Revival of Fallen Women in Coelho’s The Witch of Portobello

The research article aims to explore the attempt of the so-called ‘fallen women’, the socially excluded women, to revive their status in Paulo Coelho’s novel, The Witch of Portobello. The principal objective of this research is to analyze how Athena, the protagonist of the novel, exposes the female face of God in a male-dominated society, and to investigate how Athena’s relentless struggle throughout her life paves the way for rebuilding the female identity. In addition to the close reading of the text, The Witch of, through the explorative, analytical method, the research tool used to conduct this research is feminist criticism, within the conceptual frameworks of such revolutionary French feminists as Sheila Ruth, Luce Irigary and so forth. The working hypothesis is that Athena practices witchcraft to express the outrage of the whole women community who have been bearing the repression from centuries. She becomes able to prove that women are not witches but sources of creation, and hence they are equivalent to god. The chief finding is that the portrayal of Athena’s character and her struggle in The Witch of Portobello can be taken as a female’s effort to create equal status in patriarchal society avoiding the tag of witch. It is expected that researchers willing to explore Coelho further from feminist or other perspectives can take the paper as a useful reference.