Self-Love and gender: A Feminist Study of The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Through her novel The Forty Rules of Love Elif Shafak brings forward the concepts of Self-Love and Gender and how one’s gender plays a crucial role in determining one’s self-worth as a person. This qualitative research critically explores how gender is a significant factor that plays a pivotal role in the understanding of the concept of self-love.

Women are conditioned to live through restrictions and deprivation throughout their lives. These include restrictions placed on their ambitions, choice of clothes, choice of partners, reproductive rights, conduct in public, etc. Women are always expected to make compromises at every stage of their lives. Their social conditioning has tuned them to be always at the giving end to the extent that the concept of self-love is something that eludes them.

Shafak, through her novel, traces the discontented life led by women across the globe from different time periods and different strata of society. Ella, the protagonist of the novel despite being a dutiful wife and a mother remains dissatisfied and struggles with her identity and value as an individual. The author through various female characters in the novel, from the protagonist Ella, a modern Jewish American wife to Kerra, Rumi’s wife to the prostitute Desert Rose highlights the need to redefine gender roles based on individual happiness that stems from selflove.

This research paper through tracing women’s life from the 13th century to the present times is a humble attempt at addressing the women’s rights to be treated as equals and find their footing in the society.

Keywords: gender, deprivation, social conditioning, restrictions, society, self-love, identity.