Violence Against Women in Sanaa Shalan’s Falling in the Sun

Abstract

Violence against women is a heinous act committed against a woman, a wife, a mother, a sister, or even a daughter deliberately or not deliberately causing her psychological, emotional, and physical harm. The rise of this unhealthy phenomenon mainly in less-developed countries such as Jordan necessitates more academic attention not only because of its detrimental effect on the Jordanian women’s lives, but also because it is intentionally ignored and dismissed as taboo. With that, there has been a growing interest among Jordanian writers and sociologists in exploring the extent of this social ill through creative literary genres such as novels. This paper for one primarily examines the manifestations of violence against women in the Jordanian context through a textual analysis of Falling in the Sun by Sanaa Shalan, an author hailing from the contemporary Jordanian generation. Originally written in Arabic, this well-known novel gives prominence to the severe reality of the distress habitually suffered by many Jordanian women, notably the various forms of violence that they have to tolerate living in a multicultural male-controlled nation. With a feminist reading of Falling in the Sun (2014), we shall examine Shalan’s representations of violence against women in the novel as a dire social illness resulting from mistaken social beliefs, absence of laws, and misunderstanding of religion and gender inequality in the Jordanian society. Additionally, the current paper’s outline is constructed on three main forms of violence against women, i.e. physical, psychological and economic abuse as depicted in Falling in the Sun through the novel’s female characters, primarily the main protagonists.