Avoiding a case of ‘The Celestial Woman’: A critical stylistic analysis of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero

Abstract

This study aimed at incorporating social discourse in research to unfold what we as humans use language for: ‘to build things like marriages, reputations and institutions… also use it to lie, advantage themselves, harm people and destroy things like marriages, reputations, and institutions’. Related studies have examined Saadawi’s work from Feminist to Critical Discourse perspectives but this study adopted a Critical Stylistic approach propounded by Lesley Jeffries and victimology as a framework to identify latent ideology of ‘what kind of world is being presented by the text and, from this picture, draw some conclusions about what is seen as acceptable or unacceptable in the world created by the textual features’. A purposive qualitative method selected textual-conceptual function tools of analysis were adopted and found out that the main character, Firdaus, saw death or becoming a ‘celestial woman’ as welcoming and the only escape route from violence and stereotyping against the woman on earth. This study highlighted the similitude of events in the text with our current day reality. It also discussed the social strains and stratification that made death appealing. Overall, the paper made us realize that it should take a collective social resolve to help women avoid seeing death or becoming ‘the celestial woman’ as the only route out of domestic violence and injustice.