Negotiation of Female Identity in Paris for One and Other Stories by Jojo Moyes

Abstract

Female identity in contemporary women’s fiction is often examined through representation or final character outcomes, leaving the process that connects social construction, narrative disruption, and agency insufficiently explained. This study investigates how female identities are initially constructed, how they are negotiated, and what meanings emerge from those negotiations in Jojo Moyes’s Paris for One and Other Stories. Using a qualitative interpretive approach, the study combines close reading, purposive textual selection, within-story analysis, and cross-story comparison through Simone de Beauvoir’s existential feminism. The findings show that female identities are initially stabilized through relational labelling, self-silencing, domestic and caregiving responsibilities, material limitations, bodily judgment, and professional misrecognition. The characters negotiate these identities through spatial movement, refusal, verbal articulation, relational repositioning, self-fashioning, mediated performance, professional strategy, and improvisation. These processes do not produce uniform or complete liberation. Instead, the collection represents female identity as situated, relational, and unfinished becoming, in which agency may take the form of departure, reflective recommitment, self-assertion, or the reinterpretation of care. The study contributes a process-oriented Beauvoirian framework that links social sedimentation, disruption, negotiation, and situated freedom beyond binary readings of oppression and empowerment