WOMEN IN SEARCH OF A NEW IDENTITY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SIMIN DANESHVAR’SJAZIRE-YE SARGARDANI  (THE WANDERING ISLAND) AND VIRGINIAWOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY

M.A. THESIS IN

ENGLISH LITERATURE

WOMEN IN SEARCH OF A NEW IDENTITY:
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SIMIN DANESHVAR’SJAZIRE-YE SARGARDANI

(THE WANDERING ISLAND) AND VIRGINIAWOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY

Feminism, as widely as it is known today, delineates the way every and each literary work that features a female character should be read. It offers the viewpoint that our modern societies lack a coherent and just basis upon which to build equal gender relations. Patriarchal societies have always been unjust and partial towards women and have tried their best at silencing and harnessing the female half of the human race.And to apply this approach to a novel would be to find the traces of patriarchal and misogynistic thought and behavior in the text and context of a novel.New Historicism on the other hand has been a widespread influence among the critics and scholars. It proposes the idea that in the realm of art and literature and even humanity nothing can exist in a void and outside of its history and historical forces. In other words history influences and shapes human understanding, human artwork and literature in general. To apply this approach to every literary work will be to dig out every possible trace of history in the book and try to show how it had been a shaper of the author as well as the characters and the whole text. For such a purpose two novels from a wide variety of cultures and disciplines have been chosen, namely Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Simin Daneshvar’s Jazire-ye-Sargardani (The Wandering Island). Both novels, although from diverse cultures, center a female protagonist and have at their core the struggle for a new self and a new feminine identity. This fact binds the two novels together in a fashion never seen before. This thesis will attempt to bring into light the similarities and differences of the two novels and the two main characters as well as authorsunder the light of feminism and women studies and in a comparative fashion.

Key Words: Identity,feminism,New Historicism, Mrs. Dalloway, Jazire-ye-Sargardani, Virginia Woolf, Simin Daneshvar.