Tracing Gender in The Rock of Tanios in the Context of Feminist Literary Criticism

Abstract

Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut and is considered one of today’s most important writers for his essays dealing with the social issues of our time, particularly his novels based on his family biography. Maalouf discusses different periods within the framework of phenomena such as immigration, war, exile, love, and identity while constructing the sociocultural and historical realities of the Orient in his novels. Historical realities and individual tragedies emerged at the center of social changes in the bridge between East and West, and research on Maalouf’s works converge with existentialism, with the protagonists of his novels being represented through social relations dominated by this philosophy. Gender analysis occupies an important place among these relations and appears alongside various other issues in many of his works, from On Identity to The Rock of Tanios and Samarcand. Maalouf received the Goncourt Prize for The Rock of Tanios, which can be considered one of the works that bears the traces of its genre. Throughout the novel, one easily notices the female characters’ passive roles and the activeness of male characters in the production of power. In this sense, the work deserves to be analyzed in terms of gender in the context of feminist literary criticism. This article will deal with The Rock of Tanios in light of gender analyses and open up a discussion to question the fictional creation of female reality and the characterization of its existence in this work. © 2023, Istanbul University Press. All rights reserved.