“My Mother Brought a Groom”: A Feminist Reading of Marriage and Motherhood in Badriah Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers and Atheer Al-Nashmi’s The Woman Who Lost

Abstract

It is an axiom that almost every literary sphere bears evidence of the ubiquity of Saudi women writers venturing into all areas and segments of modern life. There is an increasing number of Saudi women writers, Badriah Albeshr and Atheer Al-Nashmi being vocal examples, who no longer fear depicting the pursuit of love, intimacy, and failed marriages. They show no reluctance in attempting to intersect these themes with motherhood. However, the literary construction of marriage and motherhood has been less surveilled by critics. Using a feminist framework, this research examines how Saudi women writers portray marriage and motherhood through select examples: Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers and Al-Nashmi’s The Woman Who Lost . Both Hend and the Soldiers and The Woman Who Lost embody templates that relegate women to traditional roles assigned to them as per the patriarchal need. Through the representations of their characters, the two novels reveal the power of men and confinement of women within their male-dominated culture.