The Symbolism of Personification and the Representation of Women in Khaldologya by Saad Saeed and Dream of the Spiders by Sherzad Hassan: A Comparative Semiotic Study

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the symbolism of personification and representations of women in Saad Saeed's novel Khaldologya and Sherzad Hassan's Dream of the Spiders, revealing how female representations were reshaped through nonhuman symbolic figures within the narrative structure. It adopted a comparative semiotic approach and used the two novels as material for analysis. Semiotic tools were employed to interpret animal symbols and analyze narrative space, semantic relationships, and the formation of gender discourse, thereby tracing the symbolic functions of personification at spatial, intellectual, and emotional levels. The results showed that Saad Saeed constructed the image of women through a multifaceted symbolic system based on diverse animal masks, expanding the semantic fields associated with protection, dominance, cunning, and symbolic revenge. By contrast, Sherzad Hassan concentrated the feminine symbol in one central sign, the spider, which embodied the tension between feminine power and masculine centrality and the mechanisms of containment and domination within dreamlike and familial spaces. The study also demonstrated that the animal transcended its descriptive function to become a semiotic and ideological medium that reconstructed the relationship between women and the other, questioned patriarchal structures, and redistributed power within the text. Its contribution lies in a comparative semiotic reading that highlights different mechanisms for constructing feminine symbolism in Arabic and Kurdish novels and shows how personification developed from a rhetorical device into an active semiotic structure representing women as active subjects within narrative discourse.