Woman at Point Zero Literary Elements

Historical fiction

The frame of the novel is set at the Qanatir prison in Cairo. When the point of view of the novel shifts to Firdaus in Chapter Two, the initial setting is the small farming community Firdaus is born into. When Firdaus's parents die, her uncle takes her to Cairo, which is where the remainder of the novel plays out.

Chapters One and Three of the novel are from the psychiatrist’s point of view. Chapter Two is from Firdaus’s perspective. Both sections are told in the first person.

The tone and mood of the psychiatrist’s section of the novel are different from the tone and mood of Firdaus’s section. This difference serves a stylistic and structural purpose because it helps to characterize the psychiatrist and Firdaus.

The tone in the psychiatrist’s section is investigative and urgent. The psychiatrist desperately wants to meet with Firdaus, and the reader feels the rollercoaster of emotions the psychiatrist experiences as Firdaus first refuses, and then agrees, to meet her. Thus, as the reader finishes the psychiatrist’s section of the novel, the mood is anticipatory.

Alternatively, the tone in Firdaus’s section is calm, reflective, and confident. Although Firdaus is telling the psychiatrist and the reader about horrific events, she is a calm and collected storyteller, and she takes pride in the life she led before being incarcerated. Because of the events Firdaus details, the mood for the bulk of the novel is disheartening, until Firdaus breaks free from fear. The mood then shifts to bittersweet triumph.

Part of what makes the Woman at Point Zero so interesting is its universal nature. While Firdaus is our obvious protagonist, she symbolizes any woman who has ever pushed and pulled against the yoke of men. Similarly, while there are many villains throughout the novel, the true antagonist is the male-dominated society that oppresses women. This is personified in characters like Firdaus’s uncle, Sheikh Mahmoud, and Marzouk.

The major conflict in Woman at Point Zero is whether or not Firdaus will find a way to free herself from the misogynistic society that oppresses her and other women.

The climax of the book is when Firdaus kills Marzouk. All through her journey, Firdaus has become increasingly disillusioned with and resentful of men. During her altercation with Marzouk, her feelings reach a boiling point, and she finally acts on those feelings.

"Little did I know that one day I would step through the same gates, not as a psychiatrist, but as a prisoner arrested with 1,035 others under the decree issued by Sadat on 5 September 1981” (Saadawi 17).

This quote, taken from the psychologist’s section of the novel, explicitly foreshadows Saadawi’s own incarceration at the Qanatir prison a few years after she meets Firdaus.

“Firdaus, however, remained a woman apart” ( Saadawi 18).

Throughout the novel, we are given countless examples of how Firdaus is exceptional. In school, she is a star pupil, and when she goes to her industrial job, she’s the only woman who doesn’t try to curry favor with the men in charge. Finally, when Firdaus murders Marzouk, she does what no woman before her has done: strike down her oppressor. With all these examples in front of us, it’s clear that calling Firdaus “a woman apart” is an understatement.

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See the separate "Imagery" section of this ClassicNote.

“I felt like exploding with laughter at the ridiculous stance he was taking, the paradox he personified, his double moral standards. He wanted to take a prostitute to this important personality’s bed, like any common pimp would do, and yet talk in dignified tones of patriotism and moral principles” (Saadawi 182).

Here, Firdaus points out the paradox of a police officer who was trying to blackmail her into having sex with a government officer while simultaneously talking about moral principles.

In grammar, parallelism is the repetition within one or more sentences of similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure. Below is an example of this from the text:

“How to grow crops, how to sell a buffalo poisoned by his enemy before it died, how to exchange his virgin daughter for a dowry when there was still time, how to be quicker than his neighbour in stealing from the fields once the crop was ripe” (Saadawi 35).

"The whole school went out." This is an example of synecdoche, where the school denotes pupils and the staff.

"The word went round." This is an example of metonymy, where the word denotes rumors.

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