Finding fulfillment in all the wrong places. (c2009)

Abstract

This study deals with Nadine Gordimer's 2001 The Pickup, Laura Esquivel's 1989 Like Water for Chocolate and Hanan al-Shaykh 1980 Hikayat Zahra. All three works are fundamentally different in terms of language, culture and plot. However, they share the representation of a female character who finds some kind of fulfillment by actualizing an inhospitable space. The novels recount stories of cultural conflicts and female resourcefulness in achieving fulfillment. These women find happiness in the places where, according to the feminist paradigm, they shouldn't. In The Pickup, the female protagonist Julie leaves a country that promotes a certain level of freedom and moves to an Arab country where she constantly contends with cultural constraints placed on women. In the unnamed Arab country, the constraints she faces allow her to discover aspects of herself that she was unaware of in her middle-class South African environment. In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita experiences fulfillment in spaces that are even less propitious: the kitchen of her house and the house of a white American male doctor. In these spaces, she finds the means to free herself from her struggles and explore her feelings. In Hikayat Zahra, Zahra tries to find a secure place and finds it paradoxically in war-tom Lebanon during the Civil War. This thesis examines how the representation of spaces and spatial relations in those novels contribute in the construction of character identities. The purpose of this thesis is to understand how the representation of space in each novel conveys a range of possible models of female liberation. Thus, this thesis situates itself as a contribution to an ongoing revision of feminist studies.