Female (Mis)representation in Moroccan Male-Authored Postcolonial Literature: The Madwoman Trope in Mohamed Mrabet’s The Big Mirror

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through a feminist postcolonial theoretical lens, this article puts forth a new reading of Mohamed Mrabet’s novella The Big Mirror. Written by a male Moroccan writer in 1977, a short while after Morocco’s emergence from colonial rule, The Big Mirror has yet to be read and scrutinized from a gender-critical perspective. Given that post-independence is a period so critical for the development of gender relations in Morocco, literary works featuring female characters as central figures to the plot and the themes present an opportunity to extract knowledge about female representation and agency in that particular context. This article argues that The Big Mirror, like many other narrative texts written in this period, fails to represent the female character in an unideological and gender-neutral way. Through the use of the Spivakian theory of the subaltern and the impossibility of her representation, this article argues that by claiming to speak for the female character, this narrative effectively silences her and effaces her agency. As a result, the female character becomes strongly inscribed in a masculinist discourse that capitalizes on the literary trope of the madwoman as a means to further occlude female agency rather than promoting it.