Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures Vol.13, No. 4, 2021, pp 755-773 755 JJMLL Ne * Women of War in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark * Mojgan Abshavi Department of English Language and Literatures, Payame Noor University, Iran Mohammad-Javad Haj’jari* Department of English Language and Literatures, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran Received on: 17-8-2020 Accepted on: 17-12-2020 Abstract Auster’s Man in the Dark includes numerous war stories that altogether contribute to its overall message about the different shape of the world if there were no wars. Most of these war stories are about the miscellaneous effective roles of women during wartime and its aftermath; their contributions to the progress of wars; their victimization as wives and captives; their sufferings as widows and laborers; and their drastic change of identity in accepting new social roles traditionally unachievable. These images of women of war make Man in the Dark a novel about women, although it literally seems not to offer any points about them. This paper is thus to argue that Auster seems to be presenting himself as a pro-feminist in this novel, which is basically about war and what causes war, in highlighting women’s roles during wartime and how their contributions have been unfairly silenced. Keywords: Auster, Man in the Dark, war, women. 1. Introduction Women have inevitably played different roles during wartime in any part of the world. They have played soldiers and resisters fighting on front lines: mothers inspiring their soldier-sons, nurses treating the injured, wives and widows economically substituting their absent or deceased husbands in factories and on farms, workers helping with the production of munitions and war stuff, double agents going on missions for their countries, showgirls entertaining and encouraging their soldiers, wives and mothers looking after their injured men after the war, and, unfortunately, victims to be tortured, raped, and slaughtered. Besides, according to L. Weatherford, roles undertaken by women during wartime, especially 20 th -centuey wars, were unprecedented: women officers, army nurses, wartime congress women, female war artists, female war historians, female war correspondents, female spies, as well as female labor force in aircraft, shipbuilding, munitions, and the electronics industry (2010, xii). However, there exist dark roles that women of war went through, contrary to their victimization in former times: “images of teenage women who smile while abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib” (Oliver 2007, 20) – one can add all the Jihadi women who attended ISIS and similar terrorist groups.  2021 JJMLL Publishers/Yarmouk University. All Rights Reserved, * Doi: https://doi.org/ 10.47012/jjmll.13.4.9 * Corresponding Author: hajjari.mohammad@razi.ac.ir