Abortion and the single woman as literary tropes in the works of Amos Oz
1 With few exceptions, Israeli literary criticism since the country’s establishment in 1948 has been concerned with the examining of the Zionist enterprise, nation and state building issues and the Arab Israeli conflict (Shaked, Megged). As a result, feminist revisions and enquiry into gender constructions in the Israeli canon have been noticeably missing. However, this paucity of gender research has thankfully changed over the last decade, with several scholars opening up this rich, diverse and exciting area.
2 In the manner of wider sociological trends, Israeli fiction has turned away from the state generation’s predominant message of ideals and ideology, away from the parochial motif of the struggle between the individual and the state. After half a century, important new voices and variants are being heard, voices that do not sit within the exclusive domain of the modernist Zionist version and are not influenced by traditional canonical modes of expression and concerns. In many ways, the disassociation from the customary prisms of the literary establishment has triggered a dialectic pattern whose undercurrents are formatively shaking up the traditional Israeli identity developed by the diegesis of the mainstream writers (Bartana, Bezherano, Moked, Shamir).
3 In the introduction to The New Feminist Criticism we read: "Whether concerned with the literary representation of sexual difference, with the ways that literary genres have been shaped by masculine or feminine values [...] feminist criticism has established gender as a fundamental category of literary analysis” (Showalter, 1985: 3). Intriguingly and lamentably, however, the fiction of Israel’s greatest living author and two time Nobel Prize nominee Amos Oz has been relatively shielded from the piercing eye of feminist discussion and from the ongoing dialogue between literature and gender hermeneutics. Despite the critical surfeit regarding his letters, comparatively speaking, feminist reappraisal of Oz’s canon is still in its embryonic stage.
4 This article, examines the motifs of abortion and the single woman in the Oz corpus. It has been informed by a methodological thematic feminist approach to re-examine several of the Amos Oz texts. At heart, the locus of this examination has been to re-evaluate the author's narratives through feminist lenses, to predominantly re-enter its fictional dimensions and strategies with the particular objective aim of uncovering misogynous presumptions and distorted images of women. In the questions raised herein we have attempted to deconstruct patriarchal ideologies and their commensurate forms of ideas, values and syntax that for so long have served to transfer cultural and social antifeminist representations of women into textual discourse.
5 Our primary concern has been to become a 'resisting reader', thereby adopting an oppositional reading stance which on the one hand encourages interpreting against the grain of fabricated truisms, and on the other, inevitably leads to the exposing of deforming stereotypes and oppressing misrepresentations that permeate the author's constructions of female characters. In other words, we have engaged in unveiling the beliefs and implicit assumptions that determine the delineation of the female, as well as the underlying premises that disturbingly identify womanliness with an array of sexist attitudes that offensively degrade its female psyche and sexuality.