T. C. SÜLEYMAN DEMĠREL ÜNĠVERSĠTESĠ SOSYAL BĠLĠMLER ENSTĠTÜSÜ BATI DĠLLERĠ VE EDEBĠYATI ANABĠLĠM DALI

THOMAS HARDY VE ABDULRAHMAN MUNĠF’ĠN ROMANLARINDA BÖLGESELLĠĞĠN KÜLTÜREL BAKIġ AÇISI ÜZERĠNE BĠR KARġILAġTIRMA

Thamer Yousif Allawi Allawi 1340224506

Doktora Tezi

DANIġMAN Doç. Dr. Beture MEMMEDOVA

ISPARTA -2017

T. R. SÜLEYMAN DEMĠREL UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES WESTERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT

REGIONALISM AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES IN THE NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY AND ABDUL RAHMAN MUNIF: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Thamer Yousif Allawi Allawi 1340224506

PhD. Dissertation

SUPERVISOR Assoc. Prof. Dr. Beture MEMMEDOVA

ISPARTA -2017

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

By force of circumstances, I had three supervisors; Asst. Prof. Dr. Şule Okuroğlu Özün, Asst. Prof. Dr. Philip George Anthony Glover, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Beture Memmedova, to all of whom I extend my sincere gratitude. Without their efforts, support and advice, the present thesis would not be as it is now.

It is my pleasure to thank my instructors in the PhD program and all the academic staff in the Department of English Language and literature, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Süleyman Demirel University. Also, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ömer Şekerci, the Head of Department, deserves many thanks for his constant encouragement of all Iraqi students.

Immeasurable appreciation and deepest gratitude for the help and support are extended to the following people, who in one way or another have contributed in making this study possible: Res. Asst. Yeşim Sultan Akbay, the librarians of the University Library, the department‘s secretary Hasan Zengin.

I am also indebted to my cousin Prof. Ayad Hammad Ali, Anbar University, Faculty of Arts, Dept. of English, for his unlimited advice and support, and Dr. Ayad Inad, thanks to whose efforts I was able to come to Turkey and proceed with my doctoral program.

I am grateful to Dr. Mohammed Iqbal (Minister of Ministry of Education- Iraq) for giving me an opportunity to study abroad, his support and encouragement. Equally, I would like to thank Dr. Nafaa Hussein Ali (Manager of Anbar Directorate General of Education) for his trust in me.

Special thanks go to my mother, my brothers, my sisters, and my friends in Iraq, Oman and Turkey. And for my dearest wife for her never-ending support and patience.

III (ALLAWİ, Thamer Yousif, Thomas Hardy ve Abdulrahman Munif‟in Romanlarında Bölgeselliğin Kültürel Bakış Açısı Üzerine Bir Karşılaştırma, Doktora Tezi, ISPARTA, 2017)

ÖZET Bu tez Thomas Hardy ve Abdul Rahman Munif‘in seçilmiş iki romanlarında karşılaştırma yaparak bölgesel elementleri incelemektedir. Hardy‘nin Çılgın Kalabalıktan Uzak (1874), ve Yuvaya Dönüş (1878), Munif‘in ise Tuz Kentleri (1988), ve The Trench (1991) adlı eserleri ele alınmaktadır. Bölgesellik kavramı kurgu dünyasında olayların ve mekânın geçtiği yer değil, bilakis mevcut bölgedeki kırsal veya kentsel olsun karakter, çevre, sosyal ilişkiler, gelenekler, dil, lehçe veya kültürel yönlerdir. Bir başka deyişle, bölgesellik belli bir bölgedeki kültürel ve mimari gelişmeleri ve bu gelişmelerin karakterler üzerine etkisini incelemektedir.

Hardy sanayi devrimine tanık olmuş İngiliz toplumu tarafından temsil edilen batı kültürünün sosyal ve kültürel dönüşümünü ele almaktadır. Munif de petrolün keşfine tanık olmuş özellikle Suudi Arabistan gibi Körfez ülkeler tarafından temsil edilen doğu kültüründeki şehirlerin ve halkın bu keşfin dehşetli sonuçlarını tartışmaktadır. İngiltere‘dekine benzer şekilde bu sosyal değişiklikler Suudi Arabistan gibi Körfez ülkelerde de sosyo-kültürel dönüşümlere sebebiyet vermektedir. Avrupa felsefesinde ve sosyal teorisinde önde gelen isimlerden biri olan Henry Lefebvre‘nin (1984) Sosyal Uzam teorisi bu bağlamda şehir veya köy gibi bölgeleri incelemede kendini kanıtlamaktadır. Teori, bölgeyi bir alandan ziyade sosyal bir uzlaşma alanı olarak görmektedir. Buna bağlı olarak, mevcut tez bu teori bağlamında seçilmiş romanların analizinde ve tartışmasında kullanılmıştır.

Tezde elde edilen sonuçlar Hardy ve Munif‘in bölgesel roman yazarlar olduğunu ve Sanayi Devrimi ve petrolün keşfinin sosyal, politik ve kültürel farklılıklar gibi benzer özellikleri paylaştıklarını göstermektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Bölgesellik, Sosyal Uzam Teorisi, Thomas Hardy, Abdul- Rahman Munif, Wessex.

IV (ALLAWİ, Thamer Yousif, Regionalism and Cultural Perspectives in the Novels of Thomas Hardy and Abdul Rahman Munif: A Comparative Study, PhD Dissertation, ISPARTA, 2017) ABSTRACT This study is concerned with drawing a comparison between Thomas Hardy and Abdul Rahman Munif based on exploring the regional elements in two selected novels by Thomas Hardy and Abdul-Rahman Munif. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), and The Return of the Native (1878), by the former, Cities of Salt (1988), and The Trench (1991) by the latter. The concept of regionalism in fiction does not mean the setting or place in which events had taken place; rather it includes different elements such as, characters, environment, social relations, customs, language, dialect, or cultural aspects of that area and its people, be it rural or urban. In other words, regionalism examines the cultural and architectural developments of a given region and the impact of these developments on the characters. Hardy tackles the western culture represented by the English society which had witnessed the emergence of the industrial revolution in England leading to social and cultural transition. On the other hand, Munif deals with the eastern culture represented by the desert in Gulf countries, specifically Saudi Arabia which had witnessed discovering oil and its dire consequences for cities and their inhabitants. This progress led to social changes and cultural transition for Gulf‘s peoples, Saudi Arabia in particular. It is in this context that the theory of Social Space, proposed by the French leading figure in European philosophy and social theory Henry Lefebvre (1984), proves effective in dealing with the place whether it is a city or village. It does not view the place as only an area; rather it conceives the place compromising environment, landscape, people, and their social relations. Therefore, this approach was used in the process of analysis and discussion of the selected novels where a gloss of quotations were cited down in order to support the analysis of regionalism.

The conclusions reached in this study show that both writers under study, Hardy and Munif are regional novelists who share common issues, such as social, political and cultural changes in the aftermath of the industrial revolution in England, whereas Munif criticizes the same changes that accompanied the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia.

V Keywords: Regionalism, Theory of Social Space, Thomas Hardy, Abdul- Rahman Munif, Wessex.

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

TEZ SAVUNMA SINAV TUTANAĞI ...... I YEMĠN METNĠ ...... II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... III ÖZET ...... IV ABSTRACT ...... V TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... VII

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION THE CONCEPT OF REGIONALISM IN LITERATURE

1.1 THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY ...... 8 1.2 THE AIM OF THE STUDY ...... 9 1.3 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY………………………………………………10 1.4 METHODS OF THE STUDY…………………………………………………………..11 1.5 THE LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY…………………………...…………………...13

CHAPTER II THE WRITERS BRINGING BOUNDARIES CLOSER

2.1 HARDY’S LIFE ...... 14 2.2 HARDY AS A NOVELIST: THE WRITER AHEAD OF HIS TIME...... 17 2.3 MUNIF’S LIFE ...... 22 2.4 MUNIF AS A NOVELIST: THE WRTIER BELONGING NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE ...... 25

CHAPTER III THE CONCEPT OF REGIONALISM AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES IN FICTION

3.1 THE REGIONAL NOVEL AS A GENRE OF FICTION ...... 31 3.2 PLACE IMAGERY AND SYMBOLISM IN HARDY’S NOVELS ...... 35 3.3 PLACE IMAGERY AND SYMBOLISM IN MUNIF’S NOVELS ...... 46

VII CHAPTER IV ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN HARDY AND MUNIF'S SELECTED NOVELS

4.1 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD ...... 56 4.2 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE ...... 65 4.3 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN CITIES OF SALT ...... 74 4.4 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN THE TRENCH ...... 81 CONCLUSION ...... 87 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 91 ÖZGEÇMİŞ...... 96 CV ...... 97

VIII VIII CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION THE CONCEPT OF REGIONALISM IN LITERATURE “Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.”

—Matthew Arnold

The present thesis analyses the theme of Regionalism and Cultural Perspectives in the selective novels by the prominent late Victorian writer, Thomas Hardy and the outstanding Arab writer Abdul-Rahman Munif within the frame of comparative study. Over the last decades, comparative studies gain more and more critical attention not only in the field of literature but as Henry Remark observes ―anything could be compared with anything else, regardless even of whether it was literature.‖1 Though Thomas Hardy and Munif are distanced by decades, the themes they address reveal enough similarities that make it possible to cross boundaries and draw comparison between the works of the two writers. Both of them deal with Regionalism, a literary concept originated in America under the names ‗local colour‘ or ‗colourist writers‘. Like many literary terms, the term Regionalism is a double- edged sword defined in many ways.

Merriem-Webster‟s Collegiate Dictionary gives four meanings of the term:

1. Consciousness of and loyalty to a distinct region with a homogeneous population. 2. Development of a political or social system based on one or more such areas. 3. Emphasis on regional locale and characteristics in art or literature. 4. A characteristic feature (as of speech) of a geographic area.2 Professor Norman Foerster, a teaching staff member at Iowa faculty, defines the American literary regionalism as follows:

 See: Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, p. 1.  The name of the writer is spelt in more than one way; Munif will be used throughout the dissertation. 1 Susan Bassnett, 1993, p. 32. 2 Merriem Webster, Merriem-Webster‟s Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus, Merriem-Webster Incorporated, 2003, p. 1048.

1 Revolting against domination by the city (especially New York), against industrial civilization, against cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and against an abstract humanism, all of them conceived as making for an artificial rootless literature.3 Grant Wood Graham (1937) in his pamphlet Revolt Against the City modified Foerster's definition:

Regionalism seeks to direct preponderating attention to the natural landscape, human geography, and cultural life that mark off particular areas of the country from other areas. Some writers draw their materials from their own experience and the lives they know best are more likely to attain universal values than those who do not.4 This definition assumes that there are four basic elements of fictional regionalism that should be achieved in any novel: landscape, characters, topography and cultural norms.

According to Weinstein,

literary regionalism from its origins in the nineteenth century does more than name place; it also locates the social and cultural perspectives of the regional characters who live and speak in ways that would recognize them.5 This definition of Regionalism shows that it is not only concerned with the setting of the novel, but also focuses on the characters including their level of living, their speech and dialects because one can distinguish the region of someone from his dialect and accent. It also explores the social level of the character as labour or education or farming. The cultural aspect of the character, along with the place in which he lived or raised, is important to determine whether he is urban or rural.

Keith quotes Phyllis Bentley, who lists the following characteristics of the genre:

Its first great merit is, of course, its brilliant illuminations of English landscape…. Its transcendent merit is that of verisimilitude…. Lastly, the

3 qtd. in, Grant Wood, Revolt Against the City, Clio Press, Wisconsin, Madison University 1935, p. 3. 4 Grant Wood, 1937, p. 3. 5 Cindy Weinstein, The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 31.

2 regional novel is essentially democratic. It expresses a belief that the ordinary man and the ordinary woman are interesting and worth depicting.6 Regionalism is the use of the specific topographical features of a certain geographical location in order to evoke its people, social structure of the society and cultural aspects which distinguish it from other areas. It is noteworthy that Abrams‘ definition does not differ much from that of Bentley‘s in that he attaches great importance to the connection between the setting and the emotional state of character.

The regional novel emphasizes the setting, speech, social structure and customs of a particular locality, not merely as local colour, but as important conditions affecting the temperament of the characters and their ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting.7 Consequently, this study tackles the concept of Regionalism not only as a setting in which all the events take place, but also issues related to the concept of regionalism, such as characterizations in each novel, their social norms and cultural values that a given region has. Also, it investigates the cultural aspects of the community, the way of life in that region, dialects, accents, customs, architecture and level of education. Thus, though the term Regionalism seems to involve limitations, in fact it allows to conduct a wide range of research.

The writers under study deal with all the factors reflected in the above definitions. Thomas Hardy uses imaginary place names in his novels, but it is not hard to guess that he means the Wessex area, the name which:

fell into the background but the area remained important in the flow of English history. The concentration of its heritage with us now, bears witness to this. In more recent times, the work of writers, Thomas Hardy, in particular, has breathed new life into the use of ―Wessex‖ to represent an area and now there are hundreds of companies that have it as part of their name.8 It is natural that the writer creates a very realistic setting as the one born in that region, and the one who knew its nature, its local people, the relationship between them and the impact of nature on characters:

6 Dale Kramer, Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, Springer, 1979, p. 36. 7 Meyer Howard Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999, p. 194. 8 http://www.destinationwessex.org.uk/about-wessex.htm, (13.10.2016).

3 His creation of Wessex is based on realistic social observation. He records unsentimentally the economic basis of rural life, the functioning of the rural economy, the subsistence level of the labourer, and the socio-economic relations between these workers and their landlords. He also records the process of change in the advent of more efficient mechanised farming. As a countryman he could see, as he remarked in his essay ‗The Dorsetshire Labourer‘, that it would not be in the interest of farm workers to ‗remain stagnant and old-fashioned‘.9 Hardy handles Wessex from a very particular prospect: it is a place of great significance in the history of England and reflects the author‘s patriotic feelings as well. At the same time, Wessex was the name of the ancient kingdom of the legendary King Alfred. Hardy employed this name for the six counties in the South-West part of England. Wessex of Thomas Hardy stretches from the English Channel in the South to Cornwall in the West, reaching Oxford to the North. This limited region which forms the scenic background to each of his eighteen "Wessex novels" and to his poems, always appears in his novels.

Hardy‘s conception of Wessex deserves a special attention. ―In fact, he gave this name to the district in which he was born and with which he was most intimately associated.‖10 Hermann Lea also emphasizes the important role of Wessex in Hardy‘s novels:

Wessex… assisting the presentation of themes of progress, primitivism, sexuality, religion, nature and naturalism; however, this is complicated by the economic role Wessex played in Hardy's career.11 When the concept of a fictional Wessex was created, it included a small area of Dorset where he grew up. Later, the nature and importance of this area were developed through a set of novels. Charles H. Harper underlines this fact by noting: ―Hardy's resurrection of the name "Wessex is greatly responsible for the popular modern use of the term to describe the south-west region of England‖.‖12

9 Geoffrey Harvey, The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy, Psychology Press, 2003, pp. 152- 153. 10 Chittaranjan Nath, ―Regionalism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy‖, A Journal of Humanities & Social Science, Karimganj College, Karimganj, Assam, India, Volume II, Issue III, January, 2014, p. 160. 11 Hermann Lea, Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Michigan, Toucan Press, 1966, p. 29. 12 Charles George Harper, Hardy Country, Wentworth Press, 2016, p. 36.

4 Hardy‘s fascination with nature is transferred to his characters. For example, Gabriel Oak who is a young farmer and shepherd in his novel Far from the Madding Crowd, is a positive character, accepting the nature‘s laws and forces. The writer does not conceal his sympathy for this rural man. Duffin H. C. attracts our attention to Hardy‘s different attitude towards rural people from that of town people.

It is the rustic in the Wessex Novels who are happy, for the mystery of delight as mentioned in the Woodlanders lies in limiting the aspirations. They are quietists without Nature obviously dominates the theme and scenes of a regional novel; and it is undoubtedly agreed that Hardy was very successful in this regard.13 All his novels prove that it has been nature it has been the nature, the immortal Wessex, its environment and the characters therein that have formed the background of Thomas Hardy‘s canon. His love for nature and its relation or rather domination upon helpless human is the central subject matter of his novels. Thomas Hardy is also the best representative of the naturalist movement in England known as a 'regional novelist'. Unlike the writers engaged in the pastoral genre, Hardy is very critical about the forces of nature and does not consider it to be comforting for a human being. Also he deals with the oppression exercised by the High-class people against the Labour-class people. Himself being one of them, Hardy was well aware of the rural man‘s problems and challenges and the physical features of his setting like hills, dales, rivers, pastures and heaths.

Abdul Rahman Munif is the other writer under study. He is a Saudi citizen but his Saudi citizenship was revoked because his works offended the rulers of Saudi Arabia. He criticizes the social, economic, cultural and political changes that happened in the Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia. He believes that the discovery of oil in the region had a negative impact on the country its norms and cultural values including respect, courage and honour. Politically, the Gulf governments became followers of the American lobby in the region that globalized it.

The basic objective of the study is to explore the regional elements such as setting, characters and socio-cultural perspectives in each of the four novels. Two

13 Henry Charles Duffin, Thomas Hardy: A Study of the Wessex Novels, the Poems, and The Dynasts, Manchester University Press, 1962, p. 13.

5 novels of Thomas Hardy have been taken for analysis: The Return of The Native (1878), and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The other two novels by Munif are Cities of Salt (1984), and the second novel is The Trench (1991(. While drawing a comparison between Hardy and Munif's works, one can observe certain common issues and events in both eras. In England in the Victorian period, the industrial revolution occurred and caused critical social changes which became the subject of Hardy‘s criticism. Hardy criticized the class struggle in the English society where the society was classified into high class, middle class, and labour class. The main setting used in Hardy's novels is Wessex, while the main setting in Munif's novels is the Arab desert. On the other hand, in Arab Peninsula, specifically Saudi Arabia in 1930s, the foreign Petroleum companies discovered the oil which turned the desert into big cities. This transition caused social changes in the Arab Peninsula. Munif criticized the social transition between Bedouin people who conceded their social norms and cultural values. Hardy criticized the political elite which monopolized the economy of England. Munif criticized the political abuse practiced by the rulers against their people. In fact, these are the main issues for comparison that have been attempted through the study.

Chapter I of the thesis states the scope and aim of the study followed by its significance, methods and limitations of the study. Chapter II starts with Hardy‘s life, which is far from an in-depth discussion in the thesis. It would be practically impossible to realize that. For the comprehensive account of the writer‘s life and literary performance, the readers are recommended a number of biographies covering the writer‘s life and literary career from his birth in 1812 up to his death in 1928. The thesis focuses on his mature philosophy, his attitude towards past, marriage, women and life, in particular. The sub-chapter ―Hardy as a Novelist‖ characterizes the author as a fiction writer, though his intention was never to become a novelist. Being a late- Victorian novelist, nevertheless, he is different from his contemporary writers by his style, philosophy and life perspective. The chapter also views the assessments of his works by the writers like D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and a number of literary critics like Harold Bloom and Alaistair Smart. The chapter continues with Munif‘s life, who is considered a controversial but remarkable novelist in both Arab and Western literature. He, too, reflects the social and regional realities of the modern

6 Arab society in his works, which he considers as an ―effective vehicle for change.‖ Born in 1933 Jordan, his life shows that he was one of the few who became the voice of the region economically exploited by Americans. The following subchapter vividly illustrates this. Chapter III ―THE CONCEPT OF REGIONALISM AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES IN FICTION‖ of the thesis deals with the core of the subject matter, regionalism. The chapter presents a detailed analysis of the concept and the way both writers handle it. Through place imagery and symbolism used in all the four novels by the writers under study, the following subchapters analyse how these symbols enable the reader to get a deeper insight into the genre. The comparison of the works show that Hardy‘s novels contain much more symbolic imagery than those of Munif. Chapter IV analyses the concept of regionalism through characterization within all four novels separately under different subchapters. Hardy is the best representative of the regional genre in the 19th century focusing on the interaction of his characters with their environment and the consequences of this interaction on their personalities. Munif‘s concern is also regionalism reflected in the social and political changes after American exploitation of the land and their impact on Arab people and culture. In the novels of both writers, it is impossible to separate characters and the natural setting. Being the character itself the setting is not given for its own sake only. The thesis ends with a conclusion, summing the main gist of the study drawing parallels and showing the differences between the works under the study.

 It should be noted that the thesis uses the words ―writer‖ and ―author‖ relating to Hardy and Munif interchangeably, not differentiating the writer as a person who writes and publishes his works and the author as the one who originates the ideas for his would-be book.

7 1.1 THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY

Place and spatial features have been a prominent aspect of the modern novel across different cultures. Regional novels focus on the effect of the place on the author where s/he embodies the nature of the place being rural or urban where he was born, his life experience, old memories, and social alterations or his community. Such kinds of novels are also called ‗local colours‘ and their writers ‗colourists‘. In the light of this the study reveals the similarities in perspectives of two writers belonging to different cultures, ideologies and social environment. Despite the different ages the writers lived in, the comparison made provides the reader with unusual topographical and cultural information about the impact, the space and setting make on human beings.

Most often the setting interacts greatly with the lives of the characters affecting its narrative lines of development. Although the use of regionalism in literature is a relatively recent research subject, it dates back to the Shakespearian time and reached its height in the novels of Thomas Hardy in British fiction. This focalization of geography in the novels of Hardy is paralleled in the novels of the Arab novelist Abdul-Rahman Munif who invoked the desert of Arabia in his novels.

For the first time this study focuses on the comparison of the works of two great writers: one, Thomas Hardy, who has become a classic writer belonging to all the world, the other is the Arab author and intellectual Abdul-Rahman Munif brought together by the common theme of Regionalism. The scope of the study thus includes all the features attributed to Regionalism.

8 1.2 THE AIM OF THE STUDY

The aim of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis of regionalism in the novels of Thomas Hardy and Abdul Rahman Munif with particular emphasis on the cultural perspectives implied in their regionalism. The analysis draws on Hardy's novels set in his fictional Wessex, and Munif's novels set in Arabia, notably The Cities of Salt trilogy. In the English translation his works are named trilogy; Cities of Salt (Vol.1), The Trench (Vol. 2), Variations on Night and Day (Vol. 3) Both of these regions are based on real places. Hardy depicts his birthplace Dorset in his novels which is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast, while Munif depicts the Arabian Desert specifically Saudi Arabia and the transformation of the Arabian Peninsula from desert oasis to oil countries. The study seeks to show that Hardy and Munif‘s concerns are not the depiction of these regions for ornamental effects. Rather, these places play a great role in the development of the plot, themes and characters. The study shows that the novels in question are far from being conventional, and that the theory of Regionalism and the theory of Lefebvre enabled the researcher to analyse the interrelationship between setting and human nature.

9 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This study is important as the novels of Hardy and Munif are studied comparatively according to the notion of regionalism. Regionalism is explained by Snell

as a fiction that is set in a recognizable region, which describes features distinguishing the life, social relations, customs, language, dialect, or the other aspects of the culture of that area and its people.14 The cultural perspectives implied in their regionalism tell much about the uniqueness of the novel as a means of cultural dissemination. Cultural perspectives within the concept of the regional novel consider:

a place or regional culture which illustrates an aspect of life in general or the effects of a particular environment upon the people living it … one expects to find characteristics of a place, setting or region, whether urban or rural, which bears an approximation to a real place.15 This view of regionalism permits comparisons between different writers.

The study is also significant in that it compares two distinct traditions of regionalism, Eastern and Western. Both Hardy and Munif focus on their invocation of regions as an active setting but they belong to different backgrounds and traditions. Hardy works within the natural view of landscape literature and social novel, while Munif represents the desert which developed into big cities due to the oil discovery there, and shifted their social conditions. To the writer, the disappearance of the desert is equal to the end of farming and the change of lifestyle.

14 K. D. M. Snell, The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800-1990, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1. 15 K. D. M. Snell, 1998, p. 1.

11 1.3 THE METHODS OF THE STUDY

The novels under study being unconventional are open to a number of literary theories. In the first place, the theory of Regionalism perfectly suits the novels by both writers. In addition, Lefebvre‘s theory of Social Space is appropriate for Munif‘s novels. The study adopts Lefebvre's approach (1984) in comparing Hardy and Munif's novels. Lefebvre constructs his theory on a social space approach, identifying it by two sets of relations: ‗production‘ and ‗reproduction‘. According to him,

social space contains and assigns appropriate places to the social relations of reproduction, i.e., the bio-physiological relations between the sexes and between age groups, along with the specific organization of the family; and the relations of production, i.e., the division of labour and its organization in the form of hierarchical social functions.16 This suggests that social space depends on two elements, production and reproduction. The former refers to dividing the region into social classes including working-class people or middle-class people and explaining the social relations between them. Reproduction refers to the structure of a family and its relations as males and females. Within this frame Lefebvre attaches great importance to people‘s lifestyles.

In addition, the study utilizes textual and biographical analysis of the aspects of regionalism in relation to setting, characterization, social custom and cultural development of edifices of the area. The emphasis will be given to the uncovering of the means by which the novelists propagate a cultural perspective in their regionalism. Another procedure is to analyse and discuss the use of symbolism and imagery of setting and characters in Hardy and Munif's novels. Hardy and Munif employ symbolism in their characters and setting as shown in the Hardy's heath and Munif's Arab Peninsula in order to convey the central theme of modernism. The setting in Hardy's novel, especially in The Return of the Native was appropriately designed to symbolize the internal conflicts and feelings of his characters. For example, ‗Wessex‘, ‗sword‘, ‗moon‘, ‗Bonfire‘, ‗birds, and ‗watch‘ are but few of them. These symbols reflect the tragedy of the main characters and mirror their anguishes. The rich

16 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1984, p. 32.

11 symbolism and imagery in Hardy and Munif's novels make their novels an invaluable subject matter for analysis and discussion.

12 1.4 THE LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

There are a number of limitations in the study. First, the study limits its comparative analysis to two novels by each writer; Thomas Hardy and Abdul-Rahman Munif. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), and The Return of the Native (1878), by the former, Cities of Salt (1984), and The Trench (1991) by the latter. Along with being one of the greatest late-Victorian writers, Thomas Hardy was equally one of the greatest poets at the beginning of the twentieth century. Because of space considerations, it is only his selected novels that were mainly analysed. Also, the novels were analysed using two theories only; the theory of literary regionalism, and Lefebvre‘s the theory of social space. Neither does the thesis employ any feminist analysis of the writer‘s novels, whereas, in general, the novels yield themselves to other approaches as well.

13 CHAPTER II THE WRITERS BRINGING BOUNDARIES CLOSER

2.1 HARDY’S LIFE

There are a number of biographies of Thomas Hardy, the writer belonging to the late 19th or the early 20th century poet-novelist; Robert Gitting‘s Young Thomas Hardy (2001), Michael Milligate‘s A Biography Revisited (2004), Ralph Pite‘s latest work Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (2007), Harold Orel‘s The Final Years of Thomas Hardy: 1912-1928 (1976), Claire Tomalin‘s The Time-torn Man (2007) are but few of them. Besides, there are a multitude of critical guides to his novels and poems. This fact proves his being unique and of great interest to biographers as well as the reading public. Despite this rich collection of biographical works, Ralph Pite ―admits that Hardy‟s life is a stubborn mystery, and his biography embraces the writer‟s seemingly self-conscious inconsistency.‖17 Among these biographies, Michael Milligate‘s A Biography Revisited is significant in that it presents the detailed account of the writer‘s family life of his personality as a husband, friend and lover. Terry Eagleton calls Milligate‘s biography as ―a lucid, judicious, opulently detailed account.‖18 Also,

Published under the name of his second wife shortly after his death, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy could never have been seen as a particularly objective account, and from 1940 onwards was increasingly widely recognised as having been written largely by Hardy himself. The extent of Hardy's involvement in its composition might be thought to lend credibility to the Life, but successive biographers have treated the memoir with justifiable caution.19 In the opening page of his book, the writer says:

Born in 1840 to humble parents in an out of the way corner of the English countryside, he lived and wrote into his eighty-eighth year, registering with extraordinary sensitivity and precision, in both prose and verse, the historic

17 Sophie Ratcliffe, ―A Man with Many Sides‖, New Statesman, Culture, July, 2006, p. 62. 18 Michael Milligate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford, OUP, 2004, the cover page. 19 Jem Poster, ―Secrets and Lives‖, The Guardian, Books, June, 2006, n. p.

14 changes that swept over England, and especially over his native Dorset, during the course of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.20 His family could not afford his education after sixteen, and he became the local architect‘s apprentice in Dorchester. London, where he went in 1862, never became close to him. It always reminded him of his social inferiority. In London, most of his time he was busy in Bloomfield‘s office, engaged in architecture. In his free time he visited picture galleries, viewing the collections of European and English paintings, (the experience reflected in almost all his novels) ―attended a reading by Dickens himself in the spring of 1863,‖ went to the opera, did some dancing.21 In terms of his private life, it was in London that he met Eliza Nicholls, a very pious girl, but an important figure in his early emotional life.

London years, which left him depressed, were not very inspiring. He left Eliza, who was comfortless and never married. His relationship with his first wife Emma has become the focus of many critics, writers and film-makers. His attitude to Emma, which was unusual and paradoxical, proves how contradictory and enigmatic Hardy was in his relation with women. Both went through a lot of problems and disillusionments went together. After her death, however, he became obsessed with her memories: ―filled with sorrow and remorse for their estrangement, he had her body brought down and placed the coffin at the foot of his bed, where it remained for three days and nights until the funeral.‖22 Claire Tomalin, his latest and the most empathetic of Hardy‘s biographer, mentions ―a perpetual calendar fixed on Monday 7 March, marking his first meeting with Emma.‖23 Claire Tomalin says that the moment his first wife died, ―Thomas Hardy became a great poet. He was a long established, admired and popular writer, acknowledged as a great novelist and, more recently, as a poet.‖24 Thus it was the death of Emma that proved to be his best inspiration.

Though, two years later, he married Florence Emily Dugdale, who was very devoted to him, he never forgot his first wife Emma Gifford, whom he survived. Even

20 Michael Milligate, 2004, p. 7. 21 Michael Milligate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford, OUP, 2004, p. 75. 22 Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man, Penguin, UK, 2007, n. p. 23 Claire Tomalin, 2007, n. p. 24 Richard Holmes, ―At Home in his Socks‖, The Guardian, Books, October, 2006, n. p.

15 when he died in 1928, his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma though he himself was interred in the Abby‘s famous Poet‘s Corner. The famous English writer, Somerset Maugham‘s (1874-1965) roman-a-clef novel The Cakes and Ale and the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) has been claimed by some critics to be a novel about Thomas Hardy as the character named Driffield, though the author himself denied it.25

In 1867 he returned to Dorset to witness the antipathy of his friends and neighbours, who would see his return as a sign of failure. However, Hardy himself ―knew that he had developed intellectually, accumulated experiences and memories and learned how much his writing mattered to him,‖ and it was in his native Dorset that he dedicated himself to writing.26 Furthermore, he read contemporary authors gluttonously, and learnt French, Latin, Greek, German languages supervised by his mentor, Horace Moule who read fragments of Iliad to him.

All his novels were written in Dorchester in Max Gate (now a museum), where he lived and worked peacefully visited by writers and his fans. After his novel Jude the Obscure he was blamed for his controversial treatment for marriage, sex and religion. He gave up writing novels and took up poetry and became the outstanding poet of the early twentieth-century. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, but was never a laureate.27

In 1923, when he posed for Augustus John (1878-1961), a Welsh painter, draughtsman, etcher, the portrait in oils ―showing a man who has come to terms with old age, his faced carved, seamed and furrowed by a long, reflective life.‖28 Two comments are attributed to the writer, the earlier a jocular, ―well, if I look like that the sooner I am under the ground the better.‖29 The second, made several years later, has him saying, “I don‟t know whether that is how I look or not—but that is how I feel.‖30 He died on January 11, 1928, at the age of 87.

25 www.britannica.com/topic/Cakes-and-Ale, (17.04.2017) 26 Michael Milligate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford, OUP, 2004, p. 97. 27 http://users.clas.ufl.edu/snod/HardyIntroduction, (21.03.2017) 28 Claire Tomalin, ―At Home with the Wizard‖, The Guardian, Books, September, 2006, n. p. 29 Claire Tomalin, 2006, n. p. 30 Claire Tomalin, 2006, n. p.

16 2.2 HARDY AS A NOVELIST: THE WRITER AHEAD OF HIS TIME

It was never Hardy‘s intention to write prose. He started and ended his literary career as a poet. But he decided to write novels to make money. In 1871 and up to 1897, he created 14 novels, his short stories were in three volumes in addition to poetry, among his top novels: Tess of the D‟Urbervilles (1891); Jude the Obscure (1895); He published them at that time, but they were not received with positive responses, a matter that might have led him to giving up fiction towards composing poems. He composed eight volumes of poetry; one thousand poems, in the first decade of the 20th century, Dynasts were published, a poetic drama consisting of three parts, 19 acts, and 130 scenes.31

His novels not only brought him money, but made him famous and a popular writer of the late-Victorian period. ―He called himself „a meliorist‟, one who believed that man can live with some happiness if he understands his place in the universe and accepts it.‖32 In other words, Hardy was strongly convinced that by his novels and poetry he would be able to strike a chord with the reading public in terms of one‘s sense of belonging, sense of place, a sense of attachment to one‘s birthplace and connectedness to one‘s past. Though Hardy is labelled as a pessimistic and melancholic writer, from his definition of happiness it is not hard to see that he considered himself a happy man.

Concerning Thomas Hardy‘s literary performance, the critics are divided in their appraisal of his works. In his well-known guidebook including the authors of literary canon, Harold Bloom quotes a number of critics like J. Hills Miller or Hugh Kenner, who disliked Hardy rather than liked him. In fiction, according to Bloom, he was more influenced by Willkie Collins (1824-1889) than by George Eliot (1819- 1880). Harold Bloom himself does not consider Hardy, Henry James‘, ―who dismissed him [Hardy] as a mere imitator of George Eliot,‖ or James Joyce‘s equal.33 Nevertheless, he brings D. H. Lawrence‘s assessment to our attention in which the writer compares Hardy with the great writers like Shakespeare, Sophocles or Tolstoy.

31 Mary Ann Gillies, Modernist Literature: An Introduction, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, p. 51. 32 http://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Hardy-Thomas.html, (02.01.2017). 33 Harold Bloom, Novelists and Novels, Checkmark Books, New York, 2005, p. 175.

17 Bloom notes that ―It is Hardy‟s genius that they [characters] are what they had to be; as imperfect as their creator and his vision, as impure as his language and his plotting, and finally painful and memorable to us.‖34

Though Hardy himself was far from adopting and employing the literary devices and techniques of modernist literature, he influenced a number of great modernist writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Virginia Woolf. The latter, a very demanding critic of the Victorian period, included Thomas Hardy into her collection of essays under the name The Second Common Reader: Annotated Edition. Interestingly, she wrote her essay on the month and year of his death in January, 1928, which can be considered a sort of elegiac note after the writer‘s death. In the preface of her writing she depicts him as a man ―without self-seeking or self- advertisement.‖35 She expresses her fascination with his nature and landscape descriptions:

But perhaps the most remarkable quality in the book is the sound of a waterfall that echoes and booms through its pages. […] He already proves himself a minute and skilled observer of Nature; the rain, he knows, falls differently as it falls upon roots or arable; he knows that the wind sounds differently as it passes through the branches of different trees. But he is aware in a larger sense of Nature as a force.36 Thomas Hardy would have been happy to learn that Virginia Woolf thought him to be a greater writer than George Eliot as regards the depiction of countrymen. Because Thomas Hardy was always annoyed by the comparison often in favour of G. Eliot. It is also interesting to note that in this essay on the writer Woolf focuses only on the two novels of the writer; Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, the novels which have become part of Hardy‘s literary canon.

The background story behind the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd is worth mentioning here. Leslie Stephen, who had read Hardy‘s Under the Greenwood Tree, and was fascinated by the pastoral scenes in the novel, asked him to

34 Harold Bloom, Novelists and Novels, Checkmark Books, New York, 2005, p. 175. 35 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Second Series, Read Books Ltd., 1935, p. 141. 36 Virginia Woolf, 1935, p. 141.

18 write a serial for his magazine Cornhill. Hardy got proud of the request of such a prominent Victorian man and explained the genre of his would-be novel as:

a pastoral tale which I thought of calling ‗Far from the Madding Crowd,‘ in which the chief characters would be a woman-farmer, a shepherd, and a sergeant in the Dragoon Guards.37 It was indeed pastoral with the Weatherbury setting, its rustics, farmers and landowners, but it was a novel much more than that fusing the pastoral with realism, lyricism and romanticism. Unlike George Eliot, Hardy‘s depiction of rustics is very warm and sympathetic. In his letter to Leslie Stephen

concerning the illustrations for Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy expressed ―a hope that the rustics, although quaint, may be made to appear intelligent, and not boorish at all.‖38 It was quite natural for Hardy, who himself belonged to the class of peasants and was ―far from the madding crowd‖ to treat the rustics with respect.

When Hardy was writing The Return of the Native, the dominant genre of the late nineteenth-century was realism. Hardy conformed to the characteristics of this movement reflecting in his novel his and people‘s anxieties with social conditions of the lower class, their dilemmas in private and social lives and their yearning for the past. However, it was impossible for a writer as versatile as Hardy to limit himself to realism only. He was influenced by the French movement naturalism and its focus on the concept of faith and chance. An individual fails to overcome faith unless it is changed by chance. More than naturalism, romanticism, which is in Hardy tragic rather than inspiring, occupies a crucial place in both novels (See: 3.2. Place Imagery and Symbolism in Hardy‟s Novels).

Naturalism is defined by Cleanth Lewis as

A literary movement concentrating and emphasizing on scientific means and observing in portraying reality within fiction. Such concept started as part of

37 Lawrence Jones, ―George Eliot and Pastoral Tragicomedy in Hardy‘s ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, Studies in Philology, University of North Carolina Press, Vol. 77, No. 4, 1980, p. 405. 38 Lawrence Jones, 1980, p. 410.

19 literary realism, it concentrates and emphasizes fact and logic over imaginative issues, and also it emphasizes impersonality.39 Other features of literary naturalism include: detachment, in which a writer or an author keeps tones impersonally, and where decisions and destiny of characters are determined through such impersonal powers resulted from an environment or nature. It is out of reach of human ruling, a feeling towards the globe as nonchalant about life of human beings. Naturalism implies opposing contradicting ideas and views: behaviour of human beings is an output of free will, besides, natural laws determine it. As a man, a poet and a novelist, he had been considerably obsessed by the past, with much awareness towards time as well as the people's changeability. To him the past meant history, meant permanence, the past was a part of man‘s present and future. It was Thomas Hardy‘s great muse:

Beautiful images had been originated from the past time of a family, such imagery has had something shared, it is so special, they represent a sense of colleaguesmanship, sharing, during that time when a family was connected with a gathering and sharing activities.40 Thomas Hardy‘s career as an architect, played a great role in his depictions of nature, landscapes and characters. His novels are full of the names of the great painters like Rembrandt, Giotto, Sebastiano de Piombo, the English painter Turner and many other outstanding representatives of art. Taking these pictorial images into consideration, A. Smart observes:

It is difficult to think of Hardy as a Victorian: he seems more like some gloomy Colossus bestriding the Victorian Age, with one foot in the Romantic period and the other in our own; and it comes as something of a shock to remind ourselves that Hardy was born three years after Queen Victoria ascended the throne. He was not, however, much in sympathy with his own times, least of all with what we now regard as typically Victorian art.41 Neither was he a modernist writer like Henry James and Joseph Conrad. At the same time he was greatly influenced by Charles Darwin‘s Theory of Evolution, by his

39 Lennart A. Björk, Psychological Vision and Social Criticism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Michigan University, 1987, p. 21. 40 Johnson Lionel, The Art of Thomas Hardy, Read Books, 1965, p. 29. 41 Alaistar Smart, ―Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy‖, The Review of English Studies, Oxford University Press, Vol. 12, No. 47, 1961, p. 276.

21 concept of chance and destiny. For the writer, chance and coincidence played a great role in lives of people. For example, in The Return of the Native, the protagonist Clym‘s return from Paris develops the plot in such a way that the novel become a tragic one.

Both novels, Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native are written in the high Victorian style, combining romanticism and realism loaded with intense emotional memories. They are unique thematically, and one can find in them everything that is expected of the novel as a genre: drama, poetry, tragedy, mythology, epic, history, religion, nature, and most importantly, the uncertainty of life and existence.

21 2.3 MUNIF’S LIFE

Abdulrahman Munif is considered a controversial but remarkable novelist in Arab literature, who promoted a new genre of fiction reflecting the social, political and economic realities of modern Arab society. Munif‘s books were ―an effective vehicle for change,‖ so he aimed to bring some change of his own for his society. A political activist and an oil economist, he started writing after forty to create a richly imaginative body of work under the title of his trilogy Cities of Salt. The writer sees the function of literature more than entertaining, imparting knowledge and information and sharing experiences and ideas. Once he remarked that ―the mission of literature is to increase awareness and receptiveness in an attempt to create cases for renaissance and revival.‖42 Born in 1933, Amman, Jordan, Munif was the son of a Saudi father and an Iraqi mother. His father died soon after his birth, and he was brought up mostly by his maternal grandmother. He got his early education at a traditional school, where he learned the Quran. At the age of nineteen, Munif moved to Iraq to study law at the University of Baghdad. He described his university years from a third point of view as follows:

Munif‘s intellectual and political orientations were closer to those of the Communist Party at the time, but he vehemently opposed of Israel, and slavish adherence to Moscow‘s line. His strong nationalist sentiments and views on Palestine led him to reject the Communist Party and instead join the Ba‘th, in which he was a critical and radicalizing influence.43 Munif participated in protests against the Baghdad Pact. Due to his political activism, he was expelled from Iraq, being unable to complete his university education. He then moved to Egypt to complete his studies at Cairo University. Aged twenty-five, Munif was awarded a scholarship by the Ba‘ath Party to Yugoslavia, where he got his PhD from the Belgrade University. Having earned his doctorate in oil economics, he returned to Beirut, Lebanon and worked for the Ba‘ath Party for one year. He lived in Egypt, Yugoslavia, Iraq, France, and in Syria making him an Arab cosmopolitan. It is interesting to note that he began his career of a writer only after

42 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/feb/05/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries, (12.05.2016). 43 Sabry Hafez, ―An Arabian Master‖, New Left Review, No. 37, February, 2006, n. p.

22 forty. His works showed that he devoted himself to defending the freedom and dignity of the Arab individual being convinced that ―Arabs have been the victims of their rulers and the foreigners.”44 Throughout his works he discussed corruption and repression for the Bedouin society and the oil corruption and political Islam in the Arab world. Due to his critical views towards the Saudi regime, he was stripped of his Saudi nationality in 1963. As a result, many of his books were banned for he never quitted exploring the theme that Arabs have been the victims of their rulers and the foreigners especially in the oil countries. In an interview in the Lebanese Daily Assafir, Mohammed Jamal Barout asked Munif about his experience during the Ba‘ath Party, and Munif replied, ―More than one friend asked me to write about my experience with the party, but I am not enthusiastic about that at all.‖45 Barout wrote in Al Hayat, ―I remember his expression, literally and truthfully: „a dirty history‟.‖46 During his career, he was a director in crude oil marketing, where he also ―edited a monthly periodical Oil and Development.‖47 He later became a writer and spent the rest of his life in Syria, and died there on 24 January 2004. During his life as a writer Munif was ―famous for his pungent parodies against the elites of the Middle East region."48 Due to his criticism in his works, many Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia, obstructed much of his work and output in addition to depriving his citizenship, and his remarkable masterpiece trilogy novel Cities of Salt. Munif‘s life was filled by oil and politics, eventually making oil his first career. As a political thinker, it maddened him that oil wealth, instead of modernizing Arabian society, enthroned and perpetuated backward monarchies allied with primitive religious establishments as well as Western governments, and who, incidentally, stole huge amounts of that wealth. With his typical understated tact, Munif is wondering in an op-ed in Guardian in 1990, ―Aren‟t we obliged to ask why it

44 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/feb/05/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries, (12.05.2016). 45 Abdul Majeed T., ―Abul Rahman Munif; An Arabian Master of Literature‖, IJAR, University of Calcut, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2014, n. p. 46 Abdul Majeed T., 2014, n. p. 47 Ahmed Naser Dheab, Nayera El Miniawi, ―Abedurrhman Munif "Sharq Al-Mutawast" and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" Comparative Study‖, Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 8, 2016, 48 Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, Penguin, UK, 2011, n. p.

23 is assumed that more modern governments would necessarily be inimical to the interests of the West?‖49 Till his final years oil was the focus of interest for Munif. In a 1994 interview for Glimmer Train, he told Seattle writer Michael Upchurch that oil was

really our only resource. This is our chance to use it to build a country that has something to do with these times. Unfortunately, over the last fifty years, all of this money has been spent wrongly.50 Eventually, oil was really his source, his only change to fight against his country and norms through writing for the most of his life. Unfortunately, his home library, with books and his manuscripts in Damascus was destroyed as a result of which his legacy, in fact, was lost. His wife, who survived him, made a poignant remark on her Facebook account: ―Is Abdul Rahman Munif just nobody?, Just because he does not have a citizenship, would he turn into nobody?‖51 In the course of time, fortunately, his wife‘s pessimism turned out unjustified, for he was mentioned in the ―New Republic‖ magazine as ―The Rise of the Global Novelist‖ in 2017, Abdulrahman Munif‘s novels were chosen by Sinan Antoon as one of the ―five books you should read before you die,‖ and Daniel Burt, in his The Novel 100, ranked the trilogy as the 71st greatest novel of all time.52 Moreover, his works are still of great interest to readers and literary or political researchers. His trilogy Cities of Salt are included into the syllabuses of ―International Literature‖ or ―World-lit‖ courses.53

49 Peter Theroux, ―Abdelrahman Munif and the Uses of Oil”, Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature, October 2012 Issue, n. p. 50 Peter Theroux, ―Abdelrahman Munif and the Uses of Oil”, Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature, October 2012 Issue, n. p. 51 https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/features/2015/3/24/abdul-rahman-munifs-legacy-becomes-a- victim-of-war, (13.05.2016). 52 arablit.org/2010/09/19/a-primer-on-saudi-lit-abdulrahman-munif-to-present/, (13.05.2016). 53 See: ―The Hidden Lives of Oil‖ by Rob Nixon in https://english.wisc.edu/rdnixon/files/hidden_lives.pdf, (17.05.2017).

24 2.4 MUNIF AS A NOVELIST: THE WRITER BELONGING NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE

I laugh in the dark, I cry in the dark; in the dark I also write till I no longer distinguish pen from finger. Every knock at the door, every rustle of the curtain, I cover my papers with my hand like a cheap tart in a police raid. From whom have I inherited this error, this blood as skittish as the mountain panther? No sooner do I spot an official form on the threshold or a helmet through a crack in the door than my bones and tears start to shudder, my blood scatters to the four winds as though some eternal squad of progeny police were chasing it from one vein to the next. -Muhammad Maghiit, "Al-Washm," from Al-Farah laysa mihnat

Abdulrahman Munif always believed that books were effective tools for a change, he always encouraged readers to engage themselves in noting down their own speculations and thoughts about what is happening, rather than handling the preordained results that have been drawn through them. Having lived in many countries like Yugoslavia, France, Iraq and Syria, he was considered a cosmopolitan writer, and it was due to this fact that he viewed different issues globally. As a novelist, Munif‘s works, labelled as oil novels, have been particularly characterized by his global perspectives and critical skills. He was the voice, as a writer, for the freedom of individuals against oppressive systems, envisioning that the oil was a chance to establish a better future for his community. Through foreign system and policies, the Arab socialism had been looked at as a continuous struggle against imperialism and Zionism. Despite oil revenues that have been rising rapidly, the Arabic world has been viewed and featured through two conflicting phenomena: the enormous financial wealth of states, the controlling systems and poverty, political oppression, deprivation of freedoms and corruption. But when he saw that the existing regimes were destroying it, he became convinced that the source will only be their end as a nation and country. Munif's literary masterpiece, a trilogy, Cities of Salt, which has been regarded as the longest novel in modern Arab literature, deals convincingly with the problem

25 and its outcomes. He spent several years to finish the trilogy, which is composed of two thousand five hundred pages and was, by then, banished in several countries, including Iraq. The work is full of literary symbolism as well as magical realism. The writer, whose work was banished even from his home country, was fighting to become the voice for that country‘s national and natural good. Astonishingly, despite his predicaments, he never stopped writing, although ―he was exiled [he still] was writing so that he could induce, also to make a change, to be safe from defeat and to head towards reform.‖54 This is why we could notice through much of Munif's work that he is as a rebel against Arab Regimes' controversies, practices and attitudes and responses during the times of wars. His only mission was to reveal the two-faced representatives‘ and officials‘ lies, and to show how they changed and falsified the facts of history and reality to a whole nation. Peter Theroux commented on Munif's view towards oil that Munif looked at this wealth as his own, as the peoples' wealth; it is for him the only way towards reconstruction and development, but he regarded the regimes as destroyers of this wealth, resulting in damaging future hopes.55 Oil and political issues covered his mind which was natural as he himself was educated in this field. Cities of Salt was structured as a serious fiction in which Munif attempted to portray the influence behind this natural wealth. He had dealt with repression, discrimination, corruption, suppression, and crisis in the Arab world. In addition, dictatorship and political Islam were dealt within his work, where he highly concentrated on the theme that the Arabs have been victimized by their own political regimes as well as being victims of the foreigners, particularly in the oil producing countries. The writer‘s quotation below is very remarkable:

"The tragedy is not in our having oil, but in the way we use the wealth it has created and in the future awaiting us after it has run out," he observed. In underdeveloped countries, he said, "oil becomes a damnation. In 20 or 30 years' time we shall discover that oil has been a real tragedy for the Arabs, and these giant cities built in the desert will find no one to live in them and their

54 Ahmad M.S. Abu Baker, ―The Question of Identity in Abdulrahman Munif‘s When We Left the Bridge‖, Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 1, No. 6, 2010, p. 60. 55 Peter Theroux, ―Abdelrahman Munif and the Uses of Oil”, Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature, October 2012 Issue, p. 2.

26 hundreds of thousands of inhabitants will have to begin again their quest after the unknown."56 In these insightful words, Munif expresses the universal issue experienced by countries possessing oil. These countries are not able to use and benefit from this wealth. The arrival of ―specter-pale Americans at an oasis‖ radically alters the local tribes‘ way of life, making some victims, others becoming wealthy.57 The local inhabitants, as a result, are divided into two classes, poor and rich. Munif is right predicting the miserable future for the region. As for his other novels like The East of the Mediterranean, Munif presented his own perspective about suppression during the twentieth-century, presenting evidence about this widespread phenomenon within the Arab World. He condemned detention centers, prisons, Arab dictatorships, corruption and repression. Like Munif, the Saudi novelist al‐Gosaibi was banned because he was seen to pose a considerable threat and danger to the dominant Saudi regime and ideology. Abdulrahman Munif inaugurated his career as a novelist with his Trees and the Assassination of Marzuq (1973). In 1978 he published a collection of stories under the title Al-Nihayat, in which his deep concern for the environment of the desert communities is traced. In 1982, he published a metafictional novel A World Without Maps, together with one of the most distinguished Palestine‘s authors, who also encouraged Munif in his literary projects. 1990s brought Munif back to the theme of freedom of the individuals. Consequently, his five-volume most famous Cities of Salt, brought ―a new beginning‖ as the critic and scholar Issa Boullata commented. While appreciating his novels, the American literary journalist and author John Updike, in his 1988 review in ―The New Yorker‖, does not consider him ―to be sufficiently westernized‖ and questions his being a conventional novelist:

it is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif, a Saudi born in Jordan – though he lives in France and received a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade – appears to be insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel.58

56 qtd. in, https://english.wisc.edu/rdnixon/files/hidden_lives.pdf, (17.05.2017). 57 https://english.wisc.edu/rdnixon/files/hidden_lives.pdf, (17.05.2017). 58 Siddhartha Deb, ―The Rise of the Global Novelist‖, New Republic, April, 2017, n. p.

27 Sabery Hafez also admires the way Munif‘s with the theme of hope in a corrupted atmosphere. He says in ―Contemporary World Writers‖ that

However, despite the nightmarish atmosphere in most of Munif's novels (save Quissat hubb majusiyyah [Magian Love Story] and Sibaq al-masafat al- tawilah [Long-Distance Race]), there is always a glimmer of hope and a strong belief that while it may be possible to crush man, it is impossible to defeat him.59 In Munif's literary world, existentialist fate is something inevitable, it is a sort of struggle and fight both spiritual and physical. Committed to the existential ideals of freedom, they are aware that if they fail, the hope for a better future will be lost. Munif‘s aim was to plant hope and strength for his readers, never to give their ideals up. The Ba‘ath party was one means to help him seek enlightenment, education and a renaissance in the Arab society. As a novelist, he used the party‘s view of secular ideology for a social economic change within his novels. As an exile from his motherland, he was both unwelcome, hated and uninvited in each land, thus being a man who belonged everywhere and nowhere. He explains his state of being in a couple of words: ―You escaped prison in your land, but you become an uninvited guest in another land, and this makes you undesirable.‖60 Although he was a writer and a person who loved his land, and literally fought for it, Munif likens his state of being to a ‗prison‘. It is, thus, quite obvious that Munif faced the threat of being in prison wherever he went across different countries. A writer whose works were banned from the lands that he fought and longed for, eventually won two distinguished Arab awards. His works are now translated in over 10 languages.

59 http://authorscalendar.info/munif.htm, (09.01.2017). 60 Abdulrahman Munif, Writer and exile: Issues and Perspectives on the Arabic Novel, Al-Mu‘assasaal- arabiya, Beirut, 1992, p. 85.

28 CHAPTER III THE CONCEPT OF REGIONALISM AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES IN FICTION

Donna M. Cassidy, in her illuminating article ―On the Subject of Nativeness: Marsden Hartley and New England Regionalism‖, defines Regionalism in America in the following way:

Regionalism initially arose in the 1920S as a movement criticizing modernization-urbanization, industrialization, standardization of mass culture. The discovery of region formed the basis for personal and cultural regeneration as writers and intellectuals considered regional culture a model for a new integrated American society.61 Though the theory of Regionalism originated in America in 1865-1895, further it was used not only in literature but in many fields like political economy, international regionalism, geography and politics itself. In the frame of this, Regionalism is used much wider and in a variety of contexts. As Bruce M. Russett remarks in his International Regions and the International System: A Study in Political Ecology,

There is a wide range of definitions of region, regional integration, regionalism, regionalization and related concepts in the academic literature. During the early debate about regional integration in the 1960s and 1970s a large amount of research capacity was invested in trying to define regions ‗scientifically‘62 Different from this interpretation of regionalism, the present chapter aims to explore the mechanisms by which literary regionalism works. Regional culture and identity are defined and discussed through the views of sociologists, different authors and cultural historians in the field of fiction, in order to provide an overview of

61 Donna M. Cassidy, ―On the Subject of Nativeness: Marsden Hartley and New England Regionalism‖, Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1994, p. 229. 62 P. De Lombaerde, F. Söderbaum, L. Van Langenhove and F. Baert, The Problem of Comparison in Comparative Regionalism, Researchgate: 2013, p. 731.  See: P. De Lombaerde, F. Söderbaum, L. Van Langenhove and F. Baert, 2013, p. 731.

29 regionalism and cultural perspectives in fiction, based on theoretical foundations. There have been considerable developments about the concept of regionalism throughout the world. Such developments have been enhanced by strong measures through the creation of regional institutions, an issue that has raised fundamental scholarly interest in their origins and sources.

The theoretical discussion has two sections: the first considers general knowledge regarding regionalism and cultural perspectives in fiction, their background, their relationship to place, identity and different attitudes of selected authors, as well as the role of place in uncovering the identity of a writer and man in general. According to Leary, identities are regarded as features, links of societies, social memberships and group sociability which specify who a person is.63 The second discusses the role of desert in Arab culture besides comparing both Western and Eastern cultures.

Hardy‘s novels are comprised mainly of rural people in a rural setting. Even the protagonist Clym, who spends a number of years in Paris, the symbol of the civilized world against the natural, decides to return to his ‗native‘ land Egdon Heath and settle there forever.

Munif‘s novels also deal with local people in local settings. The locals, especially Miteb, in Cities of Salt, makes it his main objective to do utmost to preserve his environment but unfortunately fails, because the new regime has established itself firmly and the majority of the people are happy with Americans‘ domination in the region.

63 Mark R. Leary and June Price Tangney, Handbook of Self and Identity, Guilford Press, 2012, p. 69.

31 3.1 THE REGIONAL NOVEL AS A GENRE OF FICTION

The regional novel is viewed by Snell

as a fiction that is set in a recognizable region, which describes features that distinguish the life, social relations, customs, language, dialect, or the other aspects of the culture of that area and its people.64 He demonstrates that such a fiction has a strong sense of local geography, topography or landscape. In such writing, a particular place or regional culture may be used to illustrate an aspect of life in general or the effects of a particular environment upon the people living in it. One usually expects certain characteristics in a regional novel, such as detailed description of a place, setting or region, whether urban or rural, which appears an approximation to a real place. The characters found in the setting/place of the regional novel are usually of working-class or middle-class origin.

When one examines the regional elements in Hardy's novels, one finds that he develops the presentation of increasing tensions between town and country, between local traditions and national objectives, between dialect speech and Standard English, and between regional culture and a rootless cosmopolitanism. He comments that ―his Wessex is not a closed immutable society; on the contrary, it is buffeted on all sides by the forces of change.‖65 It is worth mentioning here his keen understanding of sociological and psychological changes in the transition period from agricultural England to the industrial one. The writer does not conceal his affection and longing for the old days when the bond between land, nature and the individual was very strong. Hardy is placed within the historical development of the genre of the regional novel.66 Hardy's major contribution to regionalism is seen as his creation of a series of novels, all of which centre on a particular geographical area and offer variety, but also a scope for broader fictional possibilities. Michael goes further to say that ―Hardy's regionalism eulogizes a society whose distinctive features are gradually being effaced

64 K. D. M. Snell, The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800-1990, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1. 65 K. D. M. Snell, 1998, pp. 100-101. 66 Geoffrey Harvey, The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy, Psychology Press, 2003, p. 154.

31 by the homogenizing of culture.‖67 Hardy‘s resistance and objection to change is one of the features of literary regionalism.

Thomas Hardy‘s novels fit the new genre called regional fiction. Snell describes Hardy's works as ―novels of characters and environment‖ adding ―it is worth considering how the regional novel has been defined by the few literary critics who have approached it as such.‖68 As an example, he names the Yorkshire regional novelist Phyllis Bentley who argued that the regional novel may be seen as the ‗national novel‘ concentrating on a particular part of a region or a nation to depict the life of that region. This sort of depiction makes the reader of the novel conscious of the characteristics, which are unique to that region and differentiates it from others in the common shared motherland.

In the USA, there is a distinction between the terms 'regionalism' and 'local colour fiction', where they refer to a literary movement that flourished from the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Although most fiction is regional in that it makes the use of a specific setting, for regionalist writers the setting was not incidental but central, and the 'local colour' details give a name to the movement. In writing regional fiction, authors focus on representing the unique locales of what they saw as a vanishing American past whose customs, dialect, and characters they sought to preserve. Furthermore, as writers of a continuing national narrative implicitly focused on what it meant to be American, they often presented characters as types, sometimes as representatives of the collective traits of a community or region and sometimes as outsiders or eccentrics, whose attempts to fit into a community exposed both the community's values and their own. Local colour stories feature dialect that lends authenticity to the tale. Another element common to local colour fiction is a degree of narrative distance rendered through the character of a narrator differing in class or place of origin from the region's residents. A variation on this is a narrative voice distanced through educated diction or an ironic tone.69

67 Michael Valdez Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 31. 68 K. D. M. Snell, The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800-1990, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1. 69 Stephanie Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, University of Wisconsin Press, 2001, p. 128.

32 Local Colour is a style of writing derived from the presentation of the features and peculiarities of a particular locality and its inhabitants. Although the term Local Colour can be applied to any type of writing, it is used almost exclusively to describe a kind of American literature that in its most characteristic form made its appearance in the late 1860s, directly after the end of the Civil War. It is concerned mainly with depicting the character of a particular region, concentrating especially upon the peculiarities of dialect, manners, folklore, and landscape that distinguish the area.70 All these things find their truthful reflection in the works of American writers like Kate Chopin (1851-1901), the colourist writer known for her detailed depiction of her native Louisiana and Creole dialect, and later William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose imaginative setting Yoknapatawpha is a fictional world based closely on the people and places of Faulkner‘s native Lafayette County in Mississippi.

It is worth mentioning here one important point in terms of literary approaches towards Thomas Hardy‘s novels. He started his literary career at the time when the new movement, Modernism came into being. Henry James (1843-1916) with his novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Joseph Conrad (1857-1929) with his Heart of Darkness (1899) became the pioneers of English modernism. While analysing their novels, to use the recent new movements like psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches become unavoidable. However, Thomas Hardy was far from being impressed by these new literary innovations and developments. Though very original and illuminating and a new voice in many respects, his novels are mostly conventional. In the light of this, the novels yield themselves to traditional literary approaches like historical-biographical and moral-philosophical as well.

In sum, the terms 'regionalism' and 'local colour fiction' refer to a literary movement that flourished from the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Although most fiction is regional in that it makes use of a specific setting, for regionalist writers the setting was not incidental but central. Local colour stories feature dialect that lends authenticity to the tale. Another element common to local colour fiction is a degree of narrative distance rendered through the character of a

70 https://www.britannica.com/art/local-color, (27.09.2017).

33 narrator differing in class or place of origin from the region‘s residents.71 The regional novel focuses on a certain region to explore its social norms and cultural aspects.

71 Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer, American History through Literature: 1820-1870, Chalers Scribner‘s Sons, 2006, p. 971.

34 3.2 PLACE IMAGERY AND SYMBOLISM IN HARDY’S NOVELS

In literature, an examination of place in general shows that authors handle place as a step for creating mental pictures. Figuratively the latter is called ‗imagery‘. The Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory defines the word imagery as follows;

The terms image and imagery have many connotations and meanings. Imagery as a general term covers the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of mind and any sensory or extra- sensory experience.72 The definition implies the vagueness of the term. When analysing imagery, it is important to remember that in the dictionary meaning, imagery is defined as pictures painted with words creating an image in our mind regarding what the author describes. However, ―an image does not necessarily mean a mental picture.‖73 Hardy‘s imagery is mainly visual and auditory: in other words, they appeal to the sense of sight and to the sense of sound.

Much of his imagery is featured as descriptive actual imagery, dispersed in figurative, he utilized metaphors considerably, and part of imagery is directed towards symbols of destruction or decaying. He frequently follows and considers the symbol of nature as standing for the past, with regular differentiations of natural powers adopted within his imagery that have been concerning human life changeability. In addition, he utilized certain images in an ambiguous way, including personification. And the adoption of exemplary poetry tools for sibilance, so that he could add beauty to his subject or for purpose of enhancing both of meaning and tone. He always looked at nature representing a ruthless thing, he has been different from key poets of the Romantic era, those whose preference was to look and consider that the nature consists of moral forces which are more powerful. Poetic aspect of his subject matter was always stressed by Hardy and his life is connected to nature and countryside.74

72 J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, John Wiley & Sons, 1999, p. 413. 73 J. A. Cuddon, 1999, p. 413. 74 David Cecil, Hardy the Novelist: and Essay in Criticism, The Bobbs Merril Company, New York, 1956, p. 94.

35 A writer employs imagery to enliven the landscapes in his narration. Both Hardy and Munif use the settings of their novels to depict certain images that convey messages to the readers. Hardy employs the landscape as part of the imagery of nature which he inspired from the romantic poets who used nature not only as a theme, but as a medium for the expression of psychological states. Hardy's preferences of symbolic images are reflected in his description of Egdon Heath. The opening chapter of the novel Return of the Native begins with the powerful depiction of the Heath, the main setting of the novel:

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.75 Later, he personifies his setting by stating that

The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.76 The title of the first chapter, ―A Face on which Time Makes but Little Impression‖, personifies the setting making it very important.

The word ―face‖ suggests that the heath assumes anthropomorphic proportions and becomes, in essence, a major character in the novel; somber and dark, ―the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend.77 The heath is a symbol of permanence in the novel. This permanence is described by the author in convincing diction in the following quotation:

The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea

75 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, p 7. 76 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 7. 77 https://www.enotes.com/topics/return-native/critical-essays, (06.09.2017).

36 changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.78 The writer‘s focus on this permanence emphasizes in a way the insignificance of a human being. To the author, the heathland is ‗inviolate‘ that is untouched, undisturbed, and within the context sacred. D. H. Lawrence‘s statement related to the Heath is also meaningful: ―Edgon, whose dark soil was strong and crude and organic as the body of a beast.‖79 However, according to Harold Bloom, ―critics are perpetually divided, some finding the landscape sublime, while others protest that its representation is bathetic.‖ Geoffrey Harvey thinks differently. According to him:

Yet Hardy‘s is not a nihilistic vision, for landscape is given significance by human presence, and here on the white surface of the Roman road is the reddleman‘s van. Houses have been established on the heath, often identified as tiny points of light in the great darkness, and the novel‘s tragic drama is localised in places named Blooms-End, Mistover Knap, and the Quiet Woman.80 Bloom disagrees with them considering Hardy‘s Edgon Heath being ―both, and sometimes simultaneously so.‖81

The critic Alastair Smart, in his article ―Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy‖, observes that in his novels the writer efficiently fuses literature and painting;

This Hardyesque landscape may perhaps call to mind the landscapes of Ruisdael and Rembrandt, and there can be no doubt that its development in Hardy‘s hands was intimately bound up with his views on the art of landscape-painting. Hardy, indeed, had the eye of a painter; drawing the outlines of his forms as consciously as he filled them with substance and with colour; giving them their proper texture and lighting; fixing them firmly in a definite space; and relating them in scale to their surroundings.82

78 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, p. 10. 79 D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 25. 80 Geoffrey Harvey, The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy, Psychology Press, 2003, p. 66. 81 Harold Bloom, Novelists and Novels, Checkmark Books, New York, 2005, p. 183. 82 Alaistar Smart, ―Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy‖, The Review of English Studies, Oxford University Press, Vol. 12, No. 47, 1961, p. 262.

37 In the Return of the Native, Mrs. Yeobright‘s attitude towards locals in her community is expressed through the mention of the painters Sallaert and Van Alsloot.

What was the great world to Mrs. Yeobright? A multitude whose tendencies could be perceived, though not its essences. Communities were seen by her as from a distance; she saw them as we see the throngs which cover the canvases of Sallaert, Van Alsloot, and others of that school--vast masses of beings, jostling, zigzagging, and processioning in definite directions, but whose features are indistinguishable by the very comprehensiveness of the view.83 Thomas Hardy‘s knowledge and love of art is explicit in the scene when Eustacia sees Clement Yeobright for the first time without his noticing her.

It was, however, not with those who sat in the settle that Eustacia was concerned. A face showed itself with marked distinctness against the dark tanned wood of the upper part. The owner, who was leaning against the settle's outer end, was Clement Yeobright, or Clym, as he was called here; she knew it could be nobody else. The spectacle constituted an area of two feet in Rembrandt's intensest manner. A strange power in the lounger's appearance lay in the fact that, though his whole figure was visible, the observer's eye was only aware of his face.84 The novel The Return of the Native is rich in symbolism. The opening page of the novel describes the Bonfire Night, November Fifth commemorating Guy Fawkes‘s death, the Catholic conspirator whose name is linked with the custom of lighting Bonfire. However, Hardy employs anachronism taking the ceremony to the Anglo- Saxon pagan period, and gives the following account of the event:

The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day. Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.85

83 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 227. 84 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 166. 85 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 23.

38 In the novel, the bonfire has a number of symbolic meanings. In the first place, it acquires a political meaning reminding of the French Revolution. Besides, Eustacia wants to marry Clym not because she loves him, though she states the opposite confessing that she married him ―because [she] loved him, but [she] won't say that [she] didn't love him partly because [she] thought [she] saw a promise of that life in him.‖86 She was sure that Clym would not stay in Egdon Heath and ultimately would go back to Paris with her. She regards her desire as something natural without being aware of Clym‘s feelings about his birthplace. Paris is her dream city:

Many women would go far for such a husband. But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life-- music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that are going on in the great arteries of the world? That was the shape of my youthful dream; but I did not get it. Yet I thought I saw the way to it in my Clym.87 Trish Ferguson in her article ―Bonfire Night in Thomas Hardy‘s The Return of the Native‖, resembles Eustacia‘s character and face with those of Marie Antoinette and quotes Eustacia‘s

Flame-like soul, smouldering rebelliousness, and desire for a blaze of love, and extinction and the symbolism that has been developed associating Eustacia with bonfires, Paris, and revolution as appropriately incorporated into the scene of her death.88 Hardy‘s romantic imagery is very powerful in the description of Eustacia Evy. The writer calls the chapter devoted to her as ―The Queen of Night‖ comparing her with goddesses. His description of her appearance as a beautiful woman hardly has its equal in Victorian literature:

She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so—she might have been believed capable of sleeping without closing them

86 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 334. 87 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 334. 88 Trish Ferguson, ―Bonfire Night in Thomas Hardy‘s The Return of the Native‖, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 67, No. 1, 2012, p. 93.

39 up. Assuming that the souls of men and women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia's soul to be flame like. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils gave the same impression.89 Being the queen of the night, she satisfies her passions on nights: she gets acquainted with Clym at night, after marriage she commits adultery at night, lighting the bonfire in Captain Vye‘s house as a signal to call Wildeve. Even a moth becomes a symbol, a sign to Eustacia which Wildeve uses to call her out at night. The moth dies in the flame of the candle, an indication of their fatal end.

The ―moon‖ as a literary symbol pervades Thomas Hardy‘s novels as well as poems. It is a polysemantic symbol with a number of universal meanings:

The moon is a feminine symbol, universally representing the rhythm of time as it embodies the cycle. The phases of the moon symbolize immortality and eternity, enlightenment or the dark side of Nature herself. It might reflect inner knowledge, or the phases of man's condition on earth, since it controls the tides, the rains, the waters, and the seasons. It is the middle ground between the light of the sun and the darkness of night, and thus often represents the realm between the conscious and the unconscious. In astrology, the moon is a symbol of the soul, and in the horoscope it determines the subject's capacity for reflection and adaptation. It also provides analogy for the stages of human development: the new moon is infancy, the crescent is youth and adolescence, the full moon is maturity and pregnancy, and the waning moon represents the decline of life, sleep.90 Hardy must have known of all these meanings, but he goes further when in his novel Tess of the D‟urbervilles, he likens the moon to ―the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint.‖91 In The Return of the Native, the moon comes out as a symbol in many episodes in the novel. It stands for the romantic imagery of Clym and Eustacia‘s meeting. Here the moon undertakes many roles such as romance, love, passion and fatalism.

Minute after minute passed by, perhaps ten minutes passed, and the shadow on the moon perceptibly widened. He heard a rustling on his left hand, a

89 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 80. 90 umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/M/moon.html, (15.08.2017). 91 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d‟Urbervilles, Broadview Press, 2007, p. 423.

41 cloaked figure with an upturned face appeared at the base of the Barrow, and Clym descended. In a moment the figure was in his arms, and his lips upon hers.92 Hardy describes this situation as a case when ―no language could reach the level of their condition--words were as the rusty implements of a by-gone barbarous epoch, and only to be occasionally tolerated.‖93

The universal meaning of the moon ―maturity and pregnancy‖ finds its reflection in the local saying showing the locals ‗belief in superstitions‘: ―No moon, no, man‖. The saying suggests that it is possible to conceive only during full moon. On the other hand, the eclipsed moon on the night when Eustacia agrees to marry Clym, foreshadows their separation at the end of novel. The quotation below expresses Eustacia‘s strong sense of foreboding of their disastrous end:

We are together now, and it is unknown how long we shall be so; the unknown always fills my mind with terrible possibilities, even when I may reasonably expect it to be cheerful....Clym, the eclipsed moonlight shines upon your face with a strange foreign colour, and shows its shape as if it were cut out in gold. That means that you should be doing better things than this.94 One of the characters, Diggory Venn, the Reddleman, himself is a symbol of the past. He represents England before Industrialisation.

Reddlemen of the old school are now but seldom seen. Since the introduction of railways Wessex farmers have managed to do without these Mephistophelian visitants, and the bright pigment so largely used by shepherds in preparing sheep for the fair is obtained by other routes.95 The quotation implies that no one in Egdon Hill needs a dye used for marking sheep any more. The coming of railroad changed their life style to some point. However, Thomas Hardy sympathizes with this character and prepares a happy end for him, marrying him to Thomasin.

92 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 234. 93 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 234. 94 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 238. 95 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 93.

41 The Return of the Native is so rich in symbolic images that it is impossible to cover all of them in the present thesis. Some of the personifications are really breath- taking. For example, ―the wind blows mournfully and the night is singing dirges through clenched teeth‖ when Wildeve and Eustacia are together.96 In fact Eustacia is aware of the beauty around her, the beauty which makes her unhappy rather than contented:

It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the attention. The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene seemed made for the hour. Part of its tone was quite special; what was heard there could be heard nowhere else.97 Birds and insects all play significant roles in conveying Hardy‘s symbolism. For example, Mrs. Yeobright love of heron makes sense because this bird can free itself and become happy. The sparrow is not without meaning either. It stands for Mrs. Yeobright‘s thoughts about her son‘s marriage to Eustacia. The sparrow enters the room without warning, fearless but trapped among the flowers, and it is Mrs. Yeobright who saves the bird. The sparrow in this episode is likely to represent her son who needs her to get rid of the unfaithful wife.

The novel Far from the Madding Crowd being pastoral contains the rich description of rural scenes. Moreover, in this novel Hardy‘s being influenced by the movement of Natural Law is obvious. According to this law in philosophy it is ―a system of right or justice held to be common to all humans and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society.‖98 In other words, this law emphasizes nature‘s indifference to individuals. George Eliot, though trusting this law, personified nature ―as the mother “of a large family”.‖99 By contrast, Thomas Hardy reflects this Natural Law in a more strict way. Lawrence Jones‘ observation is remarkable:

Such scenes as those of Gabriel Oak on Norcombe Hill, Fanny Robin before the barracks, Fannys grave in the rain, Boldwood in the spring meadows, or

96 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 100. 97 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 64. 98 https://www.britannica.com/topic/natural-law, (10.07.2017). 99 Lawrence Jones, ―George Eliot and Pastoral Tragicomedy in Hardy‘s ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, Studies in Philology, University of North Carolina Press, Vol. 77, No. 4, 1980, p. 406.

42 Gabriel and Bathsheba on the ricks in the storm are richer in sensuous detail and in the bizarre and grotesque, while the sense of the scope, impersonal indifference, and inevitability of the movement of Natural Law is much greater.100 Like all his novels, Far from the Madding Crowd is also replete with various symbols. One of them is the symbol of watch in the novel. In fact, there are two watches in the novel that are revealing about their owners‘ characters. One is Troy‘s left to him from his father, who got it from the Earl of Severn for his loyalty and good service. Troy is boasting about his watch and is proud of his relationship with men superior to him in status and origin. The motto Cedit amor rebus (Love yields to circumstances) engraved in the casing, suggests much about the Sergeant‘s character. Also, the motto points out how mercenary he is even in love. The watch as a symbol brings to mind Chronos (Kronos) from Greek mythology as a symbol of time and destruction. Troy destroys everything and everybody on his way. His ruthless treatment of Fanny Robin ultimately kills her. Bathsheba, a strong woman, fails to see his real self, and goes through much suffering. Troy has no sense of time indulging himself in debauchery.

The other watch, a small silver one, belongs to Gabriel Oak, the first suitor and faithful farmer of Bathsheba. The watches are more than objects, they serve as markers of status and position. Gabriel‘s watch, an indication of his lower class, does not work properly. It

had the peculiarity of going either too fast or not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. The stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes, and he escaped any evil consequences from the other two defects by constant comparisons with and observations of the sun and stars, and by pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours‘ windows.101 It is clear from the quotation that Gabriel is not upset by his flawed watch. Instead, he looks at the stars to guess the right time. This proves his patience and

100 Lawrence Jones, ―George Eliot and Pastoral Tragicomedy in Hardy‘s ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, Studies in Philology, University of North Carolina Press, Vol. 77, No. 4, 1980, p. 406. 101 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, p. 8.

43 connectedness to nature. Moreover, it exhibits his ability to handle and cope with difficulties. The watches reveal the difference in the two unlike characters; while Gabriel is tolerant and sensible, Sergeant Troy is impulsive and hesitant in unexpected situations. These features of Troy are reflected in his sword with which he likes to show off and which reflects his aggressiveness. Also, the sword points to his masculinity and sexuality.

The names in Far from the Madding Crowd are also loaded with symbolic meanings. The second names of G. Oak, Fanny Robin and Bathsheba Everdene associated with ―evergreen‖ directly point to their bond with the natural world, though in a different way. Gabriel Oak is strong, valient like the oak tree. In case of Fanny‘s second name, Robin, Hardy does not take into consideration the universal meaning of the bird according to which the bird symbolizes something positive like ―a new beginning, the return of the warmth in the form of spring, happiness, bright future, pleasure and satisfaction.‖102 On the contrary, Fanny Robin is a fragile and a naïve girl, seduced by Sergeant Troy and abandoned by him. There is no any new beginning for her, nor is there any bright future. The poor girl dies with her unborn child.

The names of Bathsheba‘s rival suitors, Boldwood and Troy, are not without imagery either. Boldwood, though deeply rooted in his native land as a rich farm owner, is arrogant and looks down on his local servants. Troy‘s name is much more transparent pointing to the pagan city of Greece, to his military stature and complexity of his character.

Thomas Hardy as no other Victorian writer, stands out in his portrayal of rural England. The characters‘ relationship to their setting determines their fate. His characters are definitely regional, and share the same natural environment: they were born here, make their living as shepherds, reddlemen, farmers, speak their Wessex dialect. Just as in The Return of the Native, the characterization and the presentation of the symbols in Far from the Madding Crowd illustrate Thomas Hardy‘s art and craft of novel writing. Symbols broaden the scope of the novels and help to attain a deeper insight into the characters nature. Also, it should be noted that though The Return of

102 whats-your-sign.com/animal-symbolism-robin.html, (05.06.2017).

44 the Native is tragic and controversial, Far from the Madding Crowd has a relatively happy ending.

45 3.3 PLACE IMAGERY AND SYMBOLISM IN MUNIF’S NOVELS

In the previous chapters it has been mentioned that a writer employs imagery to enliven the landscapes in his narration. Like Thomas Hardy, Abdulrahman Munif, too, uses the settings of his novels to show certain images to convey messages to his readers through describing the Arabian Peninsula and the desert. Munif‘s use of symbolic images are reflected in his description of Wadi Al-Uyoun (The Oasis Valley), in Cities of Salt, whose main setting is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It tells the story of the disruption of a poor oasis and desert community following the discovery of oil in the desert. The opening lines of the novel begin with the vivid depiction of the valley located in the desert:

Wadi Al-Uyoun: An outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert, as if it had burst from within the earth or fallen from the sky. It was nothing like its surroundings, or rather had no connection with them, dazzling you with curiosity and wonder: how had water and greenery burst out in a place like this? But the wonder vanished gradually, giving way to a mysterious respect and contemplation. It was one of those rare cases of nature expressing its genius and willfulness, in defiance of any explanation.103 Describing the valley as an ordinary place to its inhabitants, Munif depicts the environment disturbance of its predators as follows:

When caravans came, enveloped clouds of dust and weakened by hunger and thirst, yet redoubling their efforts, in the last stage of the journey, to reach the Wadi al-Uyoun as quickly as possible, they were overtaken by an almost frivolous enthusiasm. They controlled their exuberance and headed straight for the water, feeling sure that He who had created the world and humankind had created, at the same time, Wadi al-Uyoun in this very spot as a salvation from death in the treacherous, accursed desert. When the caravan lingered, unloaded its cargoes and watered its men and beasts, a kind of narcotic restfulness set in, a powerful contentment induced by the climate or the sweet water, or perhaps by a sense of danger passed. This affected not only men but camels, who were distinctly less willingly to bear their heavy packs and resume the journey afterward.104

103 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 1. 104 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, pp. 1-2

46 The valley is an ordinary place that gives the feeling of home to its inhabitants. The ordinariness feels safe and untouched enough for the visiting caravans to call it the ―earthly paradise.‖105 One of the most important characters in the first part of the novel, Miteb al-Hathal has a very special relationship with the valley. So much that

left to himself to talk about Wadi al-Uyoun, Miteb al-Hathal would go in a way no one could believe, for he could not confine himself to the good air and the sweetness of the water available every day of the year, or to the magnificent nights: he would tell stories which in some cases dated back to the days of Noah, or so said the old men. There was a special relationship, a rare passion between Miteb al-Hathal and Wadi al-Uyoun.106 To show how the valley is a marvel in the eyes of people, Munif considers that ―Wadi al-Uyoun was a phenomenon, something of a miracle, unbelievable to those who saw it for the first time and unforgettable forever after.‖107 As portrayed through the imagery used by Munif to describe the Arabian Peninsula and the desert, it seems that Munif has successfully discovered symbolic correlations between geography and the characteristics of that region with its people, culture, and psychology. Moreover, Munif focuses on the culture that was affected by a quick shift because the country was transferred from a poor status into a rich exporter within a short time, where he deals with the issue throughout his novel. Cities of Salt deals with the ethnic group nomadic Bedouins, the inhabitants of the region. According to Harvey Tripp and Peter North, Bedouins at that area are considered as national guards, therefore, Bedouin culture is preserved by State and employment does not often have similar roles in this society like other countries. Before the discovery of oil in the 1930s, the lifestyle of the society was like that of poor countries. ―Bedouin tribes moved their meagre flocks of camels, goats and sheep from one patch of skimpy grass to another. Water was their most precious commodity and the Bedouins jealously guarded their waterholes.‖108

105 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 2. 106 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, pp. 3-4. 107 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 2. 108 Peter North and Harvey Tripp, CultureShock! Saudi Arabia: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette, Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd, 2009, p. 19.

47 In the novels under study Munif emphasizes that the social life in the area was centred on family structure. People visited family members on regular basis, especially older people. As part of a closed family, Saudis preferred to relate and socialize with family members rather than foreigners; extended families preferred to reside in family compounds inside cities. It was a tradition of old family members to do things in the interests of other family members, especially as regards the employment within the government bureaucracy. Miteb al-Hathal, the tribesman in Cities of Salt, loves the life in the traditional Valley. Even though the Valley suffers difficult times when the only food available is dry dates, milk, and stale bread, people like Miteb are happy and peaceful and fortunate as they have been blessed with the life they have lived.109 However, when the news that foreign people are living in the Valley arrives, Miteb al-Hathal worries and wonders ―What are they after?‖110 The concept of place has been regarded as a symbol in literature because it identifies a connection between themes of a writer's work within a specific location. The desert is the main setting in Cities of Salt, and the conflict stems from the misuse of nature and contradictions existing in traditional communities: ―the nature of conflict is not only community or traditions, but also between nature itself and human misusing of it, where dwellers or villagers themselves are not innocent.‖111 The events of the novel occur at a time of drought in the desert land, a matter that creates a threat to community's survival. Nevertheless, part of the Bedouin society has a profound respect for the nature and customs of their land, even though some leave the place for the sake of survival. The discovery of petroleum in such an area has brought some benefits for Bedouins; but to Munif, the exploitation of natural resources to a great extent harmed the natural environment. Cities of Salt represents the universe which is not yet quitted, or paradise that is not lost. It starts with the valley "Wadi Al-Uyoun", "Valley of springs", a site that is called by travellers, a paradise, an area including pure water and moderate breezing. The novelist has infused this area with a feeling of divinity; the

109 Mohammed Albalawi, Disrupting the Desert Scene: The Impact of Oil Discovery in Abdelrahman Munif‟s Cities of Salt, Kent State University Press, Saudi Arabia, 2015, p. 195. 110 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 26. 111 Sabry Hafez, ―An Arabian Master‖, New Left Review, No. 37, February, 2006, p. 6.

48 valley is transcendent beyond the tangible. The Wadi is an escape from death in this tricky desert; it stands for the blessed the powers that have protected them and made their life more prosperous. The terms that have been adopted by Munif are for purposes of expressing "tafanin," a spiritual expression that stands for the erasing heart and self as well as the extinction of the whole individual consciousness. Munif was an Arab nationalist whose imagery reflects his attitudes. He has expressed anxiety towards cultural integrity. He mentions that the fearful sort of imagery in Cities of Salt, stands for unsustainable places or cities turning into hellish ovens. He has described castles as being places for steel bodies modeling human beings through imagery. He has portrayed embodied features of this region, describing a site as if being exploded; in his imagination, he sees infants as small plants like the character Mit‘ab when pointing out to his son:

That palm, the fourth on the right, is your same age, my son. As soon as you grow up, it grows up with you, shortly Soon you will put a palm for your son who will plant a palm for his. It will become greener, people will keep passing through, drinking its water, asking for mercy from God on the dead, and they‘ll say, while in the shade of the tree, God have mercy and on all those who have planted a palm and a green shoot.112 Munif has also described the outgrowth of the seedlings, portraying them as a birth, in the same way when Mit‘ab has watched his garden bloom after rain; he experienced great delight watching the water dripping into earth and remaining there. After that, this earth started making incomprehensible movements, like shaking, chilling, and spilling out:

He saw the seeds that had been scattered begin to force their way out from inside the earth, raising their little heads this shudder of the earth… resembles the cleaving between a man and a woman, resembles the moment of ecstasy that a human feels.113 Because people have been sectioned from their area or land, Munif shows the damage of the valley and the domination of devilish features over the desert. The heat of summer turned the desert into a hell. Disturbed by people leaving their lands, Munif

112 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 49. 113 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p.53.

49 says that solutions do not come when running away into forests for hunting and being isolated from society, but by taking a serious step and action through learning and getting experience from the others who are free from tyranny. Munif grounded the novel in authenticity, lending legitimacy to some literary criticism. In most Munif's outputs, he was trying to urge the Arab people to be aware of their real political social economic situations as well as their current identity. Abu Baker has commented that

Munif was making attempts to induce and stimulate Arabic citizens in order that they could take control of their life, and such life is dominated totally by their regimes or states, it is run by fear and intimidation.114 Munif‘s fight in bringing awareness of the geography to its people‘s mind probably makes the Arabian Peninsula a symbolic place for Arabs, and Cities of Salt handles the imagery of this land very neatly. The novel starts with "Al-tih' located in the oasis of the valley which has been torn by the arrival of oil workers. It is similar to the description of Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor and critic when mentioning the influences on a traditional African land as a result of the strong missionary's arrival, bringing voice to an underrepresented and exploited colonial subject. Similary, Munif‘s geopolitically rich setting is also being exploited by its occupiers of this sacred land. In his Cities of Salt, Munif describes the lives of the Bedouin society as the years of blessings and as the times of drought. During the years of blessings, Wadi al- Uyoun‘s dwellers are depicted as exemplary people, because they were proud of their land due to the rich harvest. They are the ones who give, they are the ones who receive guests and travellers, and first and foremost they are the hosts:

Omens of a good year to come always appeared first in Wadi al-Uyoun, for in addition to the abundant water that filled the three reservoirs and encircling streams the good years brought the waters which flowed down to where water was never expected to reach. In these years vegetables were planted and green plants appeared with the early rains, making the people of Wadi al-Uyoun behave in a way that astonished travelers used to passing through dozens of similar places. The people would overdo their insistence that all travelers stay there longer, take little for what they gave out and dream up occasions to

114 Ahmad M.S. Abu Baker, ―The Question of Identity in Abdulrahman Munif‘s When We Left the Bridge‖, Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 1, No. 6, 2010, p. 60.

51 postpone the traveling plans of their visitors. Their generosity would reach the point of extravagance, leading some travelers to consider them silly and rash people who never thought about tomorrow or remembered the hard times they had known in years past.115 But during the years of drought, Munif criticizes the people for letting their sacred land go so easily. No matter how the land plays a significantly symbolic or sacred role for its people, Munif‘s criticism proves right in that its people would have be proud enough not to leave and become the guests of their homes; the Wadi seems to be personified in Munif‘s words by comforting itself and overcoming any misfortune on its own:

But during the years of drought-which is what most years were-the people of Wadi al-Uyoun behaved differently, were sadder and more introverted, leaving the travelers to act as they pleased, without interfering. If they were offered goods in exchange for dates, water or any services rendered they accepted them thankfully, and if they asked anything from a caravan it was only to seek places for new passengers who had prepared and waited a long time to travel. After they had all left, the wadi felt relief and hope, for it was rid of burdens and yet could look forward to the good things to come from the day they returned for all travelers came back sooner or later. Between the relief and the hope, with the steady supply of water and caravans, Wadi al- Uyoun continued to be strong, never fearing or wavering, for it always found a way to confront and overcome its misfortunes.116 As a symbolic image, Wadi al-Uyoun shapes the characters of its people;

good height, strong backs, symmetrical frames and straight, slender limbs, hips and shoulders. To see them you might think of them as horses run and trained to the point of overleanness, but still strong, sturdy and beautiful. Their faces were longish and symmetrical, with thin lips and smooth cheeks set high but not prominent. They were not nearly as prone to facial or bodily defects as people in other areas.117 The valley‘s desert perhaps demarcated the end of fertility, agriculture and security. The valley, which besides its rich harvest or characteristics that shaped its

115 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 4. 116 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 5. 117 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 10.

51 people, was rich and distinctive in oil as well. The oil brought unhappiness to the land in spite of water and harvest abundance. With the local people‘s escape of this natural land, the invasion of new comers was inevitable, the event that brought the feeling of disturbance to the remaining dwellers, unaware of the meaning of the oil for its invaders. The character Miteb al-Hathal is suspicious and disturbed by these new comers when he thinks that

They certainly didn't come for water-they want something else. But what could they possibly want? What is there in this dry desert besides dust, sand and starvation? They say they'll be here a long time? How will they live? They look like chicken when they eat. And the questions they asked were damned crafty. Saying they weren't like the ones who came before. 'Have any foreigners besides us come?' 'Have you heard about any foreigners, English or French coming here?' 'Did they stay long? Did they do anything?' They're afraid-they've done something. You know very well that whoever does anything wicked is afraid of others. If they were honest people who came to look for water, why everybody knows where the water is. They don't want to stay here-they want to travel around, to go and then come back, and others will come after them. That's what they said. They said, 'Wait, just be patient, and all of you will be rich!' But what do they want from us, and what does it concern them if we get rich or stay just as we are? Watch their eyes, watch what they do and say. They're devils, no one can trust them. They're more accursed than the Jews. And the bastards memorized the Koran. Strange.118 Munif‘s positive character Miteb is the voice of the writer‘s own thoughts in that he believes that these newcomers will ―turn the whole Wadi upside down on [their] heads‖ if they let them.119 Through Miteb, Munif is likely to evoke a stand against the possibility of any harm to their ―land‖. During an interview, Munif explained that the title Cities of Salt symbolizes the cities turning into dusts. Munif dwells on the desolations; he bewails the loss of his homeland while displaying the torturing appearance and birth of the mechanical period. When after the government and the Americans forced the people of the Valley to leave, ―for the first time they discovered that other people and other places were

118 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 32. 119 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 39.

52 very different from Wadi al-Uyoun.‖120 How were they to get used to their new forced ‗homes‘, how were they to call them literally ‗homes‘? As Munif questions the connection between ―being‖ and ―belongingness‖ and ―land‖ in the novel

how is it possible for people and places to change so entirely that they lose any connection with what they used to be? Can a man adapt to new things and new places without losing a part of himself?‖121 Or in other words, how can a man adapt to new things without tuning into dust, just like as title symbolizes. In the same vein, Munif‘s second novel The Trench has a number of symbolic and place imagery as well. The title itself reflects the dictionary meaning as well as symbolic meanings of the word. The word‘s denotational meaning, ―a long, narrow ditch dug by troops to provide a place of shelter from enemy fire,‖ or ―a connected system of long narrow ditches forming an army‟s line‖122 along with its symbolic meanings such as ―depression‖, ―hole‖ and ―gutter‖ are incorporated in to the plot of the novel. The latter meanings pervade the novel. However, Peter Theroux, the translator of the novel into English, says that

this second novel al-Ukhdud, which could be translated as The Trench or The Ditch […] is not of a wartime trench but of a hole one is likely to fall into. I decided on the title The Trench after a conversation with the author, in which he described the reference as the undersea geological structure that we call a trench and the Arabs call ukhdud.123 From the very beginning of the novel to the very end, its main setting Mooran is being described serving powerfully to the place imagery of the novel: ―Mooran seemed sunk, early that spring, in a meditative silence, as if the city had nothing on its mind. But a sharp eye saw, in this silence, expectancy and signs of unease.‖124 The imagery of place here appeals to the readers‘ sense of cautiousness that something bad is going to happen. The city is later personified after the death of the Sultan when it

120 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 123. 121 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 134. 122 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/trench, (05.10.2017). 123 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 555. 124 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 3.

53 ―masked its sorrow and curiosity in silence, but could not rest, not understanding why.‖125 The city becomes a symbol not only of its people but also of its geographical land. And this was Munif‘s main concern when he set himself up writing his novels. Similarly, the gloom of Mooran is transferred on its people where they are resembled to ―desert animals: scaly, rough and mean, thick-skinned and unknowable.‖126 Because of such people and such a desolate place like Mooran, ―no one ever went there unless it was [their] actual destination.‖127 Here, it is obvious that the Americans came there because Mooran was their ―actual destination‖ to a vast wealth. Although the city was misused by the Sultanate and the Americans, the rulers did fear

the city more than they loved it, always expecting the earth to crack open and destroy everything. This fear, which had guided the rulers since Mooran was founded, and for which they could find no conscious reason, filled them with a truth that dominated them always: to live for todays, not to wait for tomorrows, for one day tomorrow would not come.128 Perhaps this philosophy was the explanation of the rulers‘ exploitation of their homeland. The succession of the dead Sultan‘s son brings hope to those opportunists. The prince is flattered by his newly appointed advisor Dr. Suhbi al-Mahmilji‘s statement that with his accession the land will become a wealthy and blessed place when he says:

Mooran was forgotten, remote, a non-place: none but the lost or fugitive came here, and none but the toughest survıved here, but you came, bringing blessings; when you touched the sand, it turned all to gold. You will do much here; you will make the land and the people into new land and new people. And we, Your Majesty the Sultan, are servants in your charge: order and we obey, command and we respond.129

125 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 8. 126 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 18. 127 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, pp. 19-20. 128 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, pp. 20-21. 129 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 23.

54 The city, eventually, turned into a new land with its new people, but unfortunately not in a pleasant way. The English translator, Peter Theroux, comments on the symbolic meaning of Mooran in his translation in the following statement:

As with the capital city in this novel, Mooran (from the word mara/yemoor, ―to oscillate or shake‖), the novel‘s title is meant to suggest the seismic activity and, by extension, the precarious civilizations built by Arab oil.130 The traditional custom of the society required obedience as Dr. Suhbi well knows, and whenever the rulers ordered something they obeyed without questioning its benefits and harms. The city did change into a corrupted city losing its originality, the life-style of the palace did change with its ever-increasing harem due to the Prince‘s affection towards women, and last but not least, women became freer in their lifestyle to the point that they even began cheating on their husbands, like the physician‘s wife, Wadad. Moreover, the imagery of the parrot and lovebirds in chapter 26 of the novel plays a great role as well. When Badri al-Mudalal brings from his last trip some birds to Mooran, he says that ―these birds are used to total freedom […] they might survive a day here, but two days of Mooran‟s heat would kill them.‖131 The birds symbolize the death of the city, and the end of the freedom for Mooran‘s inhabitants. The new circumstances are likely to prevent freedom for a long time. Munif successfully shows the negative impact of oil on its local people and the land itself. This is why we could notice through much of his novels the imagery of place. By this we see in him a rebel against the Arab Regime, their practices, attitudes and responses during the times of wars. Munif, through his writing, wanted to give messages to the Arab people, to be on the alert, for their natural wealth and their moral values which have been ignored and even taken away from them.

130 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 555. 131 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 138.

55 CHAPTER IV

ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN HARDY AND MUNIF'S SELECTED NOVELS

4.1 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

Thomas Hardy has been considered as a pioneer and master of the art of characterization. Some of his characters have become the eternal figures of literature. He has chosen his characters from the low strata of society. He excels in the portrayal of simple, elemental natures. The female characters in his novels are more powerful than their male counterparts. He deals with universal passions of men and women, so his characters are universal in their concerns and interests. Thomas Hardy's characters possess common universal virtues and suffer from common human weaknesses.

It was Thomas Hardy himself, who in the 1912 General Preface to the collected ‗Wessex‘ edition of his work, categorized his works as follows: ―‗the first group is called ―Novels of Character and Environment” and contains those which approach most nearly to uninfluenced works”, a second group “as „Romances and Fantasies‟” and the third “„Novels of Ingenuity‟.‖132 His novels Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, he considered under the first group as the novels ―dealing with human concerns in the realist tradition.‖133 The twentieth century critics view the novel belonging to this group as his major works.

The definition ‗character and environment‘ can hardly be questioned for it is the theme of conflict or the theme of harmony between the two that is explored in both novels. Hardy‘s classification shows how greatly he valued the interaction between the natural environment and its inhabitants. He believed that this interaction shaped their personalities. The community in the novels is divided into those who are in conflict with their setting and some locals on the one hand, and those who cannot think themselves apart from the heath and their neighborhood. Hardy‘s sympathies are with

132 Geoffrey Harvey, The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy, Psychology Press, 2003, p. 57. 133 Geoffrey Harvey, 2003, p. 57.

56 the latter. Those who are not at peace with their birthplace and those beneath them in status are doomed in Hardy‘s novels.

Thomas Hardy‘s famous fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) called the ―warmest and sunniest‖ of his novels, came out anonymously, causing some misjudgement. Some reviewers saw in the passages George Eliot‘s style, the idea that did not appeal to him much. Though ―he felt that aspects of his art were superior to that of Eliot, that she was „not a born storyteller by any means‟ and that she „had never touched the life of the fields.‖134 However, he was, after all, influenced by this great Victorian female writer:

Even in France, Hardy‘s relationship with George Eliot was noticed; Leon Boucher in an essay on ―the pastoral novel in England‖ commented that in Hardy George Eliot had ―not so much a rival as an emulator.‖135 The Spectator then made a prophetic statement:

―If Far from the Madding Crowd is not written by George Eliot, then there is new light among novelists,‖ for ―in every page of these introductory chapters there are a dozen sentences which have the ring of the wit and wisdom of the only truly great English novelist now living.‖136 Lawrence Jones claims that ―it should be noted at the outset that Hardy‟s treatment of the natural setting is very much his own, owing little or nothing to George Eliot.‖137 Despite all these arguments, the novel got a positive critical reception and Hardy became a famous writer with a distinctive style and the master of a unique form of pastoral. The novel took its name from the elegiac poem by the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Grey, a graveyard poet, whose poem An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard must have been appreciated highly by Thomas Hardy, whose pessimism resembled that of Thomas Grey. The metaphorical title of the writer implies his antipathy for urban life. The modifier ―madding‖ stands for the representatives of

134 Geoffrey Harvey, The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy, Psychology Press, 2003, p. 24. 135 Lawrence Jones, ―George Eliot and Pastoral Tragicomedy in Hardy‘s ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, Studies in Philology, University of North Carolina Press, Vol. 77, No. 4, 1980, p. 403. 136 Lawrence Jones, 1980, p. 403. 137 Lawrence Jones, 1980, p. 406.

57 cities against the rural or the natural. The title taken from the often quoted stanza runs as follows:

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.138

The lines address the peasants‘ modest mode of life in poverty, the condition characteristic of most rural people with whom Thomas Hardy‘s sympathies lie. Interestingly, it was after this novel that Thomas Hardy gave up his architectural career and started writing poetry, fiction and after the novel Jude the Obscure he took up poetry in protest against the harsh criticism of the novel. The contemporary critics find it immoral and unacceptable for the Victorian readers. Some critics even called it ―Jude the Obscene‖. It is worth mentioning here that some anthologies present Thomas Hardy as the twentieth-century writer. In fact, all his novels were published in the nineteenth-century, while the majority of his poems were released at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Far from the Madding Crowd was published in serial form in a magazine Cornhill edited by the prominent Victorian philosopher, critic and writer Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf. While working on the novel, the writer told Leslie Stephen how happy he was in his native Bockhampton near his family, looked after by his mother and living ―within a walk of the district in which the incidents are supposed to occur‖, and it was ―a great advantage to be actually among the people described at the time of describing them.‖139 The writer meant that the setting described in his novel was like his native Dorset, and the characters of the novel resembled the local people in Dorset. Moreover,

Elements of his father‘s personality are evident in the stoic, fatalistic shepherd, Gabriel Oak, he draws on his aunt and uncle Sharpe from Hatfield

138 http://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html, (27. 12. 2016).  See: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Fourth Edition, Volume II, New York/London, W. W. Norton & Company: 1979, p. 1764. 139 Geoffrey Harvey, The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy, Psychology Press, 2003, p. 22.

58 for Bathsheba Everdene and Sergeant Troy, employs his memories of circuses at Dorchester, and mines his store of folk tales.140 All these factors testify to realism and the pastoral in the novel, the features that Virginia Woolf emphasizes in The Common Reader:

The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which, however fashions may chop and change, must hold its place among the great English novels.141 During his work on the novel, two events had a great emotional effect on Hardy. The first was his falling in love with his illustrator, Helen Paterson while he courted Emma, his would-be first wife. The second event was more disastrous: his friend, the Greek scholar Horace Moule committed suicide by cutting his throat in his room. The writer, to his distress, heard very often of suicides and witnessed the executions of people, the sad things reflected in his novels. Thomas Hardy was immediately recognized as a writer with a distinctive style resembling the style of another prominent Victorian writer George Eliot. His love of nature, though different from other Victorian writers, earned him the status of a regional writer. Howard Babb in his informative article ―Setting and Theme in Far from the Madding Crowd‖, rightly observes that

Even casual readers of Thomas Hardy soon begin to sense that in his fiction the customary setting, the natural world, operates a good deal more forcefully than as sheer backdrop to the narrative. And the power of his settings is a common- place among Hardy's critics, most of whom find the natural background functioning symbolically at moments, though one of them speaks instead of a metaphoric dimension.142 As in most of his novels, the nature, the setting acquire the role of characters from the beginning of the novel.

Norcombe Hill—not far from lonely Toller-Down—was one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth. It was a featureless

140 Geoffrey Harvey, 2003, p. 22. 141 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Second Series, Read Books Ltd., 1935, p. 143. 142 Howard Babb, ―Setting and Theme in Far from the Madding Crowd‖, ELH, The John Hopkins University Press, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1963, p. 147.

59 convexity of chalk and soil—an ordinary specimen of those smoothly outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.143 The writer‘s diction with the adjectives ‗indestructible, smoothly outlined, grander heights‘ testify to his fascination with his surrounding, with the forces of nature challenging time. The past of England with its customs, rituals and linguistic peculiarities were dear to him. The modern life that came into being as a result of industrialization did not appeal to him. Though Hardy loves his rural environment, he does not idealize his surroundings. Nature is not always comforting, on the contrary its laws and forces cause a lot of predicaments for human beings. Margaret Drabble calls Hardy‘s novels ―local novels‖:

Local novels deal with things that the author is familiar with including scenes, characters and nature. Here, in Hardy‘s case, the region is where he lived, so it is a part of his own childhood which dominated his memory. Far from the Madding Crowd offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished.144 There are three kinds of characters in the novel: those loyal to country life, those against it, and those torn between the old and the new. At first, Bathsheba Everdene is the chief representative of the latter group, her relationship to the setting changes as the plot of the novel develops. And it is in this rural environment described above that we see the protagonist of the novel, Bathsheba Everdene ―on the horseback‖ with the ―the pail in one hand, hanging against her knee.‖145 Thomas Hardy calls Eustacia the Queen of the Night, while Bathsheba is named as ―the Queen of the Corn-market.‖146 At the beginning of the novel, Bathsheba is presented to the reader in a cart packed with all sorts of flowers:

The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed around her were fresh and green, and at such a leafless season they invested the whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar vernal charm.147

143 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, p. 13. 144 Margaret Drabble, The Genius of Thomas Hardy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979, p. 91. 145 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 22. 146 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 203. 147 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 10.

61 It is evident in the novel that Hardy treats Bathsheba much more sympathetically than her counterpart in The Return of the Native. Hardy‘s Bathsheba is fond of her environment which is expressed in the quotation above. At the beginning of the novel, Bathsheba is a happy woman, which is emphasized by the narrator in the following way:

There was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be questioned; and this rather saucy assumption failed in being offensive because a beholder felt it to be, upon the whole, true.148 The similes used to describe her are also associated with nature. Her gait is like ―the flitting of a dead leaf upon the breeze.‖149 And her breath is like a zephyr: ―He felt a zephyr curling about his cheek, and turned. It was Bathsheba‟s breath—she had followed him, and was looking into the same chink;‖150 her face is as ―a lily—so pale and fainty!‖151 Bathsheba‘s character is far from being conventional in that she works hard to be independent and avoids marriage not to become the Angel in the House. Moreover, she hates ―to be thought men‟s property.‖152 Before marrying Troy, she was

proud of her position as a woman; it had been a glory to her to know that her lips had been touched by no man‘s on earth—that her waist had never been encircled by a lover‘s arm.153 Actually, she is thinking of marriage and knows that a woman can hardly escape this sacred institution, though she prefers something out of the way: ―I shouldn‟t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.‖154 However, as is often the case, she chooses the wrong man to love and marry (George Eliot‘s ‗Dorothy‘, Henry James‘s ‗Isabel Archer‘, Anne Bronte‘s ‗Agnes Grey‘ are but few examples of them). In fact, Bathsheba is a strong and free- spirited woman who becomes a landowner after working as a milkmaid. Hardy

148 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, pp. 22-23. 149 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 25. 150 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 299. 151 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 330. 152 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 36. 153 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 326. 154 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 38.

61 himself admires her when describing her ―impulsive nature, […] an Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit, she often performed actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme discretion.‖155 However, if as a farm owner she is self-confident, as a female, she is vain and naïve. The scene of the Weatherbury bees in chapter 27 must have been something Hardy himself knew very well by observing them more than once:

Sometimes throughout a whole season all the swarms would alight on the lowest attainable bough—such as part of a currant-bush or espalier apple-tree; next year they would, with just the same unanimity, make straight off to the uppermost member of some tall, gaunt costard, or quarrenden, and there defy all invaders who did not come armed with ladders and staves to take them.156 This is the chapter in which she gets acquainted with Sergeant Frank Troy and her inexperience comes out. The scene reveals how different in character Bathsheba and Troy are. The former enjoys hiving the bees, even she wants to see for herself the process of making honey. On the contrary, even holding up hive ―makes [Troy‘s] arm ache worse than a week of sword.‖157 The narrator immediately shows how Troy is uninterested in this nature‘s miracle. He is more at ease with his sword exercises. Bathsheba, who never saw any sword exercise before, gets intrigued and they make a date to come together. First, Bathsheba decides to come with her maid Liddy, but Troy persuades her to come alone. Here, just as Troy managed to drive the unruly bees into the hive, he succeeds in getting Bathsheba to do something that will ruin her life. Thomas Hardy knew well women‘s hardships and was aware ―of the disadvantages society laid upon them.‖158 Though Bathsheba‘s name is taken from the bible, Thomas Hardy‘s characterization of her is not exactly biblical. Daryl Ogden notes that Bathsheba‘s characterization

departs from the biblical Bathsheba‘s in its portrayal not merely as a ―feminized‖ spectator who peripherally perceives the visual attentions of male

155 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, p. 156. 156 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 213. 157 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 215. 158 Katharine Rogers, ―Women in Thomas Hardy‖, The Centenniel Review, Michigan State University Press, 1975, p. 249.

62 characters, but also as a socially empowered, near ―masculinized‖ spectator of those same male characters.159 Moreover, after having been frustrated by her marriage with Troy and thinking him dead, she decides to marry Boldwood, though she does not love him, which is not surprising, for he is a man who has ―no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details, he was serious throughout all.‖160 Towards the end of the novel Bathsheba matures enough to see how reliable Gabriel is. She and Gabriel have a very plain and quiet wedding, after which they invite the whole village to play and sing for them. However, Bathsheba, at the end of the novel, is not the Bathsheba at the beginning of it. The narrator‘s statement shows explicitly that Bathsheba‘s marriage with Oak is a marriage of good fellowship—―camaraderie” 161 rather than a love marriage. And to Hardy, it is the former that enables marriage last:

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other‘s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. 162 In the same vein, Dale Cramer sadly observes: ―Never again, we are sure, will she burst forth in a fine blaze of fury, her black eyes snapping and her cheek flushed; nor will she blush as furiously with love or at her temerity.‖163 Chapter III mentions Gabriel Oak‘s connectedness not only with nature but also with Bathsheba. Gabriel‘s love for Bathsheba is tested throughout the novel. His often quoted confession of love is remarkable: ―whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up there will be you.‖164 But as we see it takes a long time for Bathsheba to become aware that Gabriel is reliable enough to marry him. Gabriel‘s character is the focus of many critics. Hardy himself has mixed feelings about him. On the one hand he describes him as a man with ―sound judgment,

159 Daryl Ogden, ―Bathsheba‘s Visual Estate: Female Spectatorship in ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1993: p.2. 160 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, p. 144. 161 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 466. 162 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 466. 163 Dale Cramer, Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, Springer, 1979, p. 72. 164 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 38.

63 easy motions, proper dress, and general good character‖, on the other hand as a man ―whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.‖165 Similarly, the novels critics are also ambivalent about Gabriel‘s character. By some critics he is even seen as a ―spy/censor‖,166 by others as ―one of the most destructive voyeurs in English literature, being “at once angelic and diabolic‖.‖167 However, these unpleasant associations are ignored by the majority of literary critics, as well as the writer himself. Hardy is fascinated by his steady character, his bond with his environment. There is sun even in his portrayal.

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.168 Gabriel Oak is loved for his keeping away from ―madding crowd‖. After Bathsheba‘s refusal to marry him, he goes on loving her and taking care of her. Gabriel cannot imagine a life far from his native land. Nature, its forces, its challenges are skilfully incorporated in the characterization of all the characters in the novel from local rustics to landowners. These people cherish their customs and traditions though in a different way.

165 Thomas Hardy, 2005, pp. 7-8. 166 Daryl Ogden, ―Bathsheba‘s Visual Estate: Female Spectatorship in ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, The Journal of Narrative Texhnique, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1993, p. 3. 167 qtd. in. Daryl Ogden, 1993, p. 3. 168 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Icon Classics, San Diego, 2005, p. 7.

64 4.2 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

As it was mentioned in Chapter III, Regionalism in literature refers to the writings that focus on specific features of a particular region like characters, dialects, history, customs, topography and many others. Although the location of Hardy‘s novel is imaginary, it is based in most cases on actual geographical areas Hardy knew well. Regarding his view at nature or region, Hardy sometimes portrays it as cruel and heartless, and other times as calm and serene, so, the settings of his novels are dynamic and can be personified as a real character. Furthermore, the background of the novel is formed by the nature of Wessex, its environment and characters, and this can be obvious through some descriptions in the novel. The word Wessex for the first time is mentioned in his novel The Return of the Native:

The word Wessex was, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a purely historical term defining the south-western region of the island of Britain that had been ruled by the West Saxons in the early Middle Ages. But since Hardy unearthed the word and used it in his novels and poems, it has come to mean to more and more people a district—to some degree coterminous with the Saxon kingdom—populated by characters sprung from the novelist‘s imagination. Indeed, Wessex has come to mean the whole culture—predominantly rural and pre-industrial—found in Hardy‘s novels and poems.169 Thomas Hardy does not conceal his obsession with his native land. He transfers it to Egdon Hill emphasizing its indestructibility:

The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation.170 The word ―Ishmaelitish thing‖ is remarkable here in that that it

169 Dale Kramer, Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, Springer, 1979, p. 19. 170 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 10.

65 refers to a person or thing cast off from others. In the Bible Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Hagar. Abraham cast out Hagar and Ishmael in-to the desert. Hence the sense of an outcast comes.171 In the novel, by quoting from the Bible, Hardy emphasizes Egdon Heath‘s isolation from the civilized words. Chittaranjan Nath (2014) regards Hardy as a prominent regional novelist in English literature:

Thomas Hardy is the most important of the regional novelists of England, and deserves more space and attention. His greatness as a regional novelist lies in his depiction of Wessex, the most elaborate study of landscape in the English literature.172 Hardy is creative and flexible in describing and portraying his native landscape or region. He mentions many descriptions of the nature and presents a broad sketch nature in The Return of Native, so regionalism plays a huge part.

He is more a bit realist in this aspect "Hardy nowhere expresses the extreme inference that every flower enjoys the air it breaths, Hardy emphasizes on the gloomy part of the Nature. For him Nature is the agent of cruelty and destruction.173 Part of Hardy‘s literary canon, the novel was first published in instalments in Belgravia magazine, from January to December 1878. The novel was also available to the American reading public through Harper‘s New Monthly Magazine. Leslie Stephen was hesitant about publishing the novel in his magazine, for the reason that Eustacia‘s immoral behaviour could hurt the Victorian character. Cornhill Magazine as well rejected the novel as inappropriate for a family magazine. As for the title of the novel, it is not as ambiguous as that of Far from the Madding Crowd. It is suggestive and in fact there is a character Clym, a native of Egdon Heath who returns back to his native land from Paris, where he was successful as a diamond merchant. The title implies more: Clym‘s return develops the plot in a very dramatic way, so that Eustacia leaves her lover for him, overwhelmed by the

171 https://ardhendude.blogspot.com.tr/2011/11/, (07.08.2016). 172 Chittaranjan Nath, ―Regionalism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy‖, A Journal of Humanities & Social Science, Karimganj College, Karimganj, Assam, India, Volume II, Issue III, January, 2014, p. 160. 173 Chittaranjan Nath, 2014, p. 163.

66 desire to go to Paris, and live a life she had been dreaming of. The narrator expresses her attitude towards Clym, in a very straightforward way:

She had loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody after wearying of Wildeve.174 She makes a decision to love him ―in spite of herself‖, and she believes that ―once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for someone at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.‖175 Clym‘s innocent plans to open a school and have a peaceful married life fail and end tragically: his mother dies after having bitten by an Adder, and Eustacia gets drowned in the wear, though it is hard to conclude from the novel whether it was an accident or suicide. John Cyril Barton, in his book Transatlantic Sensations, blames ‗regionalism‘ on Eustacia‘s death:

If one is sympathetic to Eustacia, as contemporary readers were, her climactic death can be read not as punishment for cosmopolitan longings, but rather as a deplorable side-effect of a stultifying regionalism that cannot tolerate individuality or difference.176 The characters in the novel differ from each other by their attitude towards nature, locals and their community. Diggory Venn, the Reddleman, Thomasin Yeobright, Clement Yeobright cling to their setting. On the other hand the beautiful Eustacia Vye, Damon Wildeve, and Clement‘s mother, Mrs. Yeobright, unlike her son feel a great antipathy towards their surroundings. For Clym, for example, his native place is a great consoler. The narrator emphasizes this by saying:

If anyone knew the heath well it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with its odours. He might be said to be its product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the first images, of his memory were mingled, his estimate of life had been coloured by it…177 Like Hardy himself, Clym believes in human fate being convinced that life is a thing to be put up with. However, unfortunately, because of his excessive reading his

174 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 171. 175 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 171. 176 John Cyril Barton, Transatlantic Sensation, Routledge, 2016, p. 249. 177 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 209.

67 eye-sight deteriorates, and he has to give up his dream to open a school in his Egdon Hill. Gregory Ven, the Reddleman, is like Egdon‘s omnipresent spirit. He is also rewarded at the end of the novel by marrying his desired Tomasin after her husband‘s death. The writer depicts him as a loyal and gentlemanly man. On the other hand, Hardy does not conceal his dislike for the landlord Wildeve, a person of doubtful morals. The conflict between man and environment is very vivid in Eustacia‘s character. She hates the Heath, though she is aware of its greatness and beauty, when Venn wants her to trust him and tells her that he knows about her hatred of the place Eustacia‘s confession is very remarkable:

There is a sort of beauty in the scenery, I know; but it is a jail to me. The man you mention does not save me from that feeling, though he lives here. I should have cared nothing for him had there been a better person near.178 Eustacia is at odds with herself and the environment. She is unable to grapple with her problems, because what she wants is not realizable on the Heath. She protests against her life by saying that she does not deserve her lot:

O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!179 Being originally from a seaside region Budmouth, she comes to Egdon Heath with her grandfather captain Vye after her father‘s death but fails to get used to the new setting. She hates the Heath and regards it as ―Hades‖, a place of death in Greek mythology. However, she seems to be aware of her fatal end. She says to Wildeve who also abhors the Heath: ―Tis my cross, my shame, and will be my death!‖180 However, there is no escape from the Heath, and the Heath punishes those disloyal to it. Eustacia, a woman of unyielding nature and breath-taking beauty, more celestial than earthly, has become the focus of many literary critics. Hardy describes her as follows:

178 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 111. 179 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 420. 180 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 102.

68 She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow--it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.181 In her detailed physical portrayal in chapter 7, there is again the sound of nature:

Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola. In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities.182 The Bourbon roses is a place name in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, ―volcanic in origin, with frequent eruptions‖183 the word combinations very appropriate for Eustacia with her flame-like soul. The second meaning is a hybrid rose, which also reflects Eustacia‘s androgynous character implying her femininity and masculinity in terms of her passion. Her great desire was ―to be loved to madness.‖184 She was yearning for a love resembling that of Emily Bronte‘s Catherine and Heathcliff: ―In heaven she will probably sit between the Heloises and the Cleopatras.‖185 She is a real lotus-eater, obsessed with life‘s pleasures, far from being a good and caring housewife. The critic Shanta Dutta in her book Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study towards Women presents negative and positive opinions of contemporary reviewers. The contemporary critics compared her with Gustave Flaubert‘s Emma in Madame Bovary: ―and expressed disgust at characters who „know no other law than the gratification of their own passion.‘‖186 The Victorian reviewers definitely saw her as the most immoral female character in Victorian literature. The 1879 Spectator review read:

181 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p.. 79. 182 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 80. 183 http://www.rose.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/History-of-Roses-Bourbon-Roses2.pdf, (20.09.2017). 184 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 82. 185 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 85. 186 qtd. in., Shanta Dutta, Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study towards Women, Springer, 2000, p. 3.

69 His coldly passionate heroine, Eustacia Vye, never reproaches herself for a moment with the inconstancy and poverty of her own affections. On the contrary, she has no feeling that anything which happens within her, has relation to right and wrong at all, or that such a thing as responsibility exists… Hence, in her case, we never really reach the point of tragedy at all.187 Thomas Hardy‘s attitude towards women has been debated since the 19th century up to now. Some see in him a misogynist, having women go through a lot of suffering, others regard him an apologist for women, though finding his women irresistible and charm. Abercrombie‘s entry on Hardy in the 1929 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica is also ambivalent:

His view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel, not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man‘s point of view, and not, as with Meredith, man‘s and woman‘s at once. He sees all that is irresponsible for good and evil in a woman‘s character, all that is untrustworthy in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her variability. He is her apologist, but always with a reserve of private judgement. No one has created more attractive women of a certain class, women whom a man would have been more likely to love or to regret loving. In his earlier books he is somewhat careful over the reputation of his heroines; gradually he allows them more liberty, with a franker treatment of instinct and its consequences… His knowledge of women confirms him in a suspension of judgement.188 Contemporary critics, by contrast, are fascinated by Eustacia‘s character. Harold Bloom resembles her to ―Botticelli Venus [Birth of Venus], and Leonardo‟s Mona Lisa, visions of antithetical female sexuality.‖189 Like Chittaranjan Nath (see p. 65) and Howard Babb (see p. 58), Harold Bloom also ascribes Eustacia‘s fatal end to her character as well as to the Heath.

This at least of flame-like Eustacia‘s life has, that the concurrence of forces parts sooner rather than later. But then this most beautiful of Hardy‘s women is also the most doom-eager, the color of her soul being flame-like. The Heath brings her only Wildeve and Clym, but Paris doubtless would have brought

187 qtd. in., Shanta Dutta, Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study towards Women, Springer, 2000, p. 3. 188 qtd. in., Shanta Dutta, 2000, p. 8. 189 Harold Bloom, Novelists and Novels, Checkmark Books, New York, 2005, p. 182.

71 her scarce better, since as Queen of Night she attracts the constancy and the kindness of sorrow.190 She goes on haunting critics as well as readers. Everything concerning her is being rewritten and revised. The critic Frank R. Giordano, Jr. in her article ―Eustacia Vye‘s Suicide‖, writes:

to her unsympathetic, pretentious, even comical, frivolous characteristics. This revisionist approach is suggested by such titles as "The Other Eustacia," and "Eustacia Vye, Queen of Night and Courtly Pretender."1 Directly impinging upon such studies of Eustacia's character is the question of the precise mode of her death.191 Her death is interpreted in various ways. According to Diggory Venn, she fell into the weir by accident, while Captain Vye, her grandfather, and Charlie consider it a suicide. Clym blames himself for her death, claiming

I spoke cruel words to her, and she left my house. I did not invite her back till it was too late. It is I who ought to have drowned myself. It would have been a charity to the living had the river overwhelmed me and borne her up. But I cannot die. Those who ought to have lived lie dead; and here am I alive!192 Hardy has her drowned in a weir by which he underlines the revenge of Egdon Heath on those hostile to it. The place does not forgive betrayal. The following fascinating quotation is very pertinent as regards the interrelationship between character and nature by Bruce Johnson:

Eustacia is established as a genuine antithesis to the Heath in all its related meanings. Where it is stoic she is tragic; where it survives, she aspires to burn out with a great passion; where it ignores time, she likes to stare at the sand running out in her small hourglass; where its botany and geology all seem tuned to avoid great conflicts, she courts them perversely. The heath accommodates, Eustacia violates. The heath has preeminently adjusted its place in nature, Eustacia refuses hers in society and delights in flaunting its conventions.193

190 Harold Bloom, Novelists and Novels, Checkmark Books, New York, 2005, pp. 182-183. 191 Frank R. Giordano, ―Eustacia Vye‘s Suicide‖, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 22, No. 4, WINTER, 1980, p. 504. 192 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 447. 193 Bruce Johnson, True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of Thomas Hardy‟s Novels, USA, University Press of Florida, 1983, p. 52.

71 Clym‘s characterization is as ―regional‖ as that of others. He comes back from Paris which he considers ―flashy‖ and ―effeminate‖194 to Egdon Heath with great hopes. The locals, who were proud of him, find it hard to understand his return from Paris to a rural region.

He had been a lad of whom something was expected. Beyond this all had been chaos. That he would be successful in an original way, or that he would go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable. The only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in the circumstances amid which he was born.195 Unfortunately, Clym does not meet his countrymen‘s expectations. His plan to open a school for the ignorant fails because of his poor sight. He is very happy to help furze-cutters and has a very good relationship with them. Hardy sympathizes with Clym, who adores his birthplace though it does not bring him happiness. He protests to Eustacia‘s complaint, ―I cannot endure the heath, except in its purple season. The heath is a cruel taskmaster to me‖196 by expressing his love towards the Heath:

"Can you say so?" he asked. "To my mind it is most exhilarating, and strengthening, and soothing. I would rather live on these hills than anywhere else in the world."197 Clym‘s honesty and love for his mother and his wife are very appealing but compared with Gabriel Oak he is clumsy, indecisive and hesitant in his relations as well as actions. While the environment makes Gabriel stronger, Clym‘s love for his birthplace does not make him better. Clym is half blind after his excessive reading but his blindness has a metaphorical meaning, too. He is blind to Eustacia‘s secret wishes, fails to make her happy and his hesitant character leads to her death. Nor does he listen to his mother‘s advice about his life. Also, he is not able to make the right decisions. He does not assess his successful position of a diamond merchant in Paris and thinks that he would be more prosperous and happy in Egdon Heath. Hardy‘s skilful portrayal of the unconventional ahead of their time women shows that he knew them well. The most pessimistic and tragic novel among Hardy‘s

194 Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Icon Classics, USA, 2005, p. 221. 195 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 202. 196 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 224. 197 Thomas Hardy, 2005, p. 224.

72 fiction, The Return of the Native conveys Hardy‘s moral vision: spiritually weak women are doomed, few people reach deserved happiness. Besides, in this most pessimistic novel of his, Hardy gives a great importance to a sense of belonging and lack of sense of belonging. People like Wildeve and Eustacia without roots are likely to parish. Thomas Hardy, who is considered to be the last representative of old rural England, does not imagine people unconnected with their natural environment.

73 4.3 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN CITIES OF SALT

Although Abdulrahman Munif is not considered a pioneer and master of the art of characterization like Hardy, his characters, too, represent themselves in a unique way. The characters in Cities of Salt serve significantly to the development of the main theme concerning with the concept of regionalism. Both the characters and the plot serve greatly to the gradual transformation of a desert oasis from an old village to a metropolis. The Bedouin society of the region seems to have difficulty welcoming the American foreigners, even though the warm hospitality is what distinguishes them from the rest of the people they have ever known. Munif‘s manner of slow-paced narrative with rich details makes him a suitable writer to compare his works with nineteenth-century European and American naturalist fiction. The detailed narrative also makes it easier to analyse the characters‘ roles and contributions to the main theme of the novel. As in Thomas Hardy‘s novels, the nature and the setting in Munif‘s novel acquire the role of characters from the very beginning

Wadi al-Uyoun: an outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert, as if it had burst from within the earth or fallen from the sky. It was nothing like its surroundings, or rather had no connection with them, dazzling you with curiosity and wonder: how had water and greenery burst out in a place like this? But the wonder vanished gradually, giving way to a mysterious respect and contemplation. It was one of those rare cases of nature expressing its genius and wilfulness, in defiance of any explanation.198 Wadi al-Uyoun, which ―was a beginning for any person‖ and a sacred place for its dwellers, was now being haunted by the Americans‘ presence in the desert.199 It was now being occupied by things against its grains; binoculars, radios, tape recorders, and television sets. The oddness brought to the quiet valley soon turned to hostility within the society. Miteb al-Hathal, if not the protagonist, is the voice of the nature to the first part of the trilogy novel, for Munif does not have in his novels the

198 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 1. 199 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 6.

74 character in the status of protagonist. Munif explains his employment of a protagonist or/and a hero in the words below:

The protagonist of the novel is the individual who plays the whole scene and the others who surround him are just as scenery to highlight him and show his heroism, this imaginary protagonist who dominated the global novel for a long time has to step down and occupy only what he deserves from a place and time.200 Miteb, who serves as a powerful major character in the novel, is used to construct the world which is drawn through the novel. It is he who questions the presence of the newcomers:

They certainly didn't come for water-they want something else. But what could they possibly want? What is there in this dry desert besides dust, sand and starvation? They say they'll be here a long time? How will they live? They look like chicken when they eat. And the questions they asked were damned crafty. Saying they weren't like the ones who came before. 'Have any foreigners besides us come?' 'Have you heard about any foreigners, English or French coming here?' 'Did they stay long? Did they do anything?' They're afraid-they've done something. You know very well that whoever does anything wicked is afraid of others. If they were honest people who came to look for water, why everybody knows where the water is. They don't want to stay here-they want to travel around, to go and then come back, and others will come after them. That's what they said. They said, 'Wait, just be patient, and all of you will be rich!' But what do they want from us, and what does it concern them if we get rich or stay just as we are? Watch their eyes, watch what they do and say. They're devils, no one can trust them.201 The newcomers, Americans, with all their differences, be it their religion or their appearance, dress codes, manners, and especially the technology they bring, symbolize their unfitness to the valley‘s nature, causing the dwellers to bear hostility towards them. Miteb al-Hathal, who is also considered as the sheikh, the leader of the region, questions the state of things as days pass by, and grows suspicious of the government:

200 Abdulrahman Munif, Writer and exile: Issues and Perspectives on the Arabic Novel, Al- Mu‘assasaal-arabiya, Beirut, 1992, p. 76. 201 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 29.

75 When Miteb asked the two guides, they said that the emir had sent them and that was why they had come. Miteb al-Hathal grew more pessimistic with every passing day; his fears mounted and his curses were more frequent. He came to talk about nothing else. If all the men joined him in discussing the problem, not all of them agreed with him, but because of his age and social standing they let him think and swear as he pleased. He sensed that something terrible was about to happen.202 Miteb, indeed, serves as a predictor of what will happen to the region. Soon the Americans become the untouchables of the region, for ―whoever causes them any trouble [was to] be punished.‖203 However, Miteb never gives up his native land, he believes that ―the land needs its people.‖204 Munif‘s community in the Cities of Salt is divided into those who are in conflict with their setting and those who identify their presences with their lands. Munif sympathizes with those who identify themselves with their land. Those who are not at peace with their land will eventually be doomed in this novel as well. Abdulrahman Munif‘s famous seventh novel, Cities of Salt has been banned in several Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia since its publication. The novel serves not only as a setting to view a powerful political statement, but also as a panoramic scope of the region in which it is depicted. The characters in the novel die or live according to their preferences; either live and become rich and powerful by helping the Americans, or die or be driven out of their land by fighting against them. The culture clash causing the Bedouin society to lose all their norms forever shows how the novel deals with the transformation of a nature and culture so vividly and powerfully. Moreover, Regionalism exists highly in the novel due to focusing on specific features like characters, traditions, landscape, history and nature of a particular region. The novel describes the American-Arab encounter that was a cultural confrontation rather than political one, and he mentions real places in his native land by giving details. For example, he portrays the valley "Wadi Al-Uyoun" as a paradise that shows his abilities to make his readers adore such places and see them as pure and innocent. However, such beauty was badly affected by foreigners who

202 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 31. 203 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 33. 204 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 37.

76 damaged the nature and the people's hopes for future, and they negatively influenced their peaceful life and brought unacceptable traditions to the community. Miteb al-Hathal foresees the doom of a whole region with its society when he comments that ―the jinn took possession of the whole place from the day the infidels came-it‟s haunted.‖205 He, with all his boldness, never fails to warn the people about the coming disaster he deeply feels within. However, no one seem to take his words seriously. Ibn Rashed, a man from the valley who is comfortable with the American presence, remains indifferent to Miteb‘s warnings:

―Ibn Hathal, you are the sheikh of this wadi. You are its most intelligent man, so you must know that the government deals justly with people-but it knows how to use force as well.‖ ―Are you threatening me, Ibn Rashed?‖ ―We have told you, Ibn Hathal: they make the decisions. We are obedient slaves. You are a troublemaker-! Tell you we have no choice but to kneel and obey. We scarcely finish with one discussion, one problem, and you've found another one. Cousin, leave off the problems and let the government do its job.‖ ―And if I don't, Ibn Rashed?‖ ―You'll cause anger, but then the regret will be your own, Ibn Hathal.‖206 Despite all the indifference of the society, Miteb continues to stand up even to the regional emir, Khaled al-Mishari, asking him to find a solution to the unconformity that the Americans brought to the region. Emir Khaled, ―a middle-aged, heavyset, and dark skinned almost black,‖207 man is ignorant, indecisive, timorous, and self-indulgent. He is very happy with the succession of such modernity, receiving gifts like a telescope, radio and telephone. Miteb, who loved every piece of his land, now feels desperate in front of the horrible reality that occupied his valley:

Even Miteb al-Hathal, who spent long afternoons gazing at the trees and fields, no longer tending to the caravans or going to Ibn Rashed's encampment, felt that he did not need news if the latest news took a day or two longer to get to him, it did not make any difference.208

205 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 45. 206 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, pp. 77-78. 207 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 271. 208 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 66.

77 The writer draws a parallel relationship between Miteb and the valley. Miteb‘s usual habits change, just like the changing oasis. His wife is worried about him when she sees him always on guard with his weapons:

Miteb al-Hathal, who was accustomed to bearing arms only on rare occasions, when preparing for travel, upon hearing the baying of a wolf near the sheep or in his rare angry moments, frightened Wadha badly when he took his gun and went out, not because guns scared her as they did many women, who prized safety over anything to be gained by fighting, but because Miteb's condition worried her.209 Day by day Miteb grows up to see the change of his land. He refrains from seeing the ―developing‖ valley, changing his usual route:

Contrary to his usual habit, Miteb rode down to the wadi by the longest and most difficult paths, as if by taking that route he wanted to see the whole scene. After viewing the camp from the Zahra side, he examined the wadi and the surrounding hills and wanted to see it from the opposite side, or perhaps he feared something or sensed trouble.210 Raged with anger, the hopeless Miteb one day ―climbed onto his white Omani she-camel and galloped off without looking back.‖211 Upon an invitation to dinner with the new regime members and the humble people of the Bedouins, Miteb becomes a symbol of resistance to an industrialized valley. He has now become a deadly silent man: ―he was a stone, or like a stone: stiff, haggard and expressionless. Had it not been for the occasional glimmer in his eyes, they would have thought they were looking at the face of a dead man.‖212 For months he remained silent. This case, involuntarily, brings to mind Dante‘s Inferno in which those who disobey their masters are doomed to silence. His native land, which he worshipped, becomes a sort of Inferno for him. He looked so miserable that people thought he might die. But when after so many months he broke his silence for the first time, it was as if the valley was speaking instead of Miteb: ―The devils are here and we must fight them. If we do

209 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 72. 210 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 73. 211 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 92. 212 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, pp. 93-94.

78 nothing, they‟ll eat us up and we‟ll leave no trace behind!‖213 No one understood him, nor did they put any effort in understanding him. With the changing nature of the valley, days passed. Miteb was cursing the Americans and those who supported them in destroying the beauty of the land.

This was the final, insane, accursed proclamation that everything had come to an end. For anyone who remembers those long-ago days, when a place called Wadi al-Uyoun used to exist, and a man named Miteb al-Hathal, and a brook, and trees, and a community of people used to exist, the three things that still break his heart in recalling those days are the tractors which attacked the orchards like ravenous wolves, tearing up the trees and throwing them to the earth one after another, and levelled all the orchards between the brook and the fields. After destroying the first grove of trees, the tractors turned to the next with the same bestial voracity and uprooted them. The trees shook violently and groaned before falling, cried for help, wailed, panicked, called out in helpless pain and then fell entreatingly to the ground, as if trying to snuggle into the earth to grow and spring forth alive again.214 Helpless Miteb one day takes his camel, where ―he looked like a cloud, and when he sped off he looked like a white bird. He faded from sight and grew smaller, dwindled and then disappeared.‖215 No physical trace of Miteb is ever found again. The novel continues to take place in the small Bedouin village of Harran, which is already transformed into a major oil centre. This was a Harran divided into two: an American one, and a local one. The latter Harran is a cheap and poor Arab village, whereas the American Harran had swimming pools, air conditioners and many amenities provided for the Americans. In other words, the region became strange to its native owners. Perhaps the disappearance into the desert gives Miteb an invisible power to carry on the fight he failed in his presence, because by the novel‘s end the previously expected action that the Bedouins take seems to be supported by the spirit of Miteb. The novel reveals that when someone sets the entire American oil field and camp

213 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Jonathan Cape, Thirty-two Bedford Square London, 1987, p. 99. 214 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 106. 215 Abdelrahman Munif, 1987, p. 107.

79 ablaze, it is believed by the dwellers that it is Miteb‘s ghost that has come back to take revenge for what has been done to his land and his people. In conclusion, Muhammad Siddiq in his article ―The Contemporary Arabic Novel in Perspective‖ discussing the title of the novel Cities of Salt, ―suggests the injustice associated with the emergence of the modern cities of salt in the desert.‖216 He continues to argue that Miteb‘s presence has a great impact on the region‘s nature so much that ―long after his death […] his hand [is still seen] in every natural disaster that befalls the Americans and disrupts work in the oil fields.‖217 The characterization is well structured within the novel so much that it paves the way for the reader and/or the researcher to be able to trace elements of regionalism. Through each character, Munif successfully expresses the characteristics of the Wadi al-Uyoun.

216 Muhammad Siddiq, ―The Contemporary Arabic Novel in Perspective‖, World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 2, 1986, p. 209. 217 Muhammad Siddiq, 1986, p. 210.

81 4.4 CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF REGIONALISM IN THE TRENCH

Discussed in the previous chapter, The Trench is the second volume of Abdulrahman Munif‘s Cities of Salt trilogy. The trilogy is comprised of Cities of Salt, The Trench and Variations on Night and Day respectively. The Trench picks up the story where the first volume, Cities of Salt, is left off. The novel discusses the effects of the oil discovery in the region, and the inevitable corruption and destruction of the native land. This volume, too, is highly appreciated by many critics. The New York Times Book Review find the novel remarkable stating that it ―deepens, enriches and above all humanizes whatever sense of Arab culture we may have‖, and the Village Voice Literary Supplements considers the novel conveying the historical truth and collective memory finding it as ―an ambitious and profound undertaking, a call to struggle against both the new and the accepted order.‖218

The Trench narrates the story of 1950s sultanate of the city called Mooran. In this volume, Abdulrahman Munif focuses more on the greedy sultanate, Sultan Khazael and the sultan‘s chief advisor, Dr. Subhi Mahmilji, rather than the Americans.219 Just as in the first volume, Munif‘s way of narrating this novel makes elements of regionalism noticeable. The landscape, the geography, the social and cultural life in the region depicted are all real-life depictions related to Munif‘s native land. Though imaginary, the cities of Harran and Mooran stand for the real geographical Arab cities after the discovery of oil.

In the fictional Kingdom, Munif shows how the sultanate allows the Americans to exploit the natural environment for the oil. The Americans were allowed an unlimited supply while the already rich kingdom becomes richer. The novel opens with the ‗unease‘ setting of Mooran:

MOORAN SEEMED SUNK, EARLY THAT SPRING, in a meditative silence, as if the city had nothing on its mind. But a sharp eye saw, in this silence, expectancy and signs of unease. The calm was deceptive and would end abruptly, as if it had never been. With no plan or collusion, the silence

218 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, The back cover of the novel. 219 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/abdelrahman-munif/the-trench-2/, (22.07.2017).

81 was shared by all; their movements were exaggeratedly slow and measured, with a suggestion of secrecy and conspiracy, since any slip, whatever its cause would give offense and create difficulties not easily dispelled.220 Mooran seemingly foresees that something is going wrong. Sultan Khureybit needs care, for he is dying, perhaps ―he had gone blind and there were rumors of delirium.‖221 Dr. Subhi Mahmilji is being called to the city to care for the dying Sultan. The first chapter ends with the announcement of the inevitable death of the Sultan: ―„In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful. O Soul now at rest, return to your Lord, pleased and content. Enter the ranks of the faithful in my Paradise.‟ Thus saith the Lord God. Sultan Khureybit was dead.‖222 Perhaps the Sultan died peacefuly, but his death possibly foreshadows the gloomy future of the land.

Dr. Subhi Mahmilji plays a great role in the novel. Described by the men of Prince Khazael, the son of the dead Sultan, as ―the man [who] has been blinded by money,‖ he succeeds in gaining the confidence of the prince, who ascends the throne after his father‘s death.223 He becomes both the doctor and a close adviser to Prince Khazael. This closeness surely will have an effect on the land, Mooran, serving perfectly to the characterization of the novel. Mooran was ―in those years‖ a quite and ordinary city, and its people

knew how to protect themselves, how to react to everything that happened around them. They were confident that foreigners had no patience and knew none of the hidden paths into the depths of the desert or of men; they would not stay long.224 Though this was the case with the Mooran people at the beginning, the people had no power to protect their lands at the end from those ―foreigners‖, who stayed for the indefinite period of time. Dr. Subhi, who politically earned the Prince‘s trust was

220 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 3. 221 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 3. 222 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 6. 223 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 8. 224 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, pp. 19-20.

82 one of the main characters who paved the way for the foreign Americans when he told the Prince:

Your Majesty, my lord, you know better than any other man there has been oil under this land for thousands of years, untouched in its place, until your late father, after seeking counsel far and near, asking questions and making inquiries, told them, ‗Now carry out the will of God!‘ […] The oil might have stayed in bowels of the earth, Your Majesty, for hundreds or thousands of years, but divine care, approval and the good fortune that comes only from Almighty God, said, ‗Be!‘ and it was. Now, more than at any other time, and here, above any other place, Your Majesty, you can transform Mooran into a paradise on earth and rule over the far and the near!225 David Gilmour skilfully summarizes the situation in the novel in his article ―Desert Ruritania‖ as follows:

Imagine a stretch of sand which no one has ever coveted, a few palmthatch huts, a few thousand nomads, and some camels. Picture a ruler accustomed to counting his meagre treasury in his tent, a wary traditional chieftain who doesn‘t want the money offered him by foreign companies. Then add oil, outside pressure, and a mass of immigrants, close your eyes for a year or two, shake the mixture, and when you focus again you will find that the ruler has gone, the huts have become a city of glass and aluminium, and the nomads stare with bewilderment at foreigners behaving like children presented with a vast empty space and unlimited power to build what they want.226 Dr. Subhi surely does not want to continue a life similar to those of the local nomads David Gilmour has mentioned in his article. He is aware of the power of oil that can bring a vast economic change to the region, for

when he felt regretful or nostalgic for the irrecoverable past. He said to himself, with a challenge, ―It is men who create places and leave their stamp upon them when their minds and hearts catch fire from a great cause. If they seek only water, shade and the easy life, they die off like insects and leave nothing behind.‖227

225 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 24. 226 David Gilmour, ―Desert Ruritania‖, The New York Reviews of Books, March, 1992, n. p. 227 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 18.

83 He thinks his thoughts are justified when he later tries to teach his sons, Kamal and Hamed, both of whom did not like to stay at Mooran for a long time, the ―real‖ meaning of ―homeland‖:

A homeland is not just land or people; a homeland, I have come to see, is wealth. A man settles wherever he prospers, because riches bring him power. Wherever he is, is his homeland. Someday you'll learn this for yourselves!228 Originally coming from Beirut, Lebanon, Dr. Subhi‘s attachment to land differs from those of the natives of Mooran, for, his sense of belongingness has a connection with wealth and he is sure that Mooran will bring them what they need from a ‗home‘land. Moreover, as Mooran was ―not like [their] country and these people‟s values and customs [were] not like‖ theirs, as Dr. Subhi assures his daughter, Nadia, Dr. Subhi‘s role in the novel serves as a means to show the place of women in the society of Mooran.229 In Mooran, people‘s eyes were on women, they were not as modern as the people in their own country. Although this fact made Nadia laugh, women had to avoid men‘s precenses as much as possible there.

The characterization in the novel continues to serve perfectly as the novel develops, when the female character of the Sheikha, Ummi Zahwa, ―a formidable figure in Mooran‖ is presented.230

A woman, but unlike other women: she moved like a specter, coming and going unnoticed by anyone, rather quiet, though in her speech direct and sometimes wounding. Her complexion was the colour of moist earth or early twilight, her eyes like a cows, large and slightly protuberant, and at night as bright as candles. Her nose was long, as hooked as a falcon‘s beak. Her high cheekbones were like little hills in a determinedly watchful and stern face. She was not considered short, despite her bowed old age and her twice shortened walking stick. Her hands were as long as a monkey's, and her feet as broad as a camel‘s hooves.231

228 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 33. 229 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 55. 230 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 64. 231 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 64.

84 Indeed, the royal women of Mooran were different from local ones. They were to be different, for wealth was considered a power to any of the sexes among the people in the Rawadh Palace, and ―she was the most powerful person‖232 there. She was so powerful to the point that she had the right to choose the bride/s for the Prince. At this stage, Abdulrahman Munif shows the changing life style of the inner workings of the Sultan‘s harem. The harem is a hint of how the minds of the rulers shift from serious work to sexual matters, also serving as a serious cultural change. The Sultan‘s passion for women, rather than land results in gossipimg mainly on this matter and not the most important issue of oil.

The already changed neighbourhood of Harran, close to Mooran, is being narrated as belonging to ―no one‖, when Muhammad Eid ―had seen the stones put together and stacked up to become tall buildings, he had seen the streets paved to make passages for men, animal and cars.‖233 Now that everything was new and strange to its inhabitants, the land‘s people had lost their sense of belongingness. The narrative description and characterization throughout the novel conveys the main message of Abdulrahman Munif in that, in every page the reader is aware that the ‗trench‘ or ‗hole‘ drags a society‘s identity and freedom into its darkness. Now the city smelled ―horrid—it smells like corpses‖ to the natives.234

The main character of Dr. Suhbi al-Mahmilji is central to the characterization of the novel to show how a land can be corrupted at its most. The royal city and its royal customs, thanks to him, now join the modern world, namely corrupting itself. Mahmilji is also the one who secretly creates a repressive secret service, appointing Hammad as the head. But he himself is not aware that Hammad will eventually take his place as the real power behind the throne, as he has long before been appointed by the American CIA. Totally engrossed in his quest for financial and political power, the physician, as mentioned in the novel, also neglects the emotional and sexual needs of his wife. Wadad avenges him by maintaining illegal relations with her husband‘s various work partners. This betrayal is also an element of regionalism in that when

232 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 64. 233 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 162. 234 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 164.

85 one neglects one‘s land and watches its corruption it will then swallow one up like a trench.

Eventually, the reader is aware that the real power behind a corrupted society ends up by being its newcomers and its own rulers turning a blind eye to the changes busying themselves with trifle matters. The city, Mooran

once sunk in indolence, introspection and apathy, began to stir itself and change: endless new styles of buildings sprang up and multiplied all over, streets sliced through the city centre and its outskirts.235 Abdulrahman Munif does not have a final resolution to his novel, for he does not think that the problem of oil in these areas is solved. With the changing ruler, the younger brother of the prince, Mooran, still, ―listened expectantly, and waited.‖236 It can be presumed that this sentence, at the end of the novel, implies that there is a long way for Arab people to become strong enough to gain their deserved independence.

Considered a major work of contemporary Arab literature, Abdulrahman Munif‘s The Trench is both an epic novel and an intimate portrait of Arabian life rarely revealed in other contemporary novels. His skills in giving a human face to the Arab world ―remained unchronicled until Abdelrahman Munif published the novel.‖237

235 Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p. 221. 236 Abdelrahman Munif, 1991, p. 554. 237 David Gilmour, ―Desert Ruritania‖, The New York Reviews of Books, March, 1992, n. p.

86 CONCLUSION A comparison of the great late-Victorian writer Thomas Hardy‘s selected novels; Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, and Cities of Salt and The Trench by the well-established Arab writer, Abdulrahman Munif enables the reader to see the way each writer employs the concept of Regionalism in their works. Thomas Hardy utilizes literary regionalism in his novels during the late Victorian period, while Abdulrahman Munif depicts the regional characteristics of the Arabian Peninsula after the arrival of Americans in search of oil. Two different ages reveal the radical changes which affected English and Arabic communities, which in its turn, led to negative social and cultural changes criticized by the writers in their novels. The protest of some characters against these changes definitely reflect the writers‘ perspectives. Thomas Hardy as well as Munif was very upset by the changes brought by industrialisation, occupation and exploitation. For instance, Thomas Hardy knew well the troubles and conflicts of the Victorian era as regards religion, church and science, and witnessed the emergence of the industrial revolution which brought the looms and factories where people became utilitarian. This industrial progress influenced the English society negatively for many reasons: one of them being exploitation of children in black factories. On the other hand, after discovering the oil in the Arabian Peninsula in 1930s, the Gulf society had changed from desert society to urban. Hardy criticizes the negative consequences of the industrial revolution on the natural environment and its inhabitants, whereas Munif vilifies the negative consequences of American exploitation of oil. More specifically, Hardy prefers depicting the rural areas because he was born and raised in a countryside whose memories he had always cherished. Munif's basic region dealt with in his novels is the desert which represents for him the original tribal social norms and the place where the cultural values like honour, courage, generosity and respect for each other are the slogans of the Arab tribes living there before the transformation of the desert into oil region. Thomas Hardy created the indestructible and eternal Egdon Heath as a basic setting for his novel The Return of the Native, and the characters along with their social relations are the reproducers of that place. The social relations between the characters of the novel show that there are certain issues that Egdon Heath's people

87 suffer including anxiety, discomfort, and despair. These matters are reflected in the suicide of Eustacia who tried previously to escape from Egdon Heath but she failed and this displays the influence of the setting on the man. On the other hand, Wessex, a kingdom in southern England, dating back to the invasion of the Saxons in 494 A.D., is the basic location of Far from the Madding Crowd. It is an imaginary English county that Hardy coloured with fine details throughout the course of his writing career, introducing it for the first time in the novel. It is similar to Dorset, where Hardy lived most of his life, but its fictitious nature gave the author freedom to describe the landscape at will. Though fictional, the residents of Wessex, farmers, landowners, labourers, rustics are considered the true representations of people living at the time the novel was published. Hardy's classification of his characters in Far from the Madding Crowd clearly shows us the importance he placed upon the interaction between human life and immediate surroundings, and the role of environment in determining the lives of the characters that inhabit it. Munif's novel Cities of Salt focuses on the Bedouins life style in the desert. The novel's basic region is Wadi al-Uyoun, in which people experience the undesirable social changes occurring in the desert. The locals become miserable by these changes, and are helpless to do anything to preserve their environment. The locals are not even aware of American‘s mission. They are wondering the reasons for their arrival. No one makes an effort to inform them about the newcomers and some locals even take them for devils. The technologically superior Americans, despite their practical competence and good intentions, are depicted in this book ultimately as the real villains, because of their foreignness, utter lack of understanding of the inhabitants' world, and the negative effects of the modernization they have set in motion. The Trench is Munif's second novel under study. Its basic region or setting is Mooran, where the new regime changes people‘s values and lifestyle. Unlike the people mentioned in Cities of Salt, the people in this novel in the valley were happy and they had interconnected social relations, but discovering the oil in their valley turned to be sad because their land was taken from them. In this novel, Munif focused on showing the people's sadness, anguishes and anxieties. This novel also reflects the political and psychological impacts on the region after the exploitation of the land.

88 The main character Dr. Subhi and the Prince collaborate with the new comers ignoring their evil actions. Hardy‘s novels abound with rich symbolic imagery ranging from places to characters, from birds, insects to various objects. They play a great role in enabling a reader to get a deeper insight into understanding of the novels. By contrast, though Munif‘s novels also contain symbolic imagery, including the title of his novels, is not as rich as in Hardy‘s novels. Hardy approaches regionalism from sociological perspectives, while Munif approaches it from sociocultural perspectives. Munif is politically regional whereas Hardy‘s regionalism is more literary fusing the elements of the romantic, realistic and lyrical novel. Hardy‘s love of nature is mainly personal rather than universal. Hardy modifies the genre ―pastoral‖ by rejecting its idealization of nature and rustics. Munif, on the other hand, employing magical realism style shows the corruption of local rulers and the change of eternal values. In his The Trench the writer presents a postmodernist definition of ‗homeland‘ according to which the homeland is not a birthplace anymore but any place which feeds you and makes you rich. The tone of both writers is gloomy and the novels are dark and pessimistic though both writers can be called meliorists in that they had a purpose in their lives and strongly believed that human efforts can change the world for the better. In sum, the similarities and differences in the works of the writers can be summarized as follows: Similarities: 1. Both writers addressed regionalism in their works, though in different ways. 2. Though Munif did not use the word meliorism, both of them were optimistic about the positive impact of their works on the reading public. 3. Hardy as well as Munif saw radical changes and their negative rather than positive consequences for people. Hardy criticized the dire impacts of industrialization on the environment and people. Munif saw and wrote about the devastating American influence on his people‘s lifestyle. 4. Both writers depict the natural setting not for their own sake but in the interrelationship between nature and human beings. In Hardy it is Wessex

89 that he knew well, in Munif it is the Arab Peninsula that undergoes undesirable changes. 5. Both writers use symbolic imagery excessively, though Hardy‘s imagery is richer. Differences: 1. Hardy‘s novels are a blend of realism, naturalism, pastoral, romanticism and tragic, while Munif‘s works are more experimental combining magical realism, modernism and realism with strong emphasis on political elements. 2. Munif was a political activist for the nationalist cause and a widely travelled oil economist, while Hardy was far from the political life of his country.

91 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books:

ABRAMS, M. H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, USA: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. ALBALAWI, M., Disrupting the Desert Scene: The Impact of Oil Discovery in Abdelrahman Munif‟s Cities of Salt, Saudi Arabia: Kent State University Press, 2015. BARTON, J. C., Transatlantic Sensation, UK: Routledge, 2016. BASSNETT, S., Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. BJÖRK, L. A., Psychological Vision and Social Criticism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, Michigan: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987. BLOOM, H., Novelists and Novels, New York: Checkmark Books, 2005. CECIL, D., Hardy the Novelist: and Essay in Criticism, New York: The Bobbs Merril Company, 1956. CUDDON, J. A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. DE LOMBAERDE, P., SÖDERBAUM, F., VAN LANGENHOVE, L., and BAERT, F., The Problem of Comparison in Comparative Regionalism, USA: Researchgate, 2013. DRABBLE, M., The Genius of Thomas Hardy, UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979. DUFFIN, H. C., Thomas Hardy: A Study of the Wessex Novels, the Poems, and The Dynasts, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962. DUTTA, S., Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study towards Women, USA: Springer, 2000. FOOTE, S., Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. GABLER-HOVER, J., and SATTELMEYER R., American History through Literature: 1820-1870, New York: Charles Scribner‘s Sons, 2006. GILLIES, M. A., Modernist Literature: An Introduction, USA: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.

91 GOODMAN, W. R., A History of English Literature, New Delhi, India: Doaba House, 2000. HARDY, T., Far from the Madding Crowd, San Diego: Icon Classics, 2005. HARDY, T., Return of the Native, San Diego: Icon Classics, 2005. HARDY, T., Tess of the d‟Urbervilles, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2007. HARPER, C. G., Hardy Country, Australia: Wentworth Press, 2016. HARVEY, G., The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy, Hove-UK: Psychology Press, 2003. JOHNSON, B., True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of Thomas Hardy‘s Novels, USA: University Press of Florida, 1983. KRAMER, D., Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, USA, Springer, 1979. LAWRENCE, D. H., Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. LEA, H., Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Michigan, Florida: Toucan Press, 1966. LEARY, M. R., and TANGNEY, J. P., Handbook of Self and Identity, New York: Guilford Press, 2012. LEFEBVRE, H., The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1984. LIONEL, J., The Art of Thomas Hardy, Vancouver, Canada: Read Books, 1965. MILLIGATE, M., Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: OUP, 2004. MOSES, M. V., The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. MUNIF, A., Cities of Salt, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. MUNIF, A., The Trench: Volume Two of the Cities of Salt Trilogy, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. MUNIF, A., Writer and exile: Issues and Perspectives on the Arabic Novel, Beirut: Al-Mu‘assasaal-arabiya, 1992. NORTH, P. and TRIPP, H., CultureShock! Saudi Arabia: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette, Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd, 2009. SNELL, K. D. M., The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800-1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

92 The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Fourth Edition, Volume II, New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. THEROUX, P., The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, UK: Penguin, 2011. TOMALIN, C., Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man, UK: Penguin, 2007. WEBSTER, M., Merriem-Webster‟s Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus, Massachusetts: Merriem-Webster Incorporated, 2003. WEINSTEIN, C., The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. WOOD, G., Revolt Against the City, Wisconsin: Clio Press, 1935. WOOLF, V., The Common Reader: Second Series, Vancouver, Canada: Read Books Ltd., 1935. Articles: ABU BAKER, A. M. S., ―The Question of Identity in Abdulrahman Munif‘s When We Left the Bridge‖, Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 1, No. 6, 2010. BABB, H., ―Setting and Theme in Far from the Madding Crowd‖, ELH, The John Hopkins University Press, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1963. CASSIDY, D. M., ―On the Subject of Nativeness: Marsden Hartley and New England Regionalism‖, Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1994. DEB, S., ―The Rise of the Global Novelist‖, New Republic, April: 2017. DHEAB, A. N., and EL MINIAWI, N., ―Abedurrhman Munif "Sharq Al-Mutawast" and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" Comparative Study‖, Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 8, 2016. FERGUSON, T., ―Bonfire Night in Thomas Hardy‘s The Return of the Native‖, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 67, No. 1, 2012. GILMOUR, D., ―Desert Ruritania‖, The New York Reviews of Books, March: 1992. GIORDANO, F. R., ―Eustacia Vye‘s Suicide‖, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 22, No. 4, WINTER: 1980. HAFEZ, S., ―An Arabian Master‖, New Left Review, No. 37, February: 2006. HOLMES, R., ―At Home in his Socks‖, The Guardian, Books, October: 2006.

93 JONES, L., ―George Eliot and Pastoral Tragicomedy in Hardy‘s ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, Studies in Philology, University of North Carolina Press, Vol. 77, No. 4, 1980. MAJEED T., A., ―Abul Rahman Munif; An Arabian Master of Literature‖, IJAR, , Vol. 4, No. 2, June: 2014. NATH, C., ―Regionalism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy‖, A Journal of Humanities & Social Science, Karimganj College, Karimganj, Assam, India, Volume II, Issue III, January: 2014. OGDEN, D., ―Bathsheba‘s Visual Estate: Female Spectatorship in ―Far from the Madding Crowd‖‖, The Journal of Narrative Texhnique, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1993. POSTER, J., ―Secrets and Lives‖, The Guardian, Books, June: 2006. RATCLIFFE, S., ―A Man with Many Sides‖, New Statesman, Culture, July: 2006. ROGERS, K., ―Women in Thomas Hardy‖, The Centenniel Review, Michigan State University Press, 1975. SIDDIQ, M., ―The Contemporary Arabic Novel in Perspective‖, World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 2, 1986. SMART, A., ―Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy‖, The Review of English Studies, Oxford University Press, Vol. 12, No. 47, August: 1961. THEROUX, P., ―Abdelrahman Munif and the Uses of Oil”, Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature, October: 2012. TOMALIN, C., ―At Home with the Wizard‖, The Guardian, Books, September: 2006.

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(22.07.2017). umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/M/moon.html, (15.08.2017). https://english.wisc.edu/rdnixon/files/hidden_lives.pdf, (17.05.2017).

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95 ÖZ GEÇMĠġ

KiĢisel Bilgiler ______:

Adı ve Soyadı : Thamer Yousif Allawi AL_Assafi

Doğum Yeri ve Yılı : Ramadi- Anbar- Iraq -1980

Medeni Hali : Evli

Eğitim Durumu ______:

Lisans Öğrenimi : Irak-Anbar Üniversitesi-1999-2003.

Yüksek Lisans Öğrenimi : Hindistan-Babasaheb Ambedkar Marthwada

Üniversitesi-2011-2013.

Yabancı Dil(ler) ve Düzeyi :

English C2

Arabic C2

Hindu B1

Turkish B1

Bilimsel Yayınlar ve ÇalıĢmalar :

E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Telephone: +905392939005/ +9647809908512

96 CV

Personal Information

Name and Surname: Thamer Yousif Allawi Al-Assafi

Place of Birth: Ramadi- Anbar- Iraq

Date of Birth: March 12, 1980

Education:

High School: 1998-1999. Al-Rumaila Secondary School. Ramadi, Anbar, Iraq

Bachelor: 2009-2003. BA English Language and Literature, College of Education, University of Anbar. Anbar, Iraq

Masters Programme: 2011-2013. M.A English, College of Arts, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marthwada University (BAMU). Aurangabad, India.

Foreign Languages:

English C2

Arabic C2

Hindu B1

Turkish B1

Contact Details:

E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Telephone: +905392939005/ +9647809908512

97