Michel Houellebecq’s Submission and “woman”

Abstract

The novel Submission by the contemporary French author Michel Houellebecq, published in 2015, on the very day of the terrorist attack at Charlie-Hebdo, is a provocative novel just like its author. This dystopian fiction describes the near future, the year 2022 when the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood political party, Mohammed Ben Abbes wins the elections against Marine le Pen. We can read in the novel the political but above all social changes taking place in France. Literary critic Philippe Lançon writes in his article published in Liberation that this novel can be read as an "Islamophobic, Islamophile, misogynist, macho, and even, at times, almost pedophile novel" and he adds that it can also be read as “a sad farce, a provocative entertainment, which allows us to reflect on our fears, justified or not while having fun”. These many attributes that qualify the novel shows how much it lends itself to multiple approaches. The novel was treated within the framework of political and religious approaches and it would be fair to say that neither Islamophobic nor Islamophile circles considered it provocative “entertainment”. The novel provoked many strong reviews. This paper proposes to study the novel within the framework of the attitude of the narrator and the characters concerning the status of woman. Indeed, the fact that the change of political regime leads to the total erasure of women from the public space is one of the major changes that can be seen in France after the elections. Islam as applied by the Muslim Brotherhood considerably reduces women's access to studies and erases them from professional circles by reducing them to their role as wives. We will seek to study the role of women, and the evolution of female characters in the novel by trying to understand if it would be possible to interpret this role as sexism, even to the misogyny of the author.