Representations of Women in "Hazrat Al-Mohtarm" by Naguib Mahfouz

Abstract

This study deals with how women are represented and the qualities and implications of this representation in the behavior of the hero in Hazrat Al-Mohtarm (1975) by Naguib Mahfouz, which is a novel that presents a very complex human experience. As for why the woman is in this novel, the woman achieves a remarkable presence in the life of the protagonist, Othman Bayoumi, who bestows special developments on his life that elicits his reactions to life's issues and manifestations, and then in the representation of the idea of work and its remarkable embodiment. The study deals with the idea of representations through four main axes: representations of sin, representations of desire, representations of sincere love, and representations of disappointment and loss. So access to the hero comes through an understanding of the dimensions of the woman's personality in the novel. The women of "Othman Bayoumi" were distributed on these four axes: Sayyidah, Qadria, Sunni, Asilah, Ansiyah, and Radaa. The study attempts to address the following questions: To what extent does the presence of women in this novel form a balance between the semantic and the artistic? What is the peculiarity of the presence of women in the novel? What effect does the presence of women have on shaping the features of the main character? What is the position that this representation appears in the novel? This article explores these ideas through the concepts of narratives in analyzing the characters at different levels: psychological, cultural, and feminist dimensions. The reflections of minor characters help shape and develop the protagonist of the novel. The study concludes that language highlights the effect of the personality on the realization of the idea of the text, as the presence of the woman decides the features of the protagonist in its semantic and artistic dimensions, and that the privacy of the woman appears in parallel with the specificity of the job and her delusions, which creates an exciting attraction between the presence of women and the job in one context. Keywords: Novel, Hazrat Al-Mohtarm, Representations, Central protagonist, Woman.