| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 法國語文學系 === 105 === In 2005, Assia Djebar was elected to the Académie française as the first author of the Maghreb. She was born in 1936 in Algeria, which was at that time a colony of France. Her father, a French teacher, contrary to tradition, ensured that she received an education in a French school, which is a privilege in comparison to many Algerian women of that era. Due to the progressive ideas of her father, she escaped the confinement imposed on most of the Algerian girls around her age and was able to attend school. As one of the most significant North African writers of the 20th century, her first novel, La Soif was published in 1957. Due to the restrictive and conservative atmosphere during that period, she adopted the pseudonym Assia Djebar and has kept it ever since. In Arabic, Assia means consolation and Djebar stands for intransigence.
She devoted most of her time on writing and has left a legacy of immortal masterpieces. Her works often lead to a rethinking on the status of women, especially for those who live in Arab Muslim societies. Her writings, corresponded to the meaning of her pen name (consolation and intransigence), advocate Muslim women’s rights as an unflinching critic of patriarchal society, which can be seen notably in her novel Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, published in 1980. In this work of short stories, Djebar attempts to portray the dilemmas which confront Algerian women of the past and the present.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the confinement of women in this novel through different perspectives. This study is divided into three parts: The first chapter provides a discussion on the confinement imposed on Algerian women’s body and voice. For the female characters in the novel, the confinement is not only limited in the activity space. Through analyzing their situation, we try to understand the impact of patriarchal oppression both on the physical and psychological side of Algerian women. The second chapter attempts to analyze temporal confinement by exploring how women are trapped in the past, and how their voices are blurred and distorted even after Algeria’s independence. This is due to the official historical records, in which they are constantly represented with marginalization. The third chapter explores the Algerian women’s desire and pursuit of freedom triggered by confinement. In addition, it also examines how Djebar retrieves through her writings, the suppressed feminine voices lost in the fog of history in order to fill the gap in history. Through Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, Assia Djebar not only reveals different forms of confinement (visible or invisible, external or internal, physical or psychological) which confront Algerian women, but also gives a space and a voice to those women living behind an invisible veil of silence.
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