This thesis investigates various forms of women's resistance to male
domination in Kuwaiti society, as represented in Kuwaiti women's fiction. Two short
stories: Hayfa' Hashim's "al-Intiqam al-rahtb" (1953) and Layla al-'Uthman's "Min
milaff imra'a" (1979), and three novels: al-'Uthman's Wasmiyya takhruj min al-bahr
(1986), Tayyiba al-Ibrahlm's Mudhakkirat khadim (1995), and Fawziyya S. al-Salim's Muzun (2000) are closely analysed, drawing from Marxist-feminist literary
criticism. I argue that these texts portray their respective heroines, representing the
pre-oil generations of Kuwaiti women - born before or in the first half of the
twentieth century - as resistant and/or revolutionary figures, contrary to the common
notion of their stereotypical passivity and submissiveness. In view of the fact that
these texts, as well as some others that are not represented here, form a minority
among Kuwaiti women's fiction, they are here considered as 'feminist revolutionary'
texts.Part One introduces Kuwait and its people, with special reference to the
development of Kuwaiti fiction (Chapter One), and the Kuwaiti female literary
tradition (Chapter Two). Part Two (Chapters Three through Six) demonstrates how
the Kuwaiti patriarchal tradition has affected, and continues to affect, race, class and
gender relations in Kuwait, in a way that is discriminatory against and oppressive to
women. An example of this is found in the sex-related concept of sharaf or fadiha
(social honour or dishonour) - a-common-denominator ideology which each of the
texts seeks to reflect and deconstruct. Exploring the agency which each of the
authors has constructed for her heroine's defiance, evasion, or subversion of
patriarchal authority, this study asserts that some pre-oil Kuwaiti women have been
actively resistant to male domination, and that they have worked for social change
