While melancholia has been associated in both European and Arab cultural traditions with the elevated and creative intellect of men, its equivalent in women has been associated with hysteria or morbid bodily desires. In The Gendering of Melancholia, Juliana Schiesari argues that while male melancholy is a "privileged state of inspired genius," women's melancholy is always "expressed by less flattering allusions to widow's weeds, inarticulate weeping, and other signs of ritualistic (but intellectually and artistically unaccredited) mourning" (14). Melancholy is divided along gender lines into a positive experience for men and a negative one for women, and so while women do submit to the same melancholy as men, they do not seem to be worthy of its potential philosophical wherewithal. The purpose of this paper is to show the ways in which Maghrebian women writers and artists deconstruct the exclusively male tradition of melancholy and reclaim for creative and productive purposes the discredited tradition of female melancholy. This is not however a mere corrective but a rather radical project of asserting what might be called "deliberative female agency" and of associating it with the agentive potencies of melancholia. I locate this "female melancholia" in the works of several women filmmakers (e.g., Moufida Taltli, Nadia Fares, Selma Baccar, Raja Amari, etc.) and novelists (e.g., Le la Abouze d, Leila Sebbar, Malika Mokeddem, etc.), but this paper will focus only on Assia Djebar's novel "So Vast the Prison" (Vaste est la prison) and Ahlam Mosteghanemi's debut novel "Memory in the Flesh" (Dhakirat al-Jasad). While Djebar and Mostaghanemi differ enormously (not least because the former writes in French while the latter in Arabic), they have both been engaged in re-narrating the nation and in re-claiming the female voices that the male narrative of Algerian nationhood has assimilated beyond recognition.