Prostitution as independence from men

This study approaches two novels from a feminist and psychoanalytic point of view. I have examined Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho and Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. I claimed that the two novelists depicted working in prostitution for the characters as liberating and empowering. My research is focusing on how the sex industry is empowering women; through evidence from the plot, I have found that the characters gained financial, emotional and physical liberty from the patriarchal society. Working as prostitutes enabled the two characters to have better understanding of their bodies and sexuality to some degree based on the contexts of the two characters. My paper is important because it takes a different attitude towards interpreting the depiction of working in the sex industry. Usually critics focus on the bad experience that characters went through in the novels while I took more of a positive interpretation.