Naguib Mahfouz: A Western and Eastern Cage of Female Entrapment ...

Teresa Heffernan draws this to the attention of readers in her article “Feminism against the East/West Divide” by presenting Lady Mary Pierrepont of England, who accused society of “valu[ing] women as little more than chattel” and then later made the statement that she would “prefer liberty to a chain of diamonds” (203). The thirst for emancipation in eighteenth-century England prevails in many works of literature and illustrates the decades of struggle Western women endured to find some sense of equality with men. In the past two centuries Western women have won a certain degree of liberty. Perhaps earning so much freedom has clouded their vision: even British feminists, according to Heffernan, have included negative stereotypes of Eastern women in their writing. She claims that they “were quick to import the image of the enslaved Eastern woman into their writings as a means of expressing their own frustrations with power inequities,” an allegation which sadly suggests that they also added to the colonialist drama by supporting the “liberation” and the “civilizing” of the East (205–6). Bronwyn Winter affirms certain aspects of this stereotype in “Fundamental Mis-understandings” because, she claims, current feminist scholars “have acknowledged that the control of women’s behavior is high on the fundamentalist agenda” (10). With the female as object, it is understandable how the society at large is guilty of suppressing the minority voice and making that voice the source of men’s folly.

The following discussion, divided into three parts—Naguib Mahfouz, Western feminism, and Islamic feminism—focuses on female entrapment in the novels of Mahfouz and a concomitant ambiguity that stems from reading these novels from Western and Eastern cultural perspectives. In my textual analysis in subsequent chapters, I emphasize female entrapment through sexuality, domestic servitude, spirituality and religion, and intellectuality and education, since they represent four of the central defining aspects of the female experience.

Naguib Mahfouz

The Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz, (pronounced Nag-geeb in Egyptian dialect and pronounced Na-jeeb in other Arabic dialects) was born December 11, 1911, in Gamaliya, Cairo, and passed away at the age of ninety-five.