A doctoral thesis presented by Alia Mahmood Salman

University of Manouba/ Tunis 2012

My thesis was a discussion of women in violence and war in the writing of Virginia Woolf and
Alia Mamdouh. I in particular focused through a close textual reading to their novels to
examine the formation and reconstruction of women identity within these circumstances. My
rational was to ground my reading of the selected novels in their social, historical, cultural
and political contexts. While reading for example Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway nearly a century after
it was written, and Mamdouh’s the Mothballs, it is understandable to envision a woman‘s
position in London in1923 and in Iraq in 1940 as repressed, controlled and dominated by men;
but, it is worth remembering that in comparison to any earlier era in London, women had a great
deal of freedom. They had just obtained voting rights, had many modern conveniences that
allowed them leisure time that earlier generations could hardly have conceived of and,
particularly in large cities, also in Iraq, women were experiencing an empowerment in regard
to choices of vocation, lifestyle and independence that was relatively quite extensive; and
although Woolf and Mamdouh strongly advocated women‘s rights in much of their writing, I
contend that in many of their works they do not primarily promote a feminist agenda, but more
accurately, lay out a text that muddles what would be a logical development of this objective.
There are many times when Clarissa or Huda embodies traditionally conceived masculine traits
such as control and power, and Septimus or Jamil the male protagonists, along with other male
characters, exhibit traditionally feminine ones like romance and surrender. As Jeanette
McVicker in Identity and Difference in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway notes, It is Clarissa, not
Septimus, who is moved by thoughts of Empire and strength; it is Clarissa, not Septimus, who
needs to be in control of her surroundings and maintain order. On the other hand, it is
Septimus, not Clarissa, who pays attention to nature; it is Septimus, not Clarissa, who
believes that love must conquer war and death (178).

Both writers recognized and sought to portray how both the private world and external
environment constructs identity. No doubt they are deeply concerned with women‘s rights and
opportunities. They recognize that women often play roles within their societies, performing,
as on stage, scripts written and directed by a patriarchal society Certainly an important theme
and one that infuses many of Woolf‘s and Mamdouh’s works and discussion of the concept of self
within their works is war. I explored these concepts by putting in mind that Woolf was born
into a society whose foundations were built on and shaken by violence; she was affected by
structural, institutional, and personal violence; she lived through one world war and struggled
through part of another (Mathis 28). Woolf is bound to us in many ways; one of the strongest
bonds is our shared birthright of violence; the seeming inevitability of force and coercion as
a primary means of establishing and maintaining relations of power, the seeming inevitability
of war (ibid 29). A response to this statement might be an acknowledgement of how true this
continues to be for citizens of the world today and writers like Alia Mamdouh. The thesis
explores how the ideological overlay of war and its effect on relationships with others who
have gone through its horrors and trauma are revealed in Woolf’s and Mamdouh’s selected novels.
The reality of war is particularly influential on the consciousness becoming of their
characters as it is on so many real world lives. Though the two authors belong to different
contexts and different epochs, but both deal with the same issue of war and violence, their
writing styles and their perceptions are not quite different. The thesis studied the
internalization of war effects on the psych of both writers which they reflected on their
characters. Both writers benefited from war literature written before them and in their turn
influenced many writers. Within the framework of such literature and amidst the social
realities and historical circumstances (domestic and international) that greatly influenced
Woolf’s and Mamdouh’s upbringing, growth and adulthood, they wrote war novels that portray
their experience. Being a female writer in the context of war in a traditional, conservative
and most often hostile environment is a traumatic experience. It would either condemn the
authors to submission and failure or urge them to transcend and triumph over such hostile
environments. Woolf and Mamdouh fought and won, and produced what seems to be an uncompromising
war prose. Woolf and Mamdouh are far from war theoreticians in the disciplinary sense, but are
war theorists in their own right. The horrible act of war prompted them to act as war
denouncers. Like Clausewitz, both of them have their view on “the nature of war”, “the purpose
of war” and “the conduct of war”. War literature in the inter-war period has been massive as
well expressive of the damage that the two wars inflicted. Woolf, as many other writers like
Katherine Mansfield, D.H Lawrence and Storm Jameson denounced war, she is a good representative
of the anti-war prose in England. Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) shows her sensitive affection
after the death of her nephew and as Critic Marina Mackay argues: “…use narrative indirections
to diagnose the two problems of patriarchal culture: that it glorifies militaristic and
materialistic models of masculinity…and that it renders women complicit in male violence…
(124). Mrs. Dalloway is another example that shows Woolf’s steadfastness in her criticism of
the atrocity of war. The solution to these two problems, came only with Woolf’s Three Guineas
(1938)” as the only antidote to the apparently interminable public violence of men and to the
deceptions of women’s attempts at private disengagement” (Mackay 124). Having gone through an
acute depression because of the outbreak of the First World War at the age of thirty-two, Woolf
could not help resisting the fatalistic effect of the Second World War and committed suicide.
In a letter to her husband Leonard Woolf, she explained the devastating effect of the outbreak
of the war. “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel I can’t go through another of
those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time” (qted in spartacus.schoolnet) For Woolf,
war was but another form of violence and another reservoir of rape. Zewrdling dwells on that in
his book Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1987): “She was an instinctive pacifist who found
it impossible to imagine a situation that justified the use of force” (297). Though separated
by temporal and territorial boundaries, Virginia and Alia have had strikingly similar
experiences vis-à-vis of war and violence in society. Both express the impact of war on the
psychological, social and economic life of the Iraqi and English individual and her/his
surroundings and their anti-war stance is similar in their means and perceptions.Regarding
Mamdouh, the impact of both the Iraqi-Iranian war and the US invasion has determined major
themes in her fiction. In Iraq, there were two forms of literary resistance: one against the
powers of the authoritarian regime and another against Western imperialism. Mamdouh, for our
purposes, certainly represented both forms. The war theme in Mamdouh’s novels is prominent and
influential. War affects the character psychologically and pushes him to behave or to resort to
(exile, sex, crimes, suicide…etc) Mamdouh resorted to exile and left Iraq in despair for she
knew that this war is not the last. Many of Her novels represent war scenes and disasters
together with the personification of the tormented feelings of the alienated and exiled people
as Woolf who kept remembering war in her diaries and wrote in 1920 “our generation is daily
scourged by the bloody war” (D, 11, 51). Although Woolf did not participate in war, she
described the suffering of her shocked characters in Mrs. Dalloway. The horrible scenes of war
and the loss of Evan affected Septimus psychologically to the extent that he withdraws within
himself and build a barrier that shuts him from the war like society. Both writers believe in
the meaningless of war. Like Woolf, Mamdouh does not only mention the “killing machine” and
the bloody scenes and disaster that war left behind but also describes the deep pains and
psychological disorders imprinted on the human soul due to war. Mamdouh describes war as a kind
of human misery that haunts her soul. She inscribed this misery on her character’s skins. She
illustrates the absurdity of death in a free literary style. Both writers go with Freud’s
psychological interpretation of aggression. Woolf and Mamdouh offer us a “truth theory” whose
significance is revealed only by living war as a civilian and reproducing its effects as a
theorist and more so as a fiction writer. There is an obvious similarity between Woolf and
Mamdouh’s in their sensibility to the act of war and to their vision of male agency in relation
to war. On the artistic level, Woolf explores events and presents reality by fathoming the
character’s psychological reception, assimilation and reproduction of objective reality.
Mamdouh in her part does not sacrifice literary creativity to political agenda and patriotic
propaganda. True, she is rebellion, but in favor of universal values rather than her own people
and country. She does not particularize human suffering with a calculated agenda but reveals
the ordeal of the Iraqi in order to resist the subjugation of the individual as individual,
whether in Iraq or other territories. The individual, as often portrayed through their
characters, should universally be free from colonial subjugation, political indoctrination and
patriarchal domination. Woolf’s and Mamdouh’s literary text is inexorably humanist. Their tool
in making this approach tenable is “imagination”. Imagination counts because there is no
reality out there without imagining it as it is and, equally, as it ought to be (Japer 15).
One of the first conclusions I reached after reading the selected novels for analysis of
both writers is that war and violence is a direct factor to women’s estrangement. Violence in
the work of both authors is often operated by psychological estrangement which is both a
literary device and a literary issue that has to do with depersonalization. In literature,
estrangement would also refer to a type of characterization that creates fragmented characters
that no longer recognize their bodies in relation to the self and not even vis-à-vis the
external world. Estrangement or the loss of the consciousness/knowledge of the self would
develop into total misrecognition of the body. Systemic violence of all kinds has played a
gigantic role in pushing for the creative writing of twentieth century women in general and
anti-war women writers in particular. In this respect, one of Woolf’s and Mamdouh’s basic
component of writing is the concept of “outsiderness”, Outsiders, whether as actual people or
characters in fiction, often hold a troubled consciousness, a feeling of unimportance and an
emotional sense of loss or nostalgia. The past is often merged with the present or the future
in a delicate juxtaposition that gives rise to this sense of inner tension that women outsiders
feel. Fear instinct is frequently present. These outsiders view themselves as somehow excluded
from everyday life, or as oppressed and powerless even as they try to come to terms with a
better world devoid of frustration and chaos. Woolf’s portrait of Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway
and Mrs. Ramsay in to The Lighthouse illustrate the traditional and problematic women
character. Clarissa does not have a clear and meaningful sense of identity because of the inner
conflict inside her. Woolf contrasts this exterior invisibility with the development of an
interior world packed with unpronounced feelings and thoughts. There is self-questioning
relates to her awareness of her own circumstances; and the wish to change it and gain a fuller
identity. Both writers place overt violence in female world as well as male world. There is an
implicit critique of violence and hatred to war by both sexes throughout their text. In Woolf’s
plot, violence is located in the world of men who are prone to make violence and can be the
victims of its destruction. The outsider finds the past as the justification of his/her
present life. He/she takes refuge in the past and becomes so estranged from the present that he
decides to end his/her own life. The evocation of the past sometimes turns fatalistic like
Septum’s and Sabiha’s traumatic end. To feel as an outsider means that the gulf between the
ideal and the real is huge, and this push the characters to the brink of disaster and suicide.
The new system of an ‘Outsider Society’ can also provide women with an escape from oppression,
simultaneously freeing men from their own form of enslavement. Both writer’s characters
question their own self-worth in the face of oppression, Suheila exclaims: “I find it
impossible to believe that I have lived, and I cannot believe all of the seconds that were mine
to draw on and all I did was to draw back” (TLO 195) Like Woolf’s Clarissa, the women in the
Mothballs feel invisible and are reduced to inconsequence. They hide behind veils as second-
rate people. Both writers outline a view of a women’s society of outsiders that serves as an
alternative to the model of submissive wifedom and motherhood. They argue that there must be a
new criterion for woman’s life and a change in the status of women through a constructive
social mobility. Mamdouh uses the roof in the Mothballs as a refuge for Huda and as a symbol of
freedom, just as Woolf’s narrator for the Outsider’s Society who finds hope in the coming
change. One of the interesting conclusions I found that both writers find strength in the
solidarity of women as outsiders. The reference to “Loved Ones” is to the women who gather
around recollections and who offer each other strength; it is thus how they nurture a sense of
dignity amidst the pain despite brutality and infidelity. Mamdouh and Woolf’s message addresses
hope through unity and emancipation. Their texts trumpet the failure of gender wars and
meaninglessness aggression by pointing beyond them to a society driven by the outsider’s
perspective of peace and creativity without distinctions. Out of the above mentioned
consequences of war and violence on the writer’s and their characters psyche, I chose to
emphasize ‘anger” as a tool used by the writers to clarify their message through their
character’s furious reactions. Psychoanalytically speaking, one is submitted to violence and
oppression either of war or home violence. Hatred and ignorance are reactions to it; yet the
most ordinary reaction is anger. Critics consider A Room of One’s Own, as Woolf’s foremost
“feminist manifesto”. It contains stirring, provocative lectures that expound, analyze and
comment on the changing relationships between women, men, society and literary genres. Despite
the controversial dispute about whether Woolf is using furious language or not, the thesis is
with Woolf’s use of anger as a negotiation of a new condition rather than a mere attempt to
object to a certain reality. It is anger against “rules” “order” and codes, whether they are in
the form of patriotic specters or patriarchal encroachments. Her literary work constitutes a
medium for expressing anger, though not in any conventional fashion, but rather in a mockery
style. In her work, Woolf, nonetheless, seeks not to ultimately turn anger against patriotic-
patriarchal agency, but rather to create equilibrium by which both cultural and gender
differences are reduced. In her part, Mamdouh believes that the female writer might
well vent her own anger at the same time when she manages to submit her message to her society.
“Let anger and provoca¬tion overcome you as you relate your stories and write your novels”
(COAF 66). Like Woolf, Mamdouh tries to grasp and achieve what is out of women’s reach. Both
believe that writing is the nutshell of the totality of their thought and the ultimate message
capable of change. On her part, Mamdouh escalates her rage against the inhuman face of war by
adopting a violent solution. In her novel Layla & the Wolf, she advertently makes the
characters go as far as to decide to blow up their oil pipes to avenge the enemy. Mamdouh in
particular hardly controls her intense feelings of anger. But her uncontrollable emotions are
often tamed by the smoothness of her writing. This is, one would argue, the paradox of a
genius. The artistic pronouncement of anger is what renders Mamdouh’s anti-war and anti-
patriarchal prose an open-ended field to explore. The paradox of self-estrangement in life is
atoned for by the consistency of artistic creativity in her writing. Like Woolf, she has
complex sensitivity towards violence. One of my other concerns in this study is to explore the
relationship binding the real historic events and the imaginative texts of both authors. Both
writers historicize their texts, What I noticed in my analysis of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, to the
Lighthouse, Three Guineas and Mamdouh’s The Loved Ones, Al Gulama and Passion is their
writer’s historical sensibility and use of violence as a powerful backdrop to create their
characters, settings, allusions and even narrative structure. Indeed, these novels intersect in
exposing from the inside out submerged cases of historical violence (physical, psychological,
sexual and cultural) inflicted on women as well as men. I tried to examine the historical facts
and the writer’s methods in re-writing their texts in fictional perspective. At the same time,
I attempted an analysis of the deep reasons that make both writers overlap history on their
texts which violence and war are its most influential instigator. Then I focused
on the most popular results and consequences of violence and war that caused people to resort
to exile and alienation. The thesis studied the complexities especially of the Iraqis
expatriation in overall the world as well as those who are alienated in their own home. One of
the major results I have come to is that nostalgic perceptions of home can, to a certain
extent, empower the migrant to establish a new identity and at the same time foster his/her
vulnerable self – perception as an unwelcomed exile. Yet, in the novels under scrutiny in my
dissertation, the nostalgia of (Clarissa, Mrs. Ramsay, Suheila, Huda, etc.) to the lovely past
places is but wishful thinking. Despite the un lovable conditions in her exile in Paris,
Suheila in the Loved Ones doesn’t return back home, for although her home represents for her
the identity that she lacks but home means fire. Suheila is like her writer Mamdouh who
breathes the air of Iraq and lives its agony but chooses to live away from its fire (my
interview). Sarmad and his lover Alf in Al Tashahi end their narratives before the reader knows
what decision Sarmad will take. The allusion stirs from the fear, estrangement and uncertainty
that often characterize the migrant and the exiled. Woolf’s and Mamdouh novels reside in the
internalization of the effect of war and violence by their respective female characters. The
externalization of such an effect often leads to non-self-identification, self-misrecognition,
schizophrenic manifestations and suicidal tendencies. Yet, such impacts do not concern all
characters, since misrecognition of the self sometimes manifests itself by the “virtualization
of the body” whereby the enfeebled body (culturally and socially) turns into a powerful device
and a tool of resistance against the hegemonic manly world. While this seems to be a paradox,
both Woolf and Mamdouh have shown in their writing how a woman might gain power through
weakness, ability through inability and challenge through submission. While estrangement
functions in organic harmony with outsiderness and otherness, it might well create an
alternative identity with which the female character braves the violent world responsible for
women’s displacement. As for the other consequences of war and violence, I focused on exile
and alienation which differs from one another in several ways. Writing about the experience of
being alien or writing about the experience of living with the “other” requires a lot of
experience in the exile country and the ability to go inside the writers’ soul and mind (my
interview May2011). When in exile, one can never return, and there is a sense of finality in
the act. If one is alienated, they may eventually learn to adapt and fit into society. As we
found in Mamdouth’s work, exile means that one can never go home and never truly feel at home.
Mamdouth would always be Iraqi in thought, in heart and in customs. She explores clearly and
explicitly the direct and indirect ruptures in the immigrant-exiled personality, the seen or
unseen changes in it, and the tough reality of having to deal with a hostile new environment.
The Iraqi writer expresses the difficulty in adapting to the other’s culture and lifestyle. I
focused on “loneliness” as the first and foremost feeling that the immigrant- exiled feels in
his new home, which develops into a sense of non-integration with the ‘other’. I argued that
Woolf reached the status of a feminist rebel due to an alienated childhood as well as a
displaced adulthood. The image of Woolf often resembles that of the characters in her novels,
as the restless, tormented and slightly insane artist who suffered forced alienation from
reality. Woolf failed to tame the death instinct by an open rebellion against the circumstances
that pushed her to suicide. I argued that the social violence against Woolf was fatal but that
against Mamdouh was less serious. However, having to leave your country and never come back is
also as devastating as the effect of death. Alienation of Woolf led to her death, but
alienation of Mamdouh condemned her to a lifetime exile. Both Mamdouh and Woolf were feminists
in a patriarchal society and wanted freedom from the imposed social structures. One of the
important conclusions I reached in examining the selected novels and their writers is that
Woolf and Mamdouh share the anti war stance. War and violence have both proponents and
opponents. Relatively, each of these thinks he/she represents the truth and stands for a just
cause. The warmongers defend battles, killing and blood. The anti-war campaigners condemn the
act of war as reductive of humanity. Anti-war women for their part examine and condemn violence
as a corollary to war. Violence has always a masculine face in a male-dominated world. Both
writers represent such a trend by arguing that men’s violence in the time of war was
responsible making women as widows or orphans and others. I adopted Jaque Lacan’s and Sigmund
Freud’s analytical approach to highlight the sense of otherness in one’s self and those with
opposing viewpoints. My adoption to Postcolonial approach is inspired firstly by the writer’s
active consciousness that they are writing within the Postcolonial particular literary and
cultural movement. Secondly, the themes I dealt with in this thesis required that I should rely
on key Postcolonial critics to address issues such as identity reconstruction, alienation,
exile, otherness, memory, etc. Lacan, like Freud, sees the unconscious mind as active and
complex. Lacan considers the unconscious as being structured like language, and if one could
learn to decode that language, it would provide clues as to what drives them. Trauma or
childhood crisis is said to repress that language (Feratova-Loidolt, M. (2007). An exploration
of Woolf’s and Mamdouh’s work suggests that this was roughly the case. Freud uses the term
“other” to describe the other person that lies within the human psyche. As we have already
noted, a sense of “other” implies two different sides, many of which are in opposition to one
another. In Freudian analysis, this “other” is not really another person, but is the projection
of the ego (Zwerdling, 296). Examining the fantasy world of Woolf gives her readers a glimpse
into the inner workings of her inner turmoil. Mamdouh’s work is wholly centered on the
production of “me and the other” through war, acculturation (as examined in chapter I) and
immigration. The binding and obliging relationship involves an agent (the other) and a subject
(Arab). The consequence is the superiority and hegemony of the other. the Arab’s otherness is
multiple. It can be studied in class terms but has a more cultural dimension attached to it.
The “me and the other” debate gets problematized once we seek to find legitimacy for our
departure. Moreover, the negotiation of a new identity is also open to challenge, mainly
because the immigrant needs to overcome the feelings of displacement and alienation. In doing
so, he/she would seek to integrate in the new society by making concessions as to prejudice.
The sensitive feeling of the immigrant is obvious, somehow like the sensitivity of newborn
children. Based on what I have presented in the dissertation, I reached that Mamdouh has
expressed in her novels two kinds of relationships with the ‘other’. The first is a
relationship of good will, integrity and a friendship; the second is a hostile and
confrontational relationship. The existence of the ‘other’ through the self or the (I) or (we)
of any kind means the agreement or disagreement with him, and because the ‘other’ exists in
every time and everywhere as long as human beings exist, this means necessarily that difference
as agreement is always exist. My other rational was to ground my reading of the examined texts
in cultural and gender contexts. As a matter of fact, men’s and particularly women’s writers
writing, is largely shaped by the cultural and biological contexts it set to portray. The
examination of Orlando and Al Gulama provided the thesis the basis to establish such
argumentation. I tried to analyze the theory of being and becoming, and discussed how this
theory relates to war and violence in Virginia Woolf’s and Alia Mamdouh’s portrayal of female
characters in their novels to attain empowerment. I applied this theory first on the becoming
of the writers identity as a writer for the evolution from being to becoming could be very well
applied to the literary figures, in order to write one must become a writer; this in itself
involves a step-by-step process that involves an evolution from being to becoming. Often, as is
the case with Woolf and Mamdouh, writing good fiction involves taking bits and pieces of the
writer’s life and evolving it into complex characters that reflect life’s realities in telling
ways so that the audience can relate to characters. Being allows one to “become” with time,
enabling individuals to realize desirable goals and practices (Lee 97). War and
Violence are direct factors that change the character’s being into other personality. The party
empowers Clarissa and gives her the opportunity to shape her identity. ”Her party is for her an
existential act by which she deliberately evokes and expresses the identity she has chosen to
call her own” (Gelfant 89). She celebrates her new freedom and personality by reasserting the
value of experiencing what one likes and emphasizing the importance of the creative gesture.
War and violance has freed Mamdouh’s characters from fear and imprisonment and creates another
personality that seeks self definition. Huda’s mother (Iqbal) becoming represents the peak of
change from being a silenced frustrated woman to becoming self aware. When her husband
announces his determination to marry another woman and at the same time calls her to rub his
back in the bath, This Violent treatment urges her to become a fierce woman. These tiny
miracles and illuminations help her characters to become clearer, sophisticated beings than
they ever were before. When searching for grand and greater truths, ultimately each woman had
become lost in a sea of transgression. By focusing on just one or two small epiphanies however,
each young lady was transformed into a beautiful new being. I concluded that “Being” is the
state into which natural man is born; one might say it is a phenomenon that is as much chance
as it is anything else. “Becoming” is a much more complex process that involves experiences,
both good and bad. “Being and becoming” is also an biological art as reflected in the
characters of Virginia Woolf in her Orlando and Mamdouh’s Al Gulama. Then I investigated the
profound influence of Simone de Beauvoir’s theory” One is not Born but Rather Becomes a Woman”
on the development of the feminist concept and how she provides a theoretical key for literary
critics, theologian, scholars and philosophers to investigate and elaborate on the concept
concerning the social construction of gender. Woolf and Mamdouh transcend the concept of gender
from its biological range and establishe an identity other than the fixed one. I discussed this
theme through Judith Butler’s theory and Wittig’s in her essay “One is Not Born a Woman” (1981)
that assert Beauvoir’s formulation on the concept of making distinction between sex and gender
and asserted the demolition of putting gender into political categories. Both writers used
their bisexual characters as a rebellion against the congealed norms that see woman as second
sex. My thesis does not focused on just the similarities in Woolf’s and Mamdouh’s themes but
investigate also the differences in tackling issues such as sex which is a crucial character
to deal with in their fiction due to the fact of the un crossable constraints in their society
besides it is a taboo. I showed that although cultural and social constrains are not very
different in the writers milieu, the writers are different in tackling the sexual subjects. I
illustrated Woolf’s artistic talent in using imagery and symbols to describe the intimate
feelings of her characters. The thesis argued Quentin Bell’s theorization in his biography that
Woolf’s personal life is sexless due to her weak health and that the sexual inclinations
mentioned in her fiction specially Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room are very limited and narrow
in horizon compared with other writers. The thesis furthered the argument by presenting
comparative analysis from Mamdouh’s portrayal of the same theme and reached to what Harold
theorized that what Bell Quentin means by describing Woolf’s novel by “sexless” and lacking
“vital juice”, is that they lack the overt “love making” scenes found in the conventional
novels. The thesis showed Woolf as an experimental writer who introduces a new criteria in
writing fiction away from the traditional and putting in mind that this subject is very
sensitive in her time especially if it is presented by a woman writer, thus she referred and
presented it metaphorically. I concluded that it is but the outcome of oppressed and limited
self, yet it proved the authentic spirit to voice the sexuality in her time. Regarding Alia
Mamdouh, a daring and innovative Arab woman writer, I surveyed the selected novels which the
subject of sex is present but not in a filthy way and reach a conclusion that she focused on
presenting sexuality as influential factor shaping the Arab male and female world. Sexuality
in Mamdouh’s work is used as a weapon to degrade men and women in particular. Mamdouh’s
presentation of sexuality in her fiction is related to violence and struggle. She wants through
it to expose the validity of such themes in society and to establish a new sexual identity for
the male and female. This is clearly manifested through rape, homosexuality and sexual
exploitation that results in illegitimate children and psychological instability. In her
novels, Mamdouh intends to show the interplay among the following trilogy: political power, the
rigid social norms and sex. Sex in her novels comes to recall symbols and issues beyond the
limits of the body and its desires and does not stir up the reader’s instincts. Mamdouh uses
sexual stereotypes and social gender roles to show how social and cultural tradition affect
men- women relationships. I also showed how Woolf and Mamdouh tackle other sensitive subjects
as homosexuality to deconstruct the taboo each writer tackles it in her own way and according
to her own psychological personality and social norms of her time. Homosexuality is presented
as a symbol of rebellion and resistance to the patriarchal taboo and restrains. the term sex
and sexuality become a controversial debate, for as George Battaille theorizes, transgression
and taboo are two mutual concepts that neither subverts the other nor denies it, “Transgression
on the contrary it completes and reinforces the taboo”(Battaille 63). Homosexuality stands as a
counterpart to normal sexuality; Rich regards lesbianism as a form of resistance (Palmer 18).
Through the years, sex developed to be a social strategy and has its rules. A rational and
scientific discourse is created aiming to classify the sexual practices and delimits the use of
sex into male and female that is traditionally accepted and historically constructed. Both
writers’ literary work asserts resistance and rebellion as the only possibility to gain hope
and love, but lack the appropriate tool to reach fulfillment.The writer’s respective
conceptualizations of sex express their respective cultural, social, and intellectual reality
and the customs and traditions governing their societies. I focused on another factor
that resembles the core of my thesis; I revealed how oppressive, cultural and traditional
concepts mark the patriarchal societies that helped in the retardation of society in general
and women in particular. Patriarchal rigid norms are the second factor that leads women to live
a war like life. I argued also that war and violence are a direct cause for the failure of
marriage relations and complicated parent-children relationships. I argued that these same
factors help promote feminism and other social improvements as a highly relevant issue of
individual freedom and identity of women in society. I argued that the writing of Virginia
Woolf and Alia Mamdouh do not always reflect marginalization and degradation of women, rather
it represents rigorous socio-historical and cultural contexts that enrich the cross cultural
studies and shows the diversity of English Iraqi society. Both writers refuse to be defined as
feminist and they use in their work like Three Guineas and Al Gulama a cynical and ironic style
as artistic strategy to ridicule everything, man’s tyranny, power, education and tradition as a
whole as well as women’s submissiveness and weakness. Both writers call for universality. The
writer’s major concern is to show the hidden, unequal, frustrated and ambiguous ties that
relate people to each other. As for Mamdouh, she uses the horrible nature that war brings of
pain and destruction to rebuild a healthier social setting than had previously been the norm.
This ability to grow from any circumstance, such as patriarchal injustice, however blind, is an
invaluable tool in personal and social amelioration. In her novels, Mamdouh criticizes the
typical masculine exploits and habits that have led to her present anxieties and half-hearted
repressed fears. Likewise, Woolf embarks on that essential aspect of feminism that attempts to
better life for all people, and not just women. She does not only submit the opportunity to
people to improve their everyday lives, but she also introduce the experience of her
predecessors “thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past” that give hope to
individuals who do not know how social “evils are in a way to be bettered” In this regard,
there is similarity between Woolf and Alia Mamdouh. Both writers use their imagination and mix
it with real facts to introduce their literary work. Woolf didn’t suffer from poverty and had a
kind of education that her father allowed her to obtain as he was a man of intellect.
Nevertheless, she writes about deprivation, illiteracy and subjection of women. Mamdouh also
writes about women who were exposed to molestation, humiliation, and marginalization. She mixes
them with political and historical incidents that make the reader questions whether they are
real or imaginative. Her novel Al Gulama,shows how the novelist enact ways in which the
political and social are mediated, lived, performed and experienced through the personal. The
authority interferes and degrades people; the decision of the authority to wage war dramatizes
the characters’ lives and causes destruction to all their principals. In A Room of Ones Own,
Woolf’s technique in range between cynical, mockery, direct and indirect style mixed with
imaginary characters that caused confusion in interpreting her work as feminist or not. Woolf
felt the weak status of women in her time whether those of upper class or worker class. She
always addresses them with ‘failure’, ‘outlaws’ and ‘outsiders’. She also addresses herself as
such. In her essay ”Professions for Women’’, she says: “as a failure, then, I speak to you who
are also failures” (125). I reached a conclusion that no one can deny our writer’s important
contribution in enlightening women and men to their status. Their work is accepted for the
charm and wit that they addressed it. In the last chapter of my dissertation I summed up how
both writers deliver their (societal, sexual, political traditional, etc,) message through the
stream of consciousness and narrative technique, thus let critic’s and reader’s controversy
about their being feminist or not open. I focused on particular on how the flow of thoughts
serves to deconstruct patriarchal ideology and war theory to foreground woman’s subjectivity.
The dissertation illustrated how Virginia Woolf and Alia Mamdouh use their protagonists’ fluid
state of mind to reveal their own feelings towards the political, religious and social
violence. Christopher Herbert in Mrs. Dalloway, the Dictator, and the Relativity Paradox,
suggests that Woolf‘s main goal, via the whole of her text, is to present an antipode to
empirical and militaristic thinking through her commitment to the principle of relativity, the
principle, that “nothing is one thing. The character’s thought are not fixed in certain time
or in fixed place, to show the multiplicity of its universe and defy the codes of realist/
readily conventions. Mamdouh like Woolf disrupted the logic of narration and her perspective in
the novels is quite challenging.In reading the Loved Ones, one finds difficulty to get
acquainted with the numerous characters and places that Nader mentions during his trip to
Paris. Her aim is to reflect the feelings of disorientation and chaos experienced by people in
real life at that time, as their world was rapidly changing due to the compounded war that
disturbed and literally shattered the universal values which held society together. Woolf’s
structure of her novels makes use of shared memories as a means of invisibly connecting
isolated individuals and moments. Simple past incidents are remembered by many characters, and
through the remembrance of the same past incidents, the isolated characters are in actuality
connected beneath the surface. I elaborated on the same theme by focusing on another literary
tool and stated that Woolf connects wave imagery with a character’s transitive and substantive
thoughts. The motion of the waves is equated with whether the thought being experienced by a
character is substantive or transitive. James’s “The Stream of Thought.” discusses how
transitive or passing thoughts resemble those of a bird in flight because they are more
difficult to see (243). Perches, or substantive thoughts, are clearly formed conclusions. For
example, Mrs. Ramsay’s vision of “waves of pure lemon” leads her to come to the substantive
conclusion of “It is enough!” (297-298). Woolf connects the waves of lemon to Mrs. Ramsay’s
thoughts, “waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind,” which supports the
connection present between James’s theory to Woolf’s literary application. The wave imagery
provides a framework which helps the reader to pay close attention to the thoughts of the
characters in a lyrical type of way. Looking for these moments which interrupt the flow of
character’s thoughts allows the critics to chart the variations of waves in Woolf’s narratives.
These moments that act like shocks in the lives of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Bricosoe, and Cllarissa
Dalloway are significant because they help to peel away the layers of each character’s
personality. Woolf makes very clear the connection between the character’s thoughts and wave
imagery by using metaphorical language to describe how the words in the character’s mind “toss
their crests, and fall and rise” (The Waves 675). Through this language, Woolf is suggesting
that the words in the character’s mind are powerful and long to come out and it is difficult to
say what one means, and how, if one does not measure exactly how to represent cognition
verbally. (Time) and (Place) are another tool in our writer’s stratechy, As Dalsimer, in
Virginia Woolf: Becoming a writer exclaims that Woolf nurtured an “invisible presence”
according to some, which allowed her to go backwards and forwards in time, in her personal
writings and elsewhere, to be creative and imaginative in her writing (Dalsimer 2002).
Writing for both writers is a weapon that they use metaphorically to defend their independence,
freedom and their entire existence in response to dehumanization, torture, inequality and false
morals of the patriarchal society. The condemnation of silence in a hostile male world makes
Mamdouh’s characters act in total disregard of the social codes and constraints. By the same
token, Woolf revealed the disconnectedness between her characters’ inner lives and their public
lives in order to reveal much more the personal philosophical rift. Clearly, Woolf’s and
Mamdouh’s works do straightforwardly challenge the expectations of traditional narration in
fiction. Picking any of their works, we find that we have entered a special world where we
simply do not have our feet planted solidly on the ground of traditional narration, and we are
forced to alter our own consciousness in order to tune into what is going on in the novel, in
its form, and in the narration. The research work suggests that literary writing is not just a
way for Woolf and Mamdouh to heal their wounds, but a weapon against the ugly war and the
oppression of society. Their dilemma is translated into words that turn into the power that
pervades their characters and forms a new female identity. Woolf and Mamdouh represent the
ideals of society and those who have been marginalized by it. Their ideals were revolutionary
and expressed directly through their works, but many of them are hidden in the psyches and
dialogues of their characters. In order to get to know the real writers, one has to get to know
their characters intimately and examine discourse that lies at the heart of “otherness”,
alienation and what it is like to be marginalized and violated. Indeed, the texts I explored in
my dissertation on the context of comparative study are very little known for the larger
reading public. Apart from few novels of Woolf like Mrs. Dalloway, the other texts I analyzed
and especially Mamdouh’s are most probably known to specialists in the field of Arab women
writers and to few readers for Mamdouh’s work was forbidden in Iraq because of her direct
criticism to the social and political status of her country. As a matter of fact, the
comparative literary corpus I selected for examination is both recent and very little studied
in the public and academic circles and even in my country. Thus, I felt that this dissertation
will bring my modest contribution on a study that is not “saturated” at the level of critical
attention, besides, the study accomplishes little of what I wanted to transmit to the scholars’
and readers from Tunisia of the experience that I underwent during the war. Yet, this
dissertation is another attempt at the universe of a giant English writer as Virginia Woolf and
a great Iraqi writer as Alia Mamdouh.