The Laugh of the Snake Woman: Reclaiming the Female Body from the “Monstrous-Feminine” to Écriture Féminine in Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia

Abstract

This article examines the figure of the snake woman in Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia (2002) through the lenses of feminist psychoanalytic theory and mythic reinterpretation. Drawing on Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Creed’s conception of the “monstrous-feminine”, and Cixous’s notion of écriture féminine, it investigates how the novel reimagines the hybrid female body through transforming monstrosity from a marker of exclusion into a source of feminine agency and self-representation. While antiquity frequently frames serpentine female figures, most notably Medusa, through a patriarchal gaze that equates feminine fluidity with monstrosity, the analysis shows the ways in which Fatma destabilizes such traditions. The heroine’s transformation into a snake woman becomes an ambivalent and multivalent site through which the meanings of the female body oscillate between monstrosity and beauty, and between abjection and power. The study demonstrates that the heroine’s serpentine transformation simultaneously draws on feminist reclamation of Medusa and on Arab serpent traditions associated with knowledge, renewal, and feminine power. It offers an original theorization of how contemporary Saudi fiction participates in and extends the global feminist reinterpretation of female mythic monstrosity with new insights into the politics of serpentine embodiment in Arab women’s writing.