‘I’m paying for it with my flesh and blood’: cultural memory and the discursive construction of Arab female subjectivity in Midaq Alley

This study examines the discursive construction of female subjectivity in Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley through Hamida’s linguistic and interactional practices. Adopting a qualitative literary discourse-analytic design, the study integrates sociopragmatics with feminist discourse analysis, cultural memory and narrative analysis. Selected contextually complete passages are examined for speech acts, politeness, stance, evaluation, directness, interpersonal positioning and culturally meaningful representations across the narrative stages of orientation, complication and resolution. The findings show that Hamida’s subjectivity is neither stable nor a linear progression from oppression to liberation. Her discourse moves from direct resistance and challenges to authority, through negotiation of economic aspiration, social visibility and relational dependence, toward emotional vulnerability, embodiment and retrospective reflection. Cultural memory functions as a contextual repertoire of meanings that Hamida negotiates rather than passively inherits. The study contributes a context-sensitive account of literary female subjectivity as relational, contingent, historically situated and discursively negotiated.