers articulate a shared moral humanism grounded in responsibility, solidarity, and fidelity to human presence. The figure of the woman—whether as mother, beloved, or silent moral witness—becomes a crucial site through which these ethical commitments are revealed.

Through close textual analysis of major works—including La Mort heureuse, L’Étranger, La Peste, La Chute and L’État de siège for Camus, and Courrier sud, Vol de nuit, Terre des hommes, Citadelle, and Le Petit Prince for Saint-Exupéry —this dissertation examines how women function not merely as narrative figures but as moral interlocutors. In both authors, women reflect questions of absence, fidelity, exile, and responsibility. They often stand at the intersection of love and loss, revealing tensions between autonomy and attachment, revolt and order, lucidity and transcendence.

Although their philosophical vocabularies differ—Camus emphasizing limits and measured revolt, Saint-Exupéry invoking hierarchy and spiritual ascent—their responses to war, displacement, and modern fragmentation display striking affinities. Both reject nihilism without retreating into dogma. Both locate meaning not in abstract systems but in  lived relation. Their shared experiences of childhood silence, desert solitude, and historical upheaval shape literary visions in which the presence—or absence—of the feminine exposes the fragility of human connection and the ethical demand of solidarity. By placing these two twentieth-century writers in sustained dialogue, this dissertation challenges readings that situate them in opposition and instead reveals a deeper continuity: a shared humanism in which love, responsibility, and moral clarity emerge through the figure of the woman as both mirror and measure of ethical life.

Rights

© 2026, Snezana Popova

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