The Perception and Conception of Écriture Féminine: Self- Realization Attainment through Stream of Consciousness Technique in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Sahar Khalifeh رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

This study aims to delineate the track for revealing the other self-inside the fictional character and attaining self-realization through stream of consciousness narration in Virginia Woolf‘s modern English novel The Waves and Sahar Khalifeh‘s contemporary Palestinian novel Wild Thorns. This comparative study strives to answer how stream of consciousness narration in the two novels fulfils the characters‘ self-realization and how écriture feminine ascertains the two female novelists‘ self- realization. To answer these questions, this study postulates an existence of another self behind the ego voice in the two novels and it also hypothesizes that the fictional character‘s self- realization is merely ascertained when the conscious ego converges the unconscious id. This study also argues that feminism writing is able to explore the female real entity apart from male misrepresentation of the female traits according to Hélène Cixous‘ claim: ―I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man‖ (Cixous, 1976, p. 310). To prove these assumptions, this study relies on Sigmund Freud‘s and Jacques Lacan‘s theories of psychoanalysis as the bedrock for analysing the two novels, Jean- Paul Sartre‘s existential philosophy to investigate the character‘s existential quest for life purpose besides Hélène Cixous‘ and Luce Irigaray‘s feminist criticism to explore how writing empowers women writers to stand on the same footing as men in capturing the spirit of the modern and contemporary periods. This study deduces that stream of consciousness is a forceful narrative technique for self-realization and it also elicits that the more the character is free associating, the more the ego converges the supressed id and attains self- realization. This study recommends further studies of self-revelation narration and phenomenological re-reading of some modern literary texts in other genres such as poetry and drama