The Female Figure in The Monk, the Ottoman and the Wife of the Big Money Man by Venus Khoury-Ghata

Abstract

“The metamorphosis of the French language” (Tumia, 2014) in the writing of Venus Khoury-Ghata, is part of a process of crossing two languages, French and Arabic. This phenomenon of hybridization at the linguistic level functions to depict an Elsewhere, a kind of metaphor of an imaginary East, in which the destinies of women dominated by the force of submission imposed by a patriarchal type of societal order are played out. Our study aims to highlight the message of revolt expressed by the novelist in order to save those who still live “eyes downcast” to use the words of the researcher Rosalie Ghanem (Ghanem, 2018). In what way does this sense of indignation at the condition of women in the East fits into an imaginary space related to a geographical territory associated with the image of a “small village on the edge of the desert”? In order to answer this question, our research is based on the novel The Monk, the Ottoman and the wife of the big money man.