University of Tehran Research in Contemporary World Literature 2588-4131 29 2 2024 10 22 A comparative study of Gender Schema Theory in novels And that only the sweet moments last of Virginie Girmaldi and We Will Get Used to It of Zoya Pirzad A comparative study of Gender Schema Theory in novels And that only the sweet moments last of Virginie Girmaldi and We Will Get Used to It of Zoya Pirzad 343 359 99275 10.22059/jor.2023.352934.2372 FA Hadisehalsadat Mousavi department of French Language and Literature Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran 0000-0002-8702-8094 Journal Article 2022 12 28 This article examines the gender role schemas in Virginie Grimaldi’s And That Only the Sweet Moments Last (2020) and Zoya Pirzad’s We Will Get Used to It (2006) based on the theory of gender role schemas by John Stephens. Literature, especially the novel, has a significant role in the formation of mental schemas among its audience, considering that it addresses mostly the young generation. In the above-mentioned novels, these two contemporary authors depict many examples of gender role schemas in their society. The main characters of both novels play the role of middle-aged mothers in their communities. What has raised the necessity of writing the present article is the need for the examination of the differences and similarities of the challenges faced by women and single mothers and how to face them in these two cultures. The main question addressed in this article is what are the most frequent gender schemas in the two novels and have these two authors succeeded in breaking the negative feminine-maternal gender schemas? The analysis of the events, behavior, discourse, and personal and social lives of the characters based on Stephens’s theory of gender role schemas shows that Grimaldi has been more successful in fulfilling the task. She has been able to adjust and modify the negative schemas in the main character by maintaining positive female schemas. Although Pirzad has tried to de-stereotype by attributing several secondary, and sometimes superficial, male schemas to the main characters in her novel, she has not succeeded in breaking the dominant negative schemas of women. This article examines the gender role schemas in Virginie Grimaldi’s And That Only the Sweet Moments Last (2020) and Zoya Pirzad’s We Will Get Used to It (2006) based on the theory of gender role schemas by John Stephens. Literature, especially the novel, has a significant role in the formation of mental schemas among its audience, considering that it addresses mostly the young generation. In the above-mentioned novels, these two contemporary authors depict many examples of gender role schemas in their society. The main characters of both novels play the role of middle-aged mothers in their communities. What has raised the necessity of writing the present article is the need for the examination of the differences and similarities of the challenges faced by women and single mothers and how to face them in these two cultures. The main question addressed in this article is what are the most frequent gender schemas in the two novels and have these two authors succeeded in breaking the negative feminine-maternal gender schemas? The analysis of the events, behavior, discourse, and personal and social lives of the characters based on Stephens’s theory of gender role schemas shows that Grimaldi has been more successful in fulfilling the task. She has been able to adjust and modify the negative schemas in the main character by maintaining positive female schemas. Although Pirzad has tried to de-stereotype by attributing several secondary, and sometimes superficial, male schemas to the main characters in her novel, she has not succeeded in breaking the dominant negative schemas of women. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_99275_a1f5bc78911bac46d07920d8268130e0.pdf