Unfolding The Female Journey in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman

Abstract

This study explores the representations of the female journey and its interconnectedness with female development in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman (2014). By re-visioning psychotherapist and author Maureen Murdock’s journey paradigm and condensing it into three essential stages (The Separation, The Descent and The Rebirth), this study maintains the applicability of the heroine’s journey to the two male-authored novels. Each heroine’s journey begins when she becomes conscious of the fact that she has been living on the margins of her own life. Consequently, she becomes determined to challenge the conceptualization of traditionally-defined femininity, break free from the oppressive gender roles that were prescribed to them by patriarchy and ultimately define themselves as whole. The significance of this study stems from the fact that it provides an interpretation of how the two heroines’ internal struggles are translated into the outside world in the framework of the postmodern novel, and that it juxtaposes the journeys of two women of different ages, times, social and cultural backgrounds, in order to foreground the universal, multi-dimensional, and transcultural nature of the journey motif.