Book Report

Search for Identity
Nawal El Saadawi’s novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, tells the story of a woman going against the restrictions and limitations of her family and society. She is a youngEgyptian woman that decides to study medicine and she becomes the only woman in a class of men. Her encounters with the people around her strengthen her desire to discover her true identity. She comes tosee that men are not the superior gender as her mother had taught her and that books science cannot possible explain everything about humans and the world. She discovers she cannot be completelysatisfied with her life having only knowledge and strengthening her mind. After her brief and unhappy marriage, she focuses completely in her work and becomes a successful physician. She also becomesmindful of the injustice towards women and hypocrisy in society. Then finally she finds fulfillment and at last in unexpected way. She comes to discover the only way that she can be satisfied in her lifeis through her relationships with others. The process of redefining how she sees herself and her profession was long and difficult, but she came out triumphant in the end.
In the novel it talksabout how the narrator grew up in a traditional Egyptian family and was raised to feel inferior to all males and to look forward only to a life of domestic servitude. The narrator rebels against herfamily's way of thinking. She works hard in school and eventually becomes a very successful doctor, ultimately turning her back on the rigidly anti-feminist society in which she lives. Throughout herlife, she struggles with her identity, at first hating her female body and shutting out everyone around her, but ultimately coming to know and love herself.
Through reading the novel we are learningthe narrator's inner life and experiencing her memories as they pour out of her. It showed how Egypt was even worse for women in the 1950's than it is now. What was interesting to me was the medical...