The Image of the Father in Amel Mokhtar’s The Rocking Chair: A Sociological Reading

Abstract

This study examines the representation of the father in Amel Mokhtar’s The Rocking Chair (2002) from a sociological perspective, treating the father figure as a socio-textual construct that reflects transformations in paternal authority within contemporary Arab society. Drawing on the sociology of fatherhood, habitus, symbolic violence, and Kandiyoti’s concept of the “patriarchal bargain,” the study investigates how paternal authority oscillates between the power inherited from the past and its apparent decline in the present. The analysis focuses on the gradual transformation of the father from a direct source of authority into a spectral presence whose influence persists through silence, memory, and imagination. The findings demonstrate that the novel does not represent paternal authority as simply collapsing or disappearing. Instead, it is reconfigured into an indirect form of power that continues to shape the daughter’s consciousness even after the father’s death. Her resistance consequently remains incomplete, oscillating between criticism of paternal authority and acknowledgment of the father’s positive influence. Through the central metaphor of the rocking chair, the novel constructs a complex father figure that resists binary moral judgment, presenting death not as the termination of paternal power but as its continuation in a transformed, spectral form.