Un Ego au féminin: Gender and Power in Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche's Histoire de ma vie.

Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche scholars tend to victimize her, underscoring her submission to the patriarchal order, embodied chiefly through her husband Belkacem and the most famous of her sons, the poet Jean Amrouche, under whose instigation she wrote her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie. The purpose of this article is to refute such a reading by arguing that this autobiography challenges, rather than complies with, the patriarchal code. Instead of lamenting her poor luck or accepting her condition as a subaltern, the author seeks various empowering compensations, whether they be her advantageous looks, her education and ease with the French language--a rare asset in her time--or a set of idiosyncratic rhetorical strategies. These strategies include an intensive recourse to the trope of appropriation through the use of the possessive adjective "mon" (my) and verbs expressing agency and strong will. Simultaneously, Amrouche rejects features supposed to be intrinsic in women's writing, such as subjecttivity, modesty, and meekness of tone, displaying instead both pride and assertiveness. Finally, one major technique deployed by this autobiographer is the reversal of the traditional gender schema through feminizing male characters, particularly her husband and her father-in-law, while endowing women like her mother and herself with the "male" traits of courage and both physical and moral resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]