Abstract :
This study is intended to show how the impact of discourse of modernism has made remarkable changes in women’s status in patriarchal societies in the first decades if the twentieth century. Comparatively reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Zuq?q al-Midaq (1947) [Midaq Alley (1966)], this paper endeavours to contrast and compare women’s status both in the western and eastern societies after the two world wars; as women’s struggle against patriarchy and its oppressive practices imposed on women was one of the most critical concerns of the time. The American school of comparative literature, particularly the theories put forward by Rene Wellek and Abda Abood, along with Western and Eastern feminist theories of Simone De Beauvoir’s, Christine Delphy, Nawal El Saadawi and Qasim Amin are employed as the theoretical framework of this paper. The observation to emerge from this paper is that women’s social and economic status has been vital to their perpetual oppression.
Keyword :
comparative literature, feminism, women’s oppression, patriarchy, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Naguib Mahfouz