In the beginning of the 20th century, feminist literary theory was concerned mainly with the social and political role of women, as well as women’s role in literature. In the second half of the century, it is tried to study women’s social positions and their rights compared to the male counterpart. One of the most explored themes since then was gender and patriarchy. The aim of this paper is to show how women were depicted in literature after half a century of the struggle of the first wave feminist towards equality and stress the importance of theorizing the concept of patriarchy, as a first step to understanding women’s subjugation. This unfolds through a re-visitation of George Orwell’s fiction novels. Orwell is better known by his political writing. Although he has never used the word “Feminism”, in any of his fictional works, two decades after his death, the radical feminist, Daphne Patai accused him that he is anti-feminist, fundamentally because of his deprecatory stands towards women through his female characters. The selected texts reinforce patriarchal ideology, through the way Orwell portrayed his male and female characters. A feminist analytical approach will be adopted in the realization of this research, in order to analyse the novel in depth, with a focus on Orwell’s portrayal of female characters. Observing and commenting how he debases, mistreats and degrades them. Further, it sheds the light on how he portrays his male characters by analysing female and male protagonists. The significant of the study is to show the social and political context of the time regarding the role and the identity of women in the British society in the 20th century, and how women were treated under patriarch society and still until our days. Moreover, it sheds light on how patriarchy the concept of women oppression helped in the development of feminist theories.
This paper is a comparative study between Ernst Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Naguib Mahfouz’s The Beginning and the End, paralleled with the authors’ concepts of tragic vision; based on the development of the theory of tragedy from Aristotle to Hegel as well as the personal philosophy of life as tragedy of both authors. Based on the researcher knowledge, tragedy concept in the selected novels is rarely and insufficiently highlighted by few scholars and critics. Moreover, it is a comparison of novels from different cultures—Arabic literature and literature in English—in order to bridge the gap between them. The novels are stories where every day moral dilemmas often present profound paradoxes with which heroes and heroines must deal. Tragedy, in the same vein, is such a paradoxical story where we have to deal at any rate with our everyday moral dilemmas, where we are sometimes called upon to make difficult choices not between right and wrong, but between what we might define as two rights. Hegelian concept of tragedy focused on dissension and war of dichotomies between good and bad, as well as what is right and what is wrong. The tragic elements in the two novels make them Hegelian tragedies par excellence.
Feminist criticism studies the ways in which literature enhances the economic, political, social and psychological oppression of women. Patriarchy describes the power relationships between men and women. Although the majority of the existing literature spots the light on the issue of violence against women, violence against men is also a key feature of patriarchy. This paper aims at exploring how patriarchy systems not only oppress women but men also are oppressed in patriarchal societies. With relevance to male characters of Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. It is a political satirical dystopian science fiction novel, which has become universally recognized as Orwell's seminal work. The citizens of Oceania in the novel are under complete control of the totalitarian government. This paper will not go through Orwell's characteristics of a totalitarian state, but it is a study of how patriarchy system oppresses Winston; who symbolizes all men in society who are suffering from under patriarchal governments and comes to a conclusion that Winston is feminine in certain cases in his society.
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