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

Chapter 1:  Naguib Mahfouz: Western and Islamic Feminist Perspectives
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What about the concept of patriarchy and its effect upon women? Many feminists and theorists from around the world have answered this question many times. After addressing how patriarchy has affected the way men and women think about their roles in society, one must give some consideration to how we regard male or female authorship. To begin this discussion, it is worth quoting Edward Said’s work on the word authority in order to evaluate how its linked meanings intimate male authority—one of the major biases that permeates the way we live and the way male authorship has edged its way consistently into written discourse:

The OED tells us [that authority is] ‘a power to enforce obedience,’ or ‘a derived or delegated power,’ or ‘a power to influence action,’ or ‘a power to inspire belief,’ or ‘a person whose opinion is accepted’; not only those, but a connection as well with author—that is, a person who originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person also who sets forth written statements. [Many other meanings are provided here too].
Taken together these meanings are all grounded in the following notions: (1) that of the power of an individual to initiate, institute, establish—in short, to begin; (2) that this power and its product are an increase over what had been there previously; (3) that the individual wielding this power controls its issue and what is derived there from; (4) that authority maintains the continuity of its course. (83)

Basically, Said explains in The Novel as Beginning Intention that there exists a psychological and unconscious sense that is part of the novelist, who cannot help but affix importance to authorship, especially male authorship. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar address this concept when they discuss the author’s pen as a metaphorical penis: “If the pen is a metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts?” The question certainly causes one to consider how male and female authorship has been influenced through association with the image of the pen.