Women’s clothes in Zahran Al Qasimi’s Hunger of Honey: A semiotic study

Abstract

The study aimed to identify the cultural semiotics of women’s clothes in “Hunger of Honey”, a novel by Omani novelist, Zahran Al Qasimi. Although there are common features of women’s clothes in the Arab world, there are distinct features which characterize each region in the Arab world. Thus, clothes in Sultanate of Oman are characterized by specific cultural features in terms of their cultural components, characteristics, changes and consequences. In fact, these features change from environment to environment in the Omani region. The study, therefore, attempted to examine closely the relationship between clothes and semiotics and sought to identify the cultural features of women’s clothes in the above-mentioned novel and explore the reasons for these features. It also aimed to unravel the cultural components of women’s clothes and the overlap between women’s clothes and their colors in the mountain and desert environments in Sultanate of Oman and to reveal the cultural differences between these two environments. The study adopted the semiotic approach and made use of the analytical description to help provide answers to its questions and realize its objectives. The researchers divided their study into an introduction, three sections and a conclusion. The first section was the relationship between clothes and semiotics, the second section was the semiotics of fabrics and the third section was the semiotics of the burga (covering).