Absence in Mother’s Character in Nawāl al-Sa‘dāwī’s works

Proceedings of The 3rd International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

Year: 2022

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Absence in Mother’s Character in Nawāl al-Sa‘dāwī’s works

Hanan Bishara

ABSTRACT: 

The first element that defines the woman’s writing is her experience and its available cognitive references and intellectual thoughts. The woman’s writings rely on the explosion of the suppressed hidden experiences that have accumulated over the time to be declared in her direct dialogue, in which she cries out her being a woman. She aims in her writings to blow up all the fractures of her body and its ripples. In spite of that, her writings remain far from her overwhelming desire in briefing the necessary language to formulate her desire in writing, and her attempt to react to the general existential suppression, which is exerted on her by the social, moral and psychological relationships.

Therefore, the feminist novel becomes a focus of feelings that derive their aesthetics from the wealth of emotions and momentum of feelings. The focus of the novel becomes the Self while the focus of the novel that the man writes is mostly the whole world. This probably explains the repetition of the use of the pronoun “I” in the feminist novel as a kind of emphasis of the Self and its fulfilment in writing; and probably because the woman mostly sees the world centered on her, or probably because the woman is not satisfied with anything in this universe except her “I”.

The mother in the feminist novel appears to be a problematic character because the writer bears contradictory feelings towards her. The subject of the relationship between the mother and the daughter is a subject that has been frequently analyzed in the feminist art and feminist theory. The feminist writing has recently focused specifically on the mother’s character, and there have been conflicting opinions among feminist theorists regarding the problematic character of the mother.

keywords: cultural, female, sensitivity, a problematic character, Mother, Daughter, radical, feminism, spiritual tragedy.