Spatial relations and the reproduction of gender stereotypes: correspondence subjective world and the objective world in the novel Touba and the Meaning of Night

Spatial relations, as a semiotic layer in discourse studies, play a significant part in reproducing power relations and producing hegemony and authority. Analyzing the spatial relations of the novel's heroine, the present study aims at showing how space signifies and how it becomes marked through gender. House plays an important role in Tooba and the Meaning of Night — the house in the yard of which Tooba is described toward the opening of the story and which encircles her until the end of the story, when the old Tooba dies. The connection of the heroine to this house carries several significations, which this essay clarifies using semiotics of space. The basic hypothesis of this essay is that in this novel the binary opposition of inside/outside is parallel to woman/man, in the sense that interior space is marked by femininity and exterior space by masculinity, and disrupting this parallelism results in disaster. This distinction between the feminine inside and the masculine outside is reinforced to the extent that the mind becomes the innermost spatial layer in which the female characters of the novel live. Moreover, this distinction intensifies the gender-based division of labor and gender clichés in the novel.