The Plight of Saudi Women in Contemporary American Fiction

Saudi Arabia is usually identified around the world as a religiously conservative country in which religion plays a pivotal role in women's day to day existence. With the increasing Western interest in the rights of Saudi women, many contemporary Western novels erroneously attribute the plight of Saudi women to Islamic teachings. The book focuses on the investigation of this Western assumption in two American contemporary novels¿Jo Franklin¿s The Wing of the Falcon (1995) and John Briley¿s The First Stone (1997), as representatives of the Western public opinion. The study aims to prove that the plight of Saudi women presented in the novels is a problem related to local cultural traditions and not to Islamic teachings. The study uses the postcolonial feminist approach that denounces the Western feminist history of universalizing women¿s issues regardless of the women¿s different backgrounds. Postcolonial feminist criticism tends to analyze Western texts written about Third World women and link the texts to their proper ethnic, cultural and religious contexts.