The current study attempts to demonstrate transformation and change in the conditions of oppression of women within the patriarchal society under the influence of modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. On the basis of a comparative reading of the two novels, namely F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Zuqaq al-Midaq (1947) [Midaq Alley (1966)], the study intends to compare and contrast women’s experience in both Eastern and Western societyfollowing the two world wars. Resistance against patriarchal society was one of the most significant issues confronted with different female perceptions. Women from varied social class backgrounds, in western and eastern society, embraced the dominant modernist discourse that challenged the hegemony of patriarchal ideologies about women’s role in society. This theme is evident in the literature and is reflected in the narrative accounts of this period. F. Scott Fitzgerald, as an American author, in The Great Gatsby portrays the conflict of poor and rich woman within the new free spirit of the modern age. This conflict ends in betray and death. Likewise, Naguib Mahfouz, as an Egyptian author, shows in Midaq Alley woman's materialistic desire and its negative effects on her mental and spiritual conceptions. He portrays the modern woman in her endless pursuit of materialistic desires that ends in loss and chaos. To fulfill this aim, the present study benefits from the American school of comparative literature (especially theories of Wellek and Abood) as the theoretical framework through which these similarities and differences would be investigated. With the application of Simone De Beauvoir and Judith Lorber’s feminist theories as paradigms of western feminism and those of Nawal El Saadawi and Qasim Amin’s as paradigms of Arab feminism, the study reveals the impact of the economic and social status of women upon woman’s oppression as well.

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