CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian and Toni Morrison, an African American,
have been two very important writers of our times and their focus has been the
position of women in their respective societies. El Saadawi and Morrison have
published ten and nine novels respectively. El Saadawi writes in Arabic and Morrison
in English but their works show a deeper female sensibility which is a part of
feminism. This requires the definition, meaning and history of feminism and the role
and scope of female sensibility in it. A comparative study of these writers has not
been attempted so far and this thesis is precisely working towards that.
Keeping this in view this chapter discusses (i) a brief history of feminism in
Europe, America and Egypt. (ii) The respective literary traditions of the two writers
(iii) the important socio-political that shaped the life and literary ideologies of El
Saadawi and Morrison and their brief life history, growing up, education and so on,
that are necessary to understand the two writers and their societies.
The word “Feminism” was although first used by French dramatist Alexander
Dumas, the younger, in 1872, in a pamphlet “L’Homme-Femme”, the form of
feminism with which Western society is most familiar established itself in the 18th
century as a protest against the laws and conventions that required women to function
in a subordinate role. Dumas had argued that men and women are politically and
morally equal and should be treated as such. Two women who pioneered this
movement in the 18th century Europe are Olympe de Gouges and Mary
Wollstonecraft. De Gouges was a French playwright and journalist at the time of the
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French Revolution. In 1791, in response to the famous Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen of 1789, she issued the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman
and the Female Citizen”, in which she challenged the exclusion of women from
citizenship and argued for equality between the sexes.
The British Mary Wollstonecraft who also responded to the French Revolution
first wrote the pamphlet Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in defence of the
ideals of the Revolution, which had come under attack from the British statesman
Edmund Burke. A Vindication of the Rights of Women followed in 1792. In this work,
she argued that women are the equals of men and only appear inferior due to their
poor education, which required them to focus on the domestic arts. The second
Vindication is considered to be a founding document of feminism. Thus, Western
feminism was born in the claim that men and women are equal as moral and political
agents who possess the same natural rights. Egypt was an European colony and the
rise of feminism in Europe affected Egypt, but Morrison is an American which
demands us to look at American feminism.
American feminism arose from a different set of historical circumstances. In
particular, it sprang from the abolitionist movement of the 1830s. Abolitionism was
the radical antislavery movement that demanded an immediate cessation to slavery on
the grounds that every man was a self-owner; that is, every man has moral jurisdiction
over his own body. Abolitionism fostered feminism in several ways as women played
leadership roles and were encouraged to speak from public platforms to mixed
audiences of men and women. Many of the female abolitionists came from Quaker
back-grounds, in which they were accorded far more education and equality than the
general population. They soon became uncomfortable with one aspect of
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abolitionism: they seemed to be working only for men’s self-ownership and not for
women’s.
In the early 19th century, a married woman in America could not enter into
contracts without her husband’s consent, women lost all title to property or future
earnings upon marriage, children were legally controlled by the father, and women
were generally without recourse against kidnapping or imprisonment by husbands and
other male relatives. Sarah Grimke’s famous pamphlet Letters on the Equality of the
Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837) compared the laws governing slaves with
those governing women, which were remarkably similar even in wording. While the
white women in America do not enjoy any right, the situation of African American
women was even worse. Thus, feminist demands focused on eliminating legal barriers
to women, as well as acquiring the same rights to person and property as men
enjoyed.
A pivotal moment came in1840 when American female delegates to the World
Anti-Slavery Conference in London were barred from sitting in the assembly. Two
women Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady - Stanton were so outraged that they
returned home and organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to discuss women’s
rights. There they drafted the Declaration of Sentiments. Arguably the most famous
feminist document, the Sentiments paraphrased the Declaration of Independence to
declare woman’s independence from man’s shadow. A woman’s suffrage resolution
also was introduced and narrowly passed.
From that point until the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution in 1920, mainstream American feminism focused on securing the vote
for women with Stanton and Susan B. Anthony assuming leadership roles. Other
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feminists were active in three separate areas, social (especially labour) reform,
reproductive rights, and education but they tended to function either as individuals or
as female voices within broader reform movements. The situation was similar in
Britain, where “suffragettes” campaigned for universal suffrage for decades before the
vote was extended to single women over the age of 30 in 1918 and then to all adults
over 21 years of age in 1928.
Second Wave feminism in America sprang from discontent with the treatment
of women within a broader movement: in this instance, opposition to the Vietnam
War. This revival sprang from left-wing or liberal ideology. It questioned the 1950s
restrictions that included abstinence before marriage, the assumption of domesticity
rather than a career, prohibition against children out of wedlock, and attitudes against
lesbianism. Betty Friedan’s path breaking work The Feminine Mystique (1963) argued
that domesticity enslaved women and inspired a generation of women to pursue a
career instead.
Women demanded equal representation and fair treatment within the existing
system. For example, one of the movement’s major goals was affirmative action,
through which women would be included in greater numbers within existing
institutions such as universities. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) became the
pivotal issue for liberal feminism. This proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution
aimed at guaranteeing equal rights under the law regardless of sex.
Diverse schools within the feminist tradition often disagree on the definition
of equality. For individualist feminists, equality means equal treatment under laws
that respect the person and property of all human beings regardless of a person’s sex,
race, and ethnicity. And for radical feminism, equality means socioeconomic equality
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and the redistribution of power and wealth so that the historical privileges of men are
erased.
Hitherto, radical feminism had functioned as a minority and revolutionary
voice within the Second Wave. In the early 1980s, radical feminism became
ideologically dominant and defined the society of its time and institutions as “the
patriarchy”, a mixture of white male culture and capitalism through which men as a
class oppressed women as a class. Radical feminism’s methodology is predicated on
the notion of political correctness: a system of laws and policies that encourage proper
expression and behaviour while discouraging improper forms. For example,
government funds are routinely allocated to programmes that promote the expression
of correct sexual attitudes in the workplace and on campus. Meanwhile, laws and
policies against incorrect attitudes or behaviour (e.g., comments viewed as sexist or
sexually harassing) punish such expression, often through costly lawsuits.
Individualist feminism advocates the elimination of all classes under law so
that every individual has equal rights and an equal claim to person and property,
regardless of characteristics such as gender or race. The proper role of government is
to eliminate privilege and protect the rights of individual men and women equally.
Between the polar extremes of gender and individualist feminism lie a variety
of other schools that either employ a different ideological approach or define
themselves according to another standard. For example, equity feminism aims at
equality under existing institutions without necessarily reforming the current system
to reflect the natural rights of individuals.
5
As a result of an aggressive pursuit of rights and privileges for women under
the banner of feminism, today feminism has reached a stage where women and men
generally face the same basic choices. Indeed, to the extent that there is gender
inequity, it lies in the privileges that women are granted through laws or policies such
as affirmative action. Hence, both individualist and equity feminism argue for the
removal of privileges for women in order to achieve true equality. Moreover, the rise
of counterintuitive schools of feminism, such as conservative feminism that
champions the traditional family and conservative values, has acted to blunt the
historical mission and goals of feminism.
Though Feminism has now become a global phenomenon and the Feminists of
all shades and nationalities share the basic paradigms of feminism with the western
feminists, they at the same time are eager to proclaim their difference from the latter
and they carve out a separate identity for themselves. This has been made possible by
the influence of the west over the rest of the world. This is also because of the
colonisation, the modern education system, the impact of feminist thinkers,
philosophers, activists and creative writers. The list is long but it includes the two
novelists of our time Nawal El Saadawi and Toni Morrison, one an Egyptian and the
other an American but sharing a universal female sensibility. Female sensibility is an
integral part of feminism. In other words female sensibility is the mother of all”isms”
that seek to empower women.
The word “Sensibility” means an acute perception of or responsiveness toward
something, such as the emotions of another. “Sensibility” is a physical phenomenon
that refers to a specific set of moral beliefs and an ethic of compassion. Novels, plays
and poems that engage the language of sensibility assert individual rights, sexual
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freedom and unconventional familial relationships based upon feeling. In this sense El
Saadawi and Morrison’s fictional works share female sensibility. Female sensibility is
not self-pity or crusading against unjust mankind. Instead it is that which unifies
women irrespective of race, class, colour and creed.
The term “Female Sensibility” in this thesis is expressed to mean the view
point of female perspectives, the deepest responses of women to their inexplicable
suffering and perpetual sorrow. Women novelists, especially those with ‘female
perspective’ across the globe share the female sensibility. In her book The Female
Imagination Patricia Meyer Spacks stresses this specifically when she observes that
“the female experience of women has long been the same”(5). In other words, female
sensibility involves an “imaginative continuum” in women’s literature like “the
recurrence of certain patterns, themes, problems and images” (Eagleton 12) as Mary
Eagleton observes. These aspects make female sensibility the heart and soul of
feminism. While feminism is the philosophy female sensibility is its practice.
While Nawal El Saadawi reveals unique delicacies of a female sensibility
dealing with explosive issues of female exploitation inconceivable in western society
Toni Morrison’s work disarmingly exposes segregation and inhuman cruelty that
characterizes the life of women in Afro-American society. The works of both
novelists document with astonishing vividness and solidity of specification a
representation of societies in which male chauvinistic and racialist paradigms affect
the lives of the poor weak female victim.
The female sensibility of these novelists lays bare the restrictive and
dehumanizing social circumstances in which women are caged and cabined by prisons
of male domination. Both these novelists with a keen life and heartfelt female
7
sensibilities attempt to revitalize lives of women and relate how notwithstanding their
harrowing experiences of subordination and humiliation these women raise their
voices and record their actions that symbolize the revolt of integrity against violence
and tyranny. Their fictional accounts with profound human compassion and dignity
capture how female sensibility operates in Egyptian and racist America and how the
victims challenge the myriad oppressions and exploitation let loose by regimes that
encourage and perpetuate male domination. While El Saadawi takes on a line typical
of a victim-activist and a creative artist, Toni Morrison deploys her versatile genius
and finest strategies of postmodern fiction and magical realism to root her characters
on the Afro-American cultural tradition. Both novelists are committed to their female
sensibility and expose varieties of harassment and torture commonly lying outside
parameters of Egyptian and American societies in the 20th century. Toni Morrison
amplifies reality in her works with the touch of magic realism as much as El Saadawi
depicts mind boggling instances of torture perpetuated on the weak and hapless
female characters. These are women who live in the hopeless depth and nadirs of
mean vulgarity to which male dominating societies descend in their attempts to
perpetuate long accepted norms of male supremacy.
Nawal El Saadawi is a product of the postcolonial Egyptian society of our
times and also a part of the feminist movement that started in Egypt in the nineteenth
century. Egypt became a part of the British Empire in 1882 and this gave rise to a
growing national consciousness. The traditional order of Egypt had collapsed and
Egypt had also lost its identity. Under the colonial rule a growing dissatisfaction with
Egyptian society began to emerge and with it came calls for reform. The improvement
of the position of women was part of this reform. Towards the end of the nineteenth
century the Egyptian Nationalists such as Muhammed Abdu and Gamal Al-Din Al8
Afghani strongly felt that there can be no improvement of Egypt without improving
the position of women.
In the struggle for freedom against the British Imperialists, all classes of
Egyptian society participated and for the fist time women were involved in it in1919.
In the words of Kumari Jayawardena, Women took to “open political agitation in the
Nationalist movement against the British” (Feminism and Nationalism149). The
veiled gentlewomen of Cairo paraded in the streets shouting slogans for independence
and freedom from foreign occupation. They organized strikes and demonstrations,
boycotted the British goods and wrote petitions protesting against British actions in
Egypt. This period in the history of Egypt is referred to as the first phase of Egyptian
feminism. Two of the very important women are Aisha Al-Taimuriyya and Zainab AlFawwaz who were both born in the middle of the nineteenth century and were the first
generation to use writing in the freedom struggle movement.
The Islamic modernists and the reformers such as Muhammed Abdu and
Gamal Al-Din Al-Afghani had supported struggle for women’s rights. They argued
that women constitute half the nation and there would be no progress for Egyptian
society unless women get their rights. A very important name which demands a
special mention here is that of an Egyptian lawyer and jurist, Qasim Amin (18651908) who wanted the abolition of the veil, higher education for women and a
complete halt to the misuse of polygamy. He has written two books on these issues: in
his book The Emancipation of Women Qasim Amin holds that the status of Egyptian
women urgently needs reform and that the emancipation of Egypt depends entirely on
that. While he acknowledges the validity of The Koran regarding social institutions,
he states that the traditions resulting in the inequality of women should be re-
9
examined in the light of modern sciences. He strongly believed that the backwardness
of Egyptian women is due to a misinterpretation of Islam and only education can take
away the plight of Egyptian women. In his second book The New Woman Amin
places the emancipation of women at an intellectual level, while elaborating on the
advantages of Westernization.
The later part of 19th century Egypt saw the expansion of formal education for
women. And as early as the latter half of the 1880s, middle-class women began to be
published in men’s journals and in the early 1890s, middle-class women founded their
own journals and they also wrote for the other journals. The writings of many of these
women show a blend of feminist consciousness and religious and nationalist
imperatives.
Huda Shaarawi (1882-1947) and Saiza Nabarawi (1886-1951) inaugurated yet
another page in the history of Egyptian feminist activism: they removed their veils at
the Cairo railway station after returning from an international feminist conference.
Shaarawi formed the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) and it included the upper- and
middle-class women. It declared an agenda for political, social and economic
transformation and integrated (urban) women into public life on a level with men. The
EFU was aware that the lives of peasant women should not be confined to the private
sphere, and their presence in public space would drastically transform their life in
private sphere. The EFU grounded its arguments for women’s rights within the Islamic
modernist and nationalist framework.
In the 1940s, a few women such as Fatma Nimat Rashid, Durriyya Shafiq and
Inji Aflatun emerged as leaders of populist feminism and widened the feminist circle in
Egypt. All the three used their pens in the cause of feminism. Rashid and Shafiq
10
founded organizations and their own journals. Aflatun wrote books and contributed to
the other journals. Fatma Ni’mat Rashid became the editor of Arabic journal AlMisriyya. She founded the National Feminist Party (NFP) in 1944, whose name
indicated its conscious attempt to form, for the first time, a women’s political party.
Shafiq was far more successful than Rashid in rousing the women of the middle class.
An organization called The Daughter of the Nile Union was the first feminist
association to establish a broad base in the provinces and opened centres spreading
literacy and hygiene among the poor women.
Inji Aflatun used both direct action and the power of her pen to further the
cause of women’s liberation. She drew attention to the economic and social problems
of workers and peasants and overarching patriarchal domination of women in the home
and workplace in her book Nahnu Al-Nisa Al-Misriyyat (We Egyptian Women, 1949).
She located class and gender oppression within the framework of imperialist
exploitation. Like the other feminist leaders, Aflatun also insisted on political rights for
women and on improved personal status laws. Although a Marxist, Aflatun situated
her call for women’s rights within an Islamic framework.
In the face of continued patriarchal domination, Nabarawi, Aflatun, and others
formed the Ittihad al-Nisa’ al-Qawmi, (the National Feminist Union), appealing to a
broad coalition of women across the political spectrum, but the government blocked
their efforts by refusing to accord recognition to the organization. The government,
finally granted women the right to vote in 1956 but in the same year it withdrew the
right to political organisation. Feminist organizations including the political
organizations were banned. The EFU was forced to confine itself to welfare work and
to change its name. The word “feminist” was no longer acceptable. The following year
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Aflatun, branded as a communist, was sent to prison for four years. Shafiq was under
house arrest. Rashid's feminist party was dissolved. Nabarawi was silenced. Feminist
activities spearheaded by women that had come into being in the aftermath of the 1919
nationalist revolution was suppressed after three and a half decades. However, women
kept their independent feminism alive behind the scenes in Egypt reminding us of the
early feminism of the harem, and their voice was heard internationally.
Feminism reappeared in Egypt in the beginning of the seventies of the previous
century with the coming to power of Sadat and the rise of “Open Door (infitah)
Capitalism”. It also coincided with the acceleration of the second wave of Islamic
“fundamentalism” that had begun to make its appearance following the war in 1967
mainly among university students, women and men, of the lower middle class, many
of whom had come from the rural areas. Among the women, resurgent Islamism took
the form of a return to the veil mainly a covering of the head and body but not face.
Women were returning to the veil. Against this background a medical doctor and
feminist, Nawal El Saadawi, published her book Al-Mar’a WA Al-Jins (Women and
Sex) in 1972, a year after Sadat came to power. With the authority and clinical
evidence of a doctor, and more particularly as a female doctor El Saadawi exposes
men’s assaults on women’s bodies, their obsession about female virginity and sexual
purity. She condemned the public and commercial exploitation of the female body. El
Saadawi terms clitoridectomy as a savage practice and wants it to be stopped. She feels
that the patriarchal control of female sexuality has wrongly been implemented in the
name of Islam. It is another matter that the book cost her job in the Health Ministry in
Egypt. This forced El Saadawi to take to self exile. Woman at Point Zero (1975), El
Saadawi’s first novel, in away is a fictional manifestation of feministic concerns of the
writer. El Saadawi represents a very important feminist phase in contemporary Egypt
12
and has remained a very staunch feminist over five decades now. She has enjoyed
many strategies to keep the feminist movement alive.
El Saadawi formed Jam’iyya Taddamun lil-Mar’a al-Arabiyya (the Arab
Women’s Solidarity Association, or AWSA) in 1985. The organization, under the
presidency of Nawal El Saadawi, was headquartered in Cairo with its branches in
several Arab countries and in some Arab communities in the West. AWSA strongly
believes that, in the words of Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, “Women’s active
participation in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the Arab world is
essential for the realization of true democracy in Arab society” (Opening the Gates: A
Century of Arab Women Writing 367). It wants an end to gender discrimination both in
the family and society. The initial members of AWSA included a wide spectrum of
feminists.
The later part of the 20th century has seen a surge of feminist works in Egypt.
Latifa Al-Zayyat (1923-1996) wrote fiction, memoirs and drama in addition to literary
criticism and translation to tell the story of a middle-class Egyptian girl who comes of
age during the Egyptian nationalist movement of the mid-20th century. Nawal El
Saadawi also belongs to this group of writers. She will be discussed in great detail
later. Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot (1991) is set in a women’s prison where a
variety of women tell the stories of their lives, their crimes and their dreams for the
future. It is both a modern Arabian Nights and a microcosm of Egyptian womanhood
in the 20th century, based in part on Bakr’s own experience of imprisonment as a
political prisoner in the 1980s. Miral Al–Tahawi’s Gazelle Tracks (1996) delineates
the story of a young woman in search of her identity. Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love
13
(1999) takes the readers across the Egyptian landscape, Egyptian history alongside a
gripping love story.
Nawal El Saadawi is a contemporary Egyptian radical feminist writer. She was
born in 1931 into a family of modest means in the small village of Kafr Tahla near
Cairo and grew up in a large family of nine brothers and sisters. Her father believed
strongly in education, which helped him to become an official in the Egyptian
Ministry of Education. He was relatively progressive and taught his daughter to speak
her mind. He encouraged her to study the Arabic language. Her mother was a
daughter of the Director General of the Army recruitment and was educated in a
French school. Both her parents died at a young age leaving El Saadawi with the sole
burden of providing for a large family. El Saadawi is always proud of the way she
was brought up in an atmosphere which encouraged education for women and pursuit
of knowledge; she attended public schools before going on to study in the faculty of
medicine at the University of Cairo. In other words, El Saadawi’s formal education
took place in the native Egyptian Arabic-language schools. She graduated as a
medical doctor in 1955 from the University of Cairo.
El Saadawi had started writing even as a child. In 1944, at the age of thirteen,
she had already written a novel Mudhakkirat Tifla Ismuha Suad (Memoirs of a
Female Child Named Suad). She writes in Arabic primarily for an Arab audience and
she addresses the western readership and academia through the translations of her
works into English and other European languages. Over half a century she has written
about thirty books in Arabic (several of them translated into English) and they include
medical texts, short stories, novels, plays, prison memoirs, travelogues and cultural
writings.
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The turning point in her life took place in 1972 when she published her book
Woman and Sex which was a daring book on sexuality. She had strongly reacted
against female circumcision in this book. She had to pay a heavy price for doing so.
She was dismissed from service as a doctor. After losing her governmental position,
she devoted herself to research on women: from 1973 to 1976 she worked on women
and neurosis in the Ain Shams University’s Faculty of Medicine. Her contact with a
prisoner at Qanatir Prison served as an inspiration for her novel A Woman at Point
Zero (1975). From 1979 to 1980 she was the United Nation Advisor for the Women’s
Programme in Africa and the Middle East. She was highly critical of President Anwar
Sadat and his corrupt government for which she was put in jail for three months in
1981. Her incarceration forms the basis for her Memoirs from the Women’s Prison. In
1982 El Saadawi founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, an international
feminist and socialist organization devoted to promoting women’s liberation through
international conferences and creating income-generating projects for rural women.
The exploitation and subjugation of women is the focal point of God Dies by the Nile.
Her novel Two Women in One depicts the limitation of women’s roles in a repressive
society. The Fall of the Imam antagonised the religious establishment in Egypt and
this forced El Saadawi to flee Egypt. This was followed by two other novels The
Circling Song and Searching, the latter focuses on a woman striving for love and selfactualization. El Saadawi has also written two autobiographies: A Daughter of Isis is
about her childhood and her activist role in Egyptian feminism and Walking through
Fire outlines her political battles to change the status of women in the Middle Eastern
society.
Her daring and bold ways have earned a following of her own among the Arab
youth and a reading public. She continues to write while censored by some Arab
15
regimes, some of which have banned even the distribution of her books. Yet, she
managed to publish some of them in other Arab countries such as Lebanon. Contrary
to her reception within the Arabic cultural environment, El Saadawi’s books have
enjoyed a good deal of favourable coverage by the western press. Various specialized
magazines and pamphlets such as Third World Quarterly, Marxism Today, New
Society, and Women’s Review promptly print the reviews of each newly published
translation of El Saadawi’s books. Though she is considered a controversial writer by
the Arab critics and by Arab governments, there is a strong disagreement on the issues
related to the quality of her literary style. Most of them do acknowledge that her
research work and criticism have been constructive and original.
If there is a single activity that has sustained the Egyptian feminist throughout
her years in medical school, government service, prison, it is writing. Nawal El
Saadawi had to sacrifice her husband for the sake of writing. When his colleagues
complimented El Saadawi’s husband on a short story she had published, he presented
her with an ultimatum: choose between him or her writing. She writes in her prose
essay “How to write and why”, “I choose my writing and left him…writing is
essential to my life, like breathing. I can live without husband but I cannot live
without writing” (The Essential Nawal El Saadawi 8). This is a dramatic step for an
Arab woman, for whom marriage still fulfills a socially sacred and legitimizing
function. But such a step should not surprise anyone who knows Nawal El Saadawi.
El Saadawi’s writings explore the oppression and exploitation of women and
work towards a socialist restructuring of the society. In order to achieve this she says
she needs to speak the truth. “If I don’t tell the truth, I don’t deserve to be a writer”
(Newson-Horst 55). And to speak the truth, she would not want even the gods spared:
16
“I am a humanist and socialist and I am against classism, racism, against all kinds of
discrimination, and if God is unjust, I am against him too. I cannot abide injustice”
(Newson-Horst 56). It is this feminist who wants to explore and analyse the truth
behind the Egyptian women in her novels. She asserts:
The oppression of women, the exploitation and social
pressures to which they are exposed, are not characteristic
of Arab or Middle Eastern societies, or countries of the
“Third World” alone. They constitute an integral part of the
political, economic, and cultural system, preponderant in
most of the world - whether that system is backward and
feudal in nature, or a modem industrial society that has
been submitted to the far-reaching influence of scientific
and technological revolution. (The Hidden Face of Eve 2)
El Saadawi boldly and avidly presents the issues like female genital
mutilation, virginity, prostitution, madness, and crimes of honour. Her novels
uncompromisingly deal with highly proscribed and provocative subjects related to
women’s body and sexuality, their legal status in Arab societies, theology, religion
and politics. This makes her novels the most powerful narratives in the contemporary
literary world. Therefore it is true as Fedwa Malti Douglas rightly puts it:
No Arab woman inspires as much emotion as Nawal El
Saadawi. No woman in the Middle East has the subject of
more polemic. Certainly, no Arab woman’s pen has
violated as many sacred enclosures as that of Nawal El
Saadawi (Men, Women and God(s) 1).
17
This gives El Saadawi a place of pride among the Arab feminist novelists. I see this as
a meaningful opportunity to understand the cultural work of our society and make an
attempt to explore in this thesis.
Toni Morrison
The other woman writer with whom this thesis is concerned is Toni Morrison,
who is part of a great tradition of Afro-American writing which has a history of over
two hundred years now. Afro-American women’s literary tradition goes back to
Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) an eighteenth century slave writer. She is the first
African-American woman to publish her writings. Her Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral (1773) brought her fame, with prominent Americans such as
George Washington praising her work. With her uncanny knack for writing and
penetrating psychological insights she has produced works that have brought global
attention to women’s writing in general and African American writings in particular.
Early African-American women novelists are Frances Harper (1825-1911),
Jessie Fauset (1882-1961) and Nella Larsen (1891-1964) and although their women
characters are Afro-American, they were more like the American lady like persons
than Afro-American women. Frances Harper in the preface to her novel Iola Leroy
makes her purpose clear which is to “awaken the hearts of our countrymen a strong
sense of justice and a more Christian like humanity”( ix ). Life was not very easy for
African-Americans in the 1890s, where they were lynched, burned out, raped, and
deprived of their rights as citizens in the wake of the failure of Reconstruction. Jessie
Fauset, a woman novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, writes with a craving for white
acceptance. She wants to correct the impression most white people have about black
people. In her preface to The Chinaberry Tree (1931), she says that her novel is about
18
“those breathing spells in-between spaces where coloured men and women work and
live and go their ways in no thought of the problem”(ix). Both Harper and Fauset
were thus aware of the negative images of the black people that predominated in the
minds of white Americans. Nella Larsen (1893-1963) too creates such heroines who
wish to ‘pass’ for whites. They look like whites and act like whites. For example, her
heroine, Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928), identifies herself with white value
structure so much so that she gets herself alienated from the common Afro-American
mass socially and culturally. One notable exception to this trend in early AfricanAmerican women writers’ works was Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937). She was one of the first Afro-American women writers to
attempt a serious study of the Afro-American folklore and folk history. The major
themes that emerged in the novels of Hurston were search for Afro-American
woman’s self-fulfillment through community, quest for the ideal relationship
between man and woman, black sisterhood and significance of
fidelity
in
interpersonal relationships. Ann Petry in her novel The Street (1946) presented
women and mothers struggling against the social and economic hostilities stacked
against them.
A definite shift in the representation of African American women began with
Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha (1953). The protagonist of the novel, a very
ordinary black woman, manages to transform her little life into something significant
in spite of the limitations set by her husband, her family, her race, her class and by her
society in general. She manages to be her own. While presenting a young black girl
coming into womanhood, Brooks does not employ the stereotypes her predecessors
used. For the first time in African-American literature, we come across an AfroAmerican character who is neither a tragic victim consumed by the deterministic
19
socio-economic conditions, nor a pariah obsessed by any cult. In this sense Maud
Martha heralded a new moment in African-American literary history which was to
establish the authenticity of Afro-American women’s true self by placing her life in
the context of Afro-American culture and community.
The African-American women’s literary tradition took a qualitative leap
into the worlds of ontological transmutation of Afro-American women’s existential
conditions with Paule Marshall’s first novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959).
Women in her novels speak to their own self and try to articulate that self with great
force. This leads to a perceptible change in the writings of Afro-American women
writers which manifested especially in the works of Alice Walker. She prefers to call
herself a ‘womanist’ because ‘womanism’, in her opinion, expresses women’s
concerns better than feminism. It appreciates “women’s culture, women’s emotional
flexibility... and women’s strength” (In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens xi). She
explores the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and the triumph of AfroAmerican women. Her novels The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and
Meridian (1976) are very significant so far as Alice Walker’s ‘womanist’ theory is
concerned.
By the mid-seventies, African American women writers like Paule Marshall,
Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones had not only defined their cultural
context as a distinctly American-American one but also probed many facets of the
interrelationship of racism, sexism and classism in their works. Toni Morrison
belongs to this phase. These three factors - races, sex and class - signify the traumatic
conditions under which African-Americans lived in white America. Right from the
days of slavery, the blacks, irrespective of sex had realized the cruel reality of racism.
20
Sexism, more oppressive physically and mentally, was the cause of grievance to the
black women who were sexually exploited by both the Afro-Americans and white
men. Just as Afro-Americans as a group were relegated to an underc1ass by virtue of
their race, so were women relegated to a separate caste by virtue of their sex.
Confronted on all sides by racial and sexual discrimination, the black woman
had no friends but only liabilities and responsibilities but, within the separate caste
a standard of women was designed in terms of a class definition. The ideal southern
lady image of eighteenth century America was obviously a white, beautiful rich
woman who did not work. The ideal concept of woman in the society then, is not only
racist and sexist but also classist. Since Afro-American women were, by nature of
their race, conceived of as lower class, they could hardly approximate the norm as in
the words of Barbara Christian:
They had to work; most could not be ornamenta1 or
withdrawn from the world; and, according to the aesthetics
of this country, they were not beautiful. But neither were
the men. Any aggressiveness or intelligence on their part,
qualities necessary for participation in the work world,
were constructed as unwomanly and tasteless. (Black
Feminist Criticism 72)
Thus, African American women could not achieve the standard of womanhood on the
one hand and on the other, they were biologically females with all the societal
restrictions associated with that state. In short, the black women in America were
made victims of triple jeopardy of racism, sexism and classism.
Writing against this social situation, Toni Morrison analyses the relationship
21
between race, gender and class assumptions. In each of her novels she explores some
aspect of oppression afflicting African American women and men. Though most of
her novels are revealed through the eyes of black women, she does not adopt the kind
of political feminism associated with women’s movement of the 1970s. Rather, she
writes in the tradition of the black women writers like Hurston and Paule Marshall as
a cultural feminist, celebrating the strength of black women against the heavy odds of
racism, sexism and classism and she does this social and aesthetic consciousness.
Toni Morrison born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorrian, Ohio, in 1931 comes
from a family of industrious and hard working people. Her maternal grandparents left
Alabama and travelled to Ohio in search of better educational opportunities for their
children. Her father, a Georgian by birth, also fled the state’s hostile racial climate
and settled in Ohio. Morrison, the second of four children, was named Chloe Anthony
Wafford. She grew up in Lorain, Ohio, during the great depression. In Lorain where
everyone was poor, there was not much of segregation on the basis of class and overt
racial hostility. She grew up in a social set up that was rich in black lore, music, myths
and the community rituals. Her grandfather played violin and her mother sang in the
choir. Storytelling, especially of ghost stories, was a shared activity for men and
women in her family. As a teenager, Morrison read the European literary masters of
English, Russian and French. All these factors go on to tell us that Toni Morrison has
grown up in an atmosphere that nurtured people with a creative bent of mind.
Morrison excelled in her studies; she received an undergraduate degree in
English from Howard University and her masters in English literature from Cornell
University. Around this time, she changed her name from Chole Anthony Wafford to
Toni making it simple and short. Her M.A. thesis was on Faulkner and Virginia
22
Woolf. Her first teaching appointment was at Texas Southern University. From there,
she went to Howard as an instructor of English. She married Harold Morrison, a
Jamaican architect, and had two sons. They divorced in 1964. She became a senior
editor at Random House, a major publishing company in America. While working
here she wrote her first novel The Bluest Eye in 1970.
For Toni Morrison writing is not an innocent activity or choice. Her writing is
neither about her personal dreams or her individuals self. Writing is part of her larger
aim of creating beauty and articulation of politics through art. She writes:
If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I
write), isn’t about the village or the community or about
you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in
indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my
imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal
dreams-which is to say yes, the work must be political. ... It
seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to
make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful
at the same time. (Rootedness: The Ancestors Foundation
340).
Morrison’s search for beauty and politics of art necessarily includes black life,
their history and genealogy, slavery and racism, and their psychological and social
effects on the Afro-Americans over the ages, the victimization of people within the
context of a racist social order, and the daily inescapable assault by a world which
denies minimum dignity to the Afro-Americans.
23
In this sense, Morrison’s writing has been her attempt at discovering the AfroAmerican Woman’s self in white America. She says in her essays “Playing in the
Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992), “my work requires me to think
about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my tenderized,
sexualized, wholly radicalized world”(4) setting yet another objective for her writing.
Foregrounded in the three adjectives ‘tenderized, sexualized and radicalized’ is the
fate of Afro-Americans in general and Afro-American women in particular. Women
generally are part of a silenced world: they are objects of sex and fundamentally the
“other” of the white/black patriarchal self. In this Morrison represents the African
American women, not her individual self and attempts to discover the self of AfroAmerican woman. Morrison herself realizes the need of such a coming together of
two cultures, as, prerequisite and vital for African-Americans emotional,
psychological and political survival. As she says “so much of what is true about AfroAmericans is not only the Africans but the Americans - we are very much that and
trying to separate, chose things out can be very difficult, if you want to separate them
out.” (225).
Set in a small Midwestern town in Lorain, Ohio, during the Depression, The
Bluest Eye tells the story of Pecola Breedlove who, hating her black self yearns for
blue eyes which she believes will enable her to escape the racial persecution. Sula
(1973) her second novel revolves around the two friends, Sula and Nel, who grow up
together in a small town called Ohio, through their sharply divergent paths of
womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation. Her third novel Song
of Solomon (1977) delineates Pilate’s individual attempt to define herself through
music and song. Preserving her ethnic culture and transmitting her cultural mores
through its mythical representation are also a part of her dreams and Pilate strives
24
towards that. Her next novel Beloved (1987) deals with the history of slavery and the
various methods the Afro-Americans employ to resist slavery. Tar Baby (1981) her
fifth novel deals with the two young lovers called Jadine and Son and the pain,
struggle, and compromises confronting Afro-Americans seeking to live and love with
integrity in the white world. Set in the 1920’s Jazz (1992) Morrison’s sixth novel tells
the story of Violet Trace’s who, betrayed and humiliated by her husband Joe, schemes
plot after a plot to take revenge on the 18 year old girl friend of her husband Joe.
Paradise (1998) her seventh novel tells the story of a few women who find
themselves at the edge of all Afro-American town called Ruby and the various
methods of the town leaders to kill these women in order to prevent the change the
women were bringing about. Love (2003) is a chronicle in Morrison’s continuing
exploration of the lives, communities, and histories of the African Americans. The
story specifically interrogates the meaning of love for post Civil Rights movement
among members of the African-American communities. The novel’s main characters,
Heed and Christine Cosey, provide a stage for the exploration of the larger issues
which affect African-American communities.
El Saadawi and Toni Morrison
Though the two writers belong to different ethical, cultural, socio-political
backgrounds but there are certain affinities and similarities between Nawal El
Saadawi and Toni Morrison such as they are born in the same year; they consistently
write about the issues of women of their respective communities. These women are
sensitive human beings gauging the social reality around them. They started their
writing at a very crucial time in their respective countries. While El Saadawi started to
discuss very sensitive issues such as women’s sexuality which is considered as taboo
25
at that time Morrison started to write about slavery after the Civil War when it was not
easy to talk about slavery. Both of them engaged in writing as an act of protest and
resistance.
Similarly there are also some differences between the two writers: while El
Saadawi is influenced by the socialist ideology of feminism, Toni Morrison is by the
black feminist ideology. El Saadawi sees that the original cause of women’s
oppression in patriarchy which manifests itself internationally as capitalism and
imperialism and nationally in the feudal and capitalist classes of the Third World
countries where as Morrison argues that sexism and racism are inextricable from one
another and that all forms of white feminism strive to overcome sexism and class
oppression and ignore racism which is the original cause of black women’s
oppression. Morrison argues that the liberation of black women entails freedom for all
people, since it would require the end of racism, sexism and class oppression.
However, El Saadawi sees the need to work alongside not just men but other groups,
as she sees the oppression of women as a part of a larger pattern that affects every one
involved in the capitalist society.
The other points of differences between the two novelists are: Morrison writes
in English, El Saadawi although a postcolonial subject writes in her mother tongue,
which goes a long way in the language politics in postcolonial world. One is a Muslim
and the other a Christian, but the human self and the woman’s self that the two writers
talk about cuts across religion, race and language. These factors I believe will make
the study a significant academic exercise.
This dissertation argues that Arab women and African-American women as
represented in El Saadawi’s and Morrison’s novels respectively share similar
26
experiences in the sense that women are presented as a marginalized lot. They are
affected by alienation. They live under oppression and exploitation and they are
shackled by the existing norms of their societies. Very importantly, the works of the
two novelists exhibit female sensibility so far as they present a woman’s perception
and point of view.
El Saadawi’s writings have attracted the attention of the academic world and a
good number of books and articles have been written about her works. George
Tarabishi’s book Woman Against Her Sex: A Critique of Nawal El Saadawi is more
about the life and mission than her writings. The book Gender Writing/Writing
Gender: The Representation of Women in a Selection of Modern Egyptian Literature
by Nadje Al-Ali talks about El Saadawi’s motivation for writing, her idea of the role
of literature in society, the meaning she attaches to her own literary works and her
attitude towards the position, predicament and role of women in Egyptian society. The
book Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing by Margot Badran and
Miriam Cook is an anthology of Arab feminist writing in English translation and
includes a few articles on El Saadawi. Feminism and Beside Itself (1995), a collection
of articles, discusses the major thematic concerns of a few of the novels of El Saadawi
and Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s book Men, Women and God(s) makes an attempt to read
El Saadawi’s novels as a protest against the dominant socio-political system of the
Egyptian world.
Toni Morrison’s fictional works have received a wider appreciation and
academic attention. Several books and articles have appeared: Toni Morrison by
Harold Bloom which is a collection of articles is introductory in nature. The book
gives a detailed biography of the author and a brief analysis of her novels. Jan
27
Furman’s Toni Morrison’s Fiction traces the recurrent themes and settings in
Morrison’s works. Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism (Critical Studies
in Black Life and Culture) by David Middleton is a collection of contemporary
criticism, and it explores Morrison’s concerns with racial and gender issues. It
analyzes Morrison in relation to other major modern authors, her philosophical and
religious speculations, and her preoccupation with the process of fiction making. The
Novels of Toni Morrison: Search for Self and Place Within the Community by Patricia
Bryce Bjork focuses on the cultural and communal traditions embedded in the five
selected novels of Morrison. Bjork explores how communal traditions influence the
search for self and place within a given African-American community. The book
examines historical and ideological aspects of African-American literature while
offering in-depth critical analysis of all her novels. Bessie W. Jones and Andrey L.
Vinson’s The Works of Toni Morrison discusses only the four novels of the writer.
A.A. Mutalik Desai’s New Waves in American Literature discusses mainly The Bluest
Eye against the contemporary socio-political situation in America. Ayesha Irfan’s
Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Readers Companion is about a single novel (Beloved).
Karla F.C. Halloway and Stephani’s jointly edited New Dimension of Spirituality
offers to give critical perspectives on Morrison’s works. The book Commonwealth
and American Nobel Laureates in Literature: Essays in Criticism a collection of
critical writings by various writers which is edited by McLeod offers critical insights
into the works of the writer.
Taking courage from these writers and authors of the innumerable articles
published in journals/ejournals and books/ebooks the thesis makes an attempt to do a
comparative study of Nawal El Saadawi and Toni Morrison looking at them as writers
championing the cause of women in their writings that are distinctly rooted in their
28
respective culture, language and literature.
Chapterisation
The dissertation is divided into five chapters, each of which focuses on a
specific theme. The first chapter, “Introduction”, offers a brief history of the Egyptian
society and the Afro American society with a special reference to women and the
development of female sensibility in their respective societies, and in addition to
providing a brief account of Nawal El Saadawi and Toni Morrison’s life, career and
their literary works.
The second chapter “The Quest for Self Realization” makes an attempt to
compare El Saadawi’s Two Women in One (1986) and Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973),
and goes on to explore the respective protagonists’ search for their self. The chapter
examines Bahiah, Sula and Nel’s relationships. The chapter also looks into the
boundaries within which Bahiah, Sula and Nel shape their quests, and to the extent to
which they succeed in reaching their selfhood. In showing how the woman’s self
grows, develops, transforms, and expresses itself, the chapter focuses on the direction,
the import, and the praxis of female selfhood.
The third chapter “Exploitation and Resistance” focuses on El Saadawi’s God
Dies by the Nile with Morrison’s Beloved and examines how the protagonists Zakeya
and Sethe respectively are traumatized, abused and exploited. It traces the situations
which lead to the abuse and exploitation of these two protagonists and how the
community contributes to their agony. The chapter then proceeds to dwell on the
protagonists’ resistance to the tremendous suffering and exploitation though they pay
a heavy price by way of putting an end to their suffering and exploitation.
29
The fourth chapter, “Oppression and Self Esteem”, compares El Saadawi’s
Woman at Point Zero and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and argues that the humiliated
and oppressed women employ various methods to transcend fear and to discover their
self esteem.
The last chapter entitled “Conclusion” discusses the ways and methods El
Saadawi and Morrison envision to liberate women from racial, sexist, socio-political
and cultural discrimination. It argues that the two novelists although belong to two
different nations and cultures are uniquely united by the silken thread of female
sensibility.
30
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