SOURCE: Guyot-Bender, Martine. “Harmony and Resistance in L'amour, la fantasia's Algerian Women's Communities.” In Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, edited by Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes, pp. 175-99. New York and London: Garland, 1996.

In the following essay, Guyot-Bender draws attention to positive aspects of female domesticity in L'amour, la fantasia, contending that cloistered Algerian women are shown to derive a sense of solidarity and security that liberated women lack, thus adding complexity to reductionist notions of female victimization in patriarchal Arab society.

The fate of Muslim women has been a subject of great concern for feminist activists inside and outside Islamic countries. Islamic laws consider women inferior to men and not deserving of equal status: sequestration, illiteracy, inheritance laws, and repudiation are only some issues that have prompted sympathy and closer examination of the lives they live (Achour 227-249). In 1959, Frantz...