Abstract

Feminist existentialism merged the tenets of existentialism and feminism, which Simon de Beauvoir adopted and incorporated into her book, The Second Sex. (1952). This study aims to analyze Nawal El Saadawi’s novel, Woman at Point Zero, (1983) in light of Simone de Beauvoir’s theory that holds women to be Emancipated and Transcendent. El Saadawi is known to be controversial as a feminist who is committed to upholding women’s rights. Her literary works have crossed genre boundaries while adhering to her main theme of exposing the oppressive patriarchal power in Arab society. She has been able to shed light on the traumatic reality that Arab women endure. Woman at Point Zero is one of El Saadawi’s dark and heartbreaking novels throughout human history. She attempts to bring to attention the suffering that women experience as a result of patriarchy, the male dominance. It describes the suffering of a woman named Firdaus, from her birth through her life and on to her unfair death. She calls for the rejection of the gender norms that are imposed and upheld by patriarchal authority in order to address the issue that women in patriarchal societies face and, in addition, liberate women from all forms of oppression, whether from her husband, her father, society, or government. El Saadawi paves the road for the liberation of women and the restoration of their rights to accomplish financial independence to become transcendent and emancipated women. Employing the content analysis approach, the researcher concludes that the novel fulfills De Beauvoir’s theory in her book The Second Sex.