The Nearly Hundred-Year Gap in Finding the New Arab Woman: Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Abstract

The study aims to explore the representation of Arab women in Fadia Faqir’s novel, Pillars of Salt and the representation of Western women in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. The study also attempts to compare and contrast between the two writers’ representations of women. To achieve the objectives of the study, the theory of feminism is applied to both novels to analyse them in terms of how women are represented. Moreover, the results of the study show that the representation of women in the writings of some Arab authors today resembles the representation of Western women written by authors in their writings over 100 years ago. The significance of the current study stems from the fact that it sheds light on literary works that are written by two different authors from different times, countries, and consequently different cultural backgrounds.