Why Insanity Is Not Subversive in Hanan Al-Shaykh's Short Story 'Season of Madness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5853780 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Luma Balaa (0000-0002-5557-3012) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 82 |
| Pages | 480-499 |
| Publication date | 2014-10-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Australian Feminist Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1321-7568 • E-ISSN: 1465-3303 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/08164649.2014.990776 |
| OpenAlex | W2133227822 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Dalya Abudi maintains that in many female Arab texts ‘madness serves as a metaphor for female victimisation on the one hand and for female resistance on the other’. This paper contends that the representation of women as insane in Hanan Al-Shaykh's ‘Season of Madness’ is not subversive. I draw on Camineor-Santangelo's approach to feminist criticism, which argues that a madwoman cannot speak. Camineor-Santangelo explains that madness is complicit with de Lauretis’ technologies of gender because it gives the illusion of power but at the same time the mad (non)-subject is located outside any ‘sphere where power can be exerted’. I illustrate how in this story female madness is mainly represented as witchcraft and evil, stigma, a female malady, a denied subjectivity, social control, illusional power, self-sabotage and a final surrender. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI would like to thank the editor of Australian Feminist Studies, anonymous reviewers, Dr Jennifer Skulte-Ouaiss, Dr Marianne Marroum, Ms Orpha Darwish and anonymous copyeditors for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.Notes1. I will focus on the English translation of Al-Shaykh (Citation1994).2. It is interesting to note that throughout the story only Fatin is named and all the other characters are nameless. They are referred to as ‘mother-in-law’, ‘husband’ and ‘another man’. The author is attempting to draw the focus onto Fatin and her relationship with the other characters.3. Hanan Al-Shaykh's The Locust and the Bird (Citation2009) bears many similarities to ‘Season of Madness’. In summary, The Locust and the Bird is the true story of a woman, Kamila, Al-Shaykh's mother, who is forced to get married to her dead sister's husband who is much older than her and whom she does not love. After her sister's death, Kamila is forced to get married to look after her sister's children. She meets a young man and falls in love with him. After the husband finds out about her adultery, he divorces her and she marries the person she loves. In doing so, she loses custody of her children. Both women in these two texts do not love their husbands and commit adultery, but in the short story she is trapped and does not get her divorce as opposed to the biography in which she gets her freedom.Additional informationNotes on contributorsLuma BalaaDr Luma Balaa is an Assistant Professor of English Studies in the Department of English at the Lebanese American University of Beirut. Her research interests include fairytales, Anglophone Lebanese Australian writers, women's writings, feminism and representations of women in Cinema. She is the author of several international refereed articles such as ‘The comic disruption of stereotypes in Loubna Haikal's Seducing Mr Maclean’ (Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature. Dec 2012), ‘Misuse of Islam in El-Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile from a feminist perspective’ (Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World. 2013) and ‘Men's Contradictory Experiences of Power in Jarrar's novel Dreams of Water’ (Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature. Dec 2013
Art · Insanity · Literature · Power (physics · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · Surrender · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Psychology · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |