Feminist stylistics in Ahdaf Soueif's Aisha

Stylistics is primarily concerned with deconstructing meanings and their established interpretations. Many feminists have taken an interest in stylistics recently, and feminist stylistics relies mainly on feminist theories, which include a particular interest in patriarchal values that degrade women and marginalize their societal position. This study explores the feminist discourse in the novel Aisha by Ahdaf Soueif, which is considered one of the traditional fictional novels that depict Arab women in a patriarchal society. Aisha is a feminist novel that deals with oriental women's issues. Those women are mostly portrayed as sexual objects and weak and submissive to their male counterparts. Feminist stylistics emerged in response to these demeaning perceptions of women, and it aimed to eliminate these stereotypes in language and society. In this regard, feminist stylistics exposes the unsustainable assumptions of traditional stylistics by putting gender issues at the core of the textual analysis. Highlighting gender discourses in different texts, including linguistic and thematic differences, is central to this feminist method. Within this context, the first chapter of the study will give comprehensive definitions of the roots of the stylistics, its origin, its formation, and how it merges with feminist theory to form Feminist Stylistics. The second chapter is an introduction to the life and literary career of Ahdaf Soueif with a brief focus on her work, Aisha, which includes eight stories linked to each other. In this study's third, fourth and fifth chapters, Sara Mills's feminist stylistic models are used to analyse the stories according to four levels. The feminist stylistics approach is applied to word/phrase level, sentence level, and discourse analysis level. Applying the feminist stylistic approach to Soueif's stories, it is aimed to reveal how gender representation in language reflects the patriarchal culture. Thus, this study based on feminist stylistics examines sexism in the stories and how point of view, agency, metaphor, or transitivity are directly related to gender, which distinguishes women's writing habits from men's writing.