ABSTRACT. Hizya by Maïssa Bey: Bovaristic Readings of Algerian Society. The novel Hizya by Maïssa Bey, published in 2015, allows us to revisit the theme of Bovarism. In this article we aim to investigate the causes and forms that would justify the use of this term by the female and male characters of this novel, who live in an Algerian society whose landmarks are ancestral. Analyses according to the Bovaristic grid (Gaultier) lead us to highlight the discrepancy between exterior and interior, real and literary imagination, individual and family, individual and society. Different forms of bovarism are investigated: literary, which will allow us to study the relationship between the hypotext of the Algerian poet Mohamed Ben Guittoun (where the eponymous heroine lives a love story suspended by death) and the hypertext in prose by Maïssa Bey (where the young woman investigates possible or impossible love); sentimental, based on the gap between love (desire and pleasure) and freedom or conformity (to archaic rules); social, which will consider the relationship between love-marriage-family-society; history, which will draw a parallel between the ideals of the Independence with the disappointing decades that followed it. By extrapolating the Flaubertian concept, we wanted to design a tool capable of seeing both the complexity of characters and situations, as well as textual and ideational coherence.

Keywords: Hizya, Maïssa Bey, Bovarism, intertextuality, Algerian society.