Reimagining Female Identity in Post Naksa Egypt: A Feminist Reading of Naguib Mahfouz’s Love Beneath the Rain

Аннотация

The study presents a feminist literary analysis for Naguib Mahfouz's Love Beneath the Rain, highlighting the construction and negotiation of female identity from almost a postcolonialism point of view that looks at the socio-political aftermath of the 1967 defeat of Egypt. This research examines how Mahfouz portrays women's reflections and resistances to the discourses where gender, national trauma, and cultural disintegration are entangled. Through a qualitative, descriptive-analytical methodology, the work minded critically at five pivotal female characters: Aliyat, Saniyah, Muna, Fitna, and Sameera, in post-Naksa societal rupture backdrop. Based on feminist and postcolonial theoretical frameworks propounded mainly by Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Leila Ahmed, and Nawal El Saadawi, analysis reveals that the female figures defined by Mahfouz understand beyond reductive archetypes; they function as moral agents and symbolic interlocutors of the jagged identity of Egypt. The findings point towards a much more nuanced engagement by Mahfouz with the subjectivity of women and show how they, in his narratives, reflect collective disillusionment and catalyze socio-cultural critique. The present research within Arab literary and gender studies focuses on the articulation of resistance, reconstruction of identity, or fictional ideological critique within postcolonial literature through women's voices. Keywords: Naguib Mahfouz, female identity, post Naksa Egypt, feminist literary criticism, Arabic fiction, postcolonial gender discourse 1. Introduction crisis of cultural confidence (Shoair, 2023; Ibrahim, 2013). As the internal disaffection within this The effects of the national injury motivate people to increasingly fragmented sociopolitical landscape grew, rethink their collective identities or individual identities writers and intellectuals began looking inward for and which is often reinscribed in literature as a reflective alternative literary modes through which the erosion of measure of these reckonings. The very disenchanted national ideals could be put in question and the contours defeat in the 1967 Six Day War, known to Egyptians as al of personal and collective transformation explored. Naksa or "the setback," caused a psychological and Among those voices is probably the most significant in ideological gulf of great dimensions within Egypt. the contemporary history of Egypt the 1988 Nobel Besides demolishing pan Arabist aspirations, this laurate Naguib Mahfouz, whose works from 1967 military and moral crash also hastened an era of onward exhibit a significant turn toward existential economic stagnation, political disenchantment, and a uncertainty and moral ambiguity (Jacquemond, 2008). American Journal of Applied Science and Technology 48 https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajast International Journal Of Literature And Languages (2771-2834) Mahfouz's Love Beneath the Rain (1973), like most setting becomes a metaphorical terrain where tradition national disillusionment, portrays the volatile nexus of clashes with the shifting mores of a disenchanted the personal and the collective. It dramatizes, through populace. In this space, Mahfouz stages gender as both the kaleidoscopic narrative of intersecting lives, the a narrative and political dilemma. His female characters national trauma becomes social relationships with a ranging from educated professionals to socially special view to gender in post war Cairo. In Mahfouz's marginalized women grapple with autonomy, morality, novel, women shape the reality into an aesthetic and cultural legacy within a system that both defines organization of the narrative the main tantalizing agent and confines them. These women operate in contested through which the effects of the ideological collapse spaces cafés, universities, households that are rife with would be articulated. Historically, women in Arabic symbolic significance. Their experiences serve as both literature have often functioned as metaphors for mirrors and critiques of a fractured Egyptian identity cultural integrity, national honor, or moral virtue (Saber, 2006; Shoair, 2023). (Elsadda, 2012; Aghacy, 2009). Yet in Love Beneath the Despite its literary significance, Love Beneath the Rain Rain, Mahfouz’s female characters transcend these has received comparatively limited scholarly attention in archetypal functions. Instead, they are characterized as both Arabic and Western academic circles. Most dynamic, conflicted, and socially embedded subjects feminist analyses of Mahfouz’s work have focused on his attempting to cope with two burdens: one placed by canonical texts from the 1950s and 1960s, often either patriarchal oppression and the second by national valorizing or problematizing his representation of degeneration. A feminist postcolonial framework serves women (Ruzeik, 2016; Hartman, 2002). However, only a as the basis for this research, which aims to investigate handful of peer reviewed studies (e.