The Image of Women in American and Algerian Fictions: A Case Study of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Amin Zaoui’s La chambre de la vierge impure (2009)

Abstract

This Dissertation is a case study which compares the image of women in American and Algerian fictions through the works of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Amin Zaoui’s La chambre de la vierge impure (2009). The purpose of this dissertation is to show how close backgrounds may produce similar literary productions. This was achieved by applying Fredric Jameson’s theory The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). In fact, the interest of this theory lies in the fact that it helped us show how the two ideological battlegrounds that the American society of the 1920s and the Algerian society of the 1990s were rendered through fiction by the two authors. In the first chapter we have put emphasis on the analysis of the major female characters of each novel; in order to sort out the prevalent ideologies in presence during the time the two novels were composed. Our work has shown that though the two novels may seem different, they share the same representation of women; both authors portrayed ambiguously women’s physical appearance, inner thoughts, desires, and their situation in society. Then in the second chapter, we have studied the two novels as socially symbolic acts, and reached the conclusion that close backgrounds may produce similar literary productions.