Ghada Samman's Farewell, Damascus (2017) has attracted scholarly attention primarily for its political critique, narrative experimentation, and engagement with transnational feminist concerns. However, existing scholarship has yet to examine the novel through a sustained philosophical lens, specifically the existential feminist framework of Simone de Beauvoir. This gap is significant: reducing Zain's rebellion to social resistance alone overlooks the deeper existential dimensions of her struggle for selfhood, identity, and autonomous subjectivity. This study addresses that gap by examining the representation of rebellion and female agency in Farewell, Damascus through de Beauvoir's concepts of the Other, immanence, and transcendence. Using qualitative close textual analysis, the research investigates how patriarchal structures are constructed and challenged through the protagonist Zain's experiences across three central domains: marriage, motherhood, and intellectual expression. Drawing on de Beauvoir's argument that patriarchal society confines women to immanence by constructing them as the Other, beings defined in relation to men rather than as autonomous subjects. The study interprets Zain's divorce, rejection of compulsory motherhood, and engagement in clandestine writing as existential strategies of self-definition rather than mere acts of social defiance. The findings demonstrate that rebellion in the novel operates simultaneously as social resistance and as a philosophical process of subject formation, a sustained movement from imposed Otherness toward self-defined transcendence. The study concludes that Farewell, Damascus articulates a model of feminist resistance in which intellectual autonomy and self-determination serve as the primary means of confronting patriarchal authority, and argues that de Beauvoir's framework, while developed in a Western context, retains significant analytical power when applied to Arab literary and socio-cultural settings.

Keywords: rebellion; societal norms; feminist theory; patriarchal oppression

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