Gender Roles and Ideas :: Arab Women Culture Literature Essays

Gender Roles and IdeasThe Male Character in Arab Womens NovelsOften in literature authors, particularly men, are criticized for falsely or inaccurately portraying or authorship women. This debate has been historically confined to male authors, but is on occasion reversed and female authors are criticized for inaccurately writing men. Although it may sound like a fair tradeor at least the beginnings of one in the world of criticsthese situations are special(a) to primarily European and predominately North American literature. Examining the portrayal of men and the male sex as a whole, by women, is an important if not essential labour in this modern world, but where is comes to a point of being absolutely crucial is when it is the women authors of a world where they are second class citizens only because of their gender. If the writing of men in Arab womens novels can be understood at even the most basic level it may allow some discernment into what these women think and assume con sciously and subconsciously, about themselves and their position in society and about the inherent oppression that they deal with and resign themselves tono matter how washed-out or extreme the degree of the oppression, ranging from Egypt to Saudi Arabia.The purpose of this discourse is to first, examine and delineate the manner in which Arab women novelists portray or write men and second, to question the most relevant reasons why the women write them as they do. This will be accomplished by focusing mainly on three novels written by women from Jordan and Palestine with settings form Beirut to London.The first of these three novels is Fadia fakeers, Pillars of Salt. This story is set in Jordan before and during the British occupation and Mandate. The bind itself is broken into a number of chapters, each shifting between the voices of The Storyteller, Maha, and Um Saad, and Faqirs third-person. For purposes of ease in this discourse these short chapters will be grouped into vii i natural sections, as each five or six chapters between Maha and Um Saad is set off by an interlude from The Storyteller, who himself appears nine times altogether. In this book there is a large spectrum men that Faqir writes, but in terms of relevance to the topic above we will focus on the quest characters to illustrate how Faqir portrays the male sex The Storyteller, who could be argued as not being a man, but with very little success, as it is undoubtedly Faqirs intention to have the storys told by The Storyteller to be from a male perspective.