The Chronotope of the House and Feminist Matrilinealism in Nada Awar Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home

Authors

Luma Balaa, Lebanese American University

Abstract

This paper studies feminist matrilinealism in Nada Awar Jarrar’s novel Somewhere Home. In this novel the author builds her stories around a house which was inhabited by several generations of female ancestors. Tess Cosslett claims that the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope in matrilineal narratives influences the space and time structures of women’s writing whereby women communicate along two time frames simultaneously: a synchronic, horizontal plane and a diachronic, vertical axis. The synchronic plane refers to the way in which women from different generations unite and bond whereas the diachronic plane goes backward and forward in time. Employing Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope and Tess Cosslett’s two time frames model of feminist matrilineage, this study argues that the chronotope of the house in Somewhere, Home plays a major role in displaying matrilineage and this house clearly manifests the synchronic and diachronic planes: those of female bonding, feminist recovery, and feminist progress.

Author Biography

Dr. Luma Balaa is Associate Professor of English Studies in the Department of English at the Lebanese American University of Beirut. Her research interests include fairytales, Anglophone Lebanese Australian writers, women’s writings, feminism and representations of women in Cinema. She is the author of several international refereed articles.

Recommended Citation

Balaa, Luma (2021) "The Chronotope of the House and Feminist Matrilinealism in Nada Awar Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home," Journal of International Women's Studies: Vol. 22: Iss. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol22/iss1/4