Comparision of Virginia Woolf and Joumana Haddad as angry women

This study compares Victorian women with today's Arab women in terms of their social identities and living conditions in the light of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) and Joumana Haddad's Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman, I Killed Scheherazade (2010). The aim of the study is to draw attention to the fact that today's Arab women live in a male-dominated society just as Victorian women did and within this society, they struggle against being oppressed, early marriages, deprivation, in other words, against gender inequality existing in every field of daily life. The first chapter points to the psychoanalytic theories related to the construction of gender roles and identity acquisition process so as to clarify the relationship between women and men. Afterwards, the chapter focuses on 'female identity' in Victorian England and today's Arab world. In the second and third chapters of the study, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Joumana Haddad's Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman, I Killed Scheherazade are analysed with the purpose of offering an insight to the conditions and struggles of the Victorian and today's Arab women. In the last chapter, the existential struggles and self-identity explorations of women in their patriarchal societies are analysed from Virginia Woolf's and Joumana Haddad's point of view by comparing and examining the two preceding polemic books of both writers. At the end of the thesis, it is concluded that throughout history women have been forced to live with male-determined identities and values in male-dominated societies, and although we have come a long way in the struggle of disposing the impositions, male-based values and recreating the social and personal identity of women, there remain millions of angry women who are being deprived and restricted of their human rights in every field of life such as family, education and career. Keywords: Victorian Women, Arab Women, Struggle, Identity, Patriarchy