3 - The Evil, Sick and Disabled Female Body

Summary

In this chapter, I examine the representations of the female body in war in Vénus Khoury-Ghata's La Maîtresse du Notable and Hyam Yared's La Malédiction. Following the guidelines of postclassical narratology, particularly feminist and postcolonial narratologies, I argue that the body, just like the voice, plays a role in the narrative structure. In fact, in these novels, the war stories are told through or by the body. The narrative voice remains available. However, the female body tells the war story around which the narrative is built. In Khoury-Ghata's novel, the female body is the source of evil and the reason behind the war. The foreign body spreads fear among the natives. It is the generative body that produces monsters and it is the Western body that settles in the East. In Yared's novel, the female body is the oppressed sick body that, like Lebanon, lives an internal conflict and becomes self-destructive.

It is interesting to note that both novels focus on the mother figure as an agent of oppression to both male and female bodies, which goes against the old feminist discourse that portrays men as the enemy, the ‘sexual brutes’ and the ‘cultural dominators’ (Bordo 1993: 23). As Susan Bordo stipulates, the old feminist discourse seems at times inadequate in its simplistic dichotomies of man/woman, oppressor/oppressed. Additionally, this argument shows women as passive and lacking agency (Bordo 1993: 23). In this regard, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Hyam Yared differ from the mainstream feminist discourse in pointing out the role women play in women's oppression, particularly during war time.

La Maîtresse du Notable or The Evil Female Body

La Maîtresse du Notable tells the story of Flora, a white woman living in an unnamed war-torn city. Married to a Christian man, she has three children: Fredéric, Bébé and an unnamed daughter who also acts as the narrator. Flora lives in a building located at the demarcation line between the Christian and the Muslim sectors. She has different neighbours with different stories: Mlle Liliane, who was previously engaged to Flora's husband; Mme Evguénia, called Mme Vava; M. Nahum, the disabled Jewish building owner; his black Muslim servant, Mourad; two Spanish lesbian nuns, Lucia and Anunciad; and a sniper who lives on the rooftop. The novel opens with Flora leaving her household to join her wealthy and powerful Muslim lover, referred to as the Notable.