Mhani Alaoui as a mythmaker: a psychoanalytical archetypal and feminist revisionist reading of Dreams of Maryam Tair

The study aims at examining the meanings of myths in Mhani Alaoui’s Dreams of Maryam Tair: Blue Boots and Orange Blossoms. Through the theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis and feminism, the study explores how myths operate as narratives and symbolic structures that represent female power, independence and rebellion. This research seeks to offer a new perspective to the novel by analyzing myths through combining psychoanalytic archetypal theory and feminist revisionist mythography. Drawing on Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious and archetypes, the study exposes how myths express repressed desires, collective memory, collective unconscious, and archetypes. It attempts to employ Freudian analysis of myths and the way they express repressed individual unconscious wishes, feelings and conflicts. More specifically, the study analyzes the novel through the lens of feminist revisionist mythography, which questions patriarchal mythical narratives, exposes gender bias, and rewrites female mythical figures as active and powerful. Through a close textual analysis of four myths; the myth of Sheherazade, the myth of Adam and Lilith, the myth of Zohra, and the myth of Maryam, the study exposes how myth functions as a mechanism for expressing individual and collective unconscious and a tool for reclaiming female power, resistance, self-assertion and solidarity.