In “Distant View of a Minaret” by Alifa Rifaat, a lonely wife describes life with her husband as “a world from which she had been excluded” (Rifaat, 1996, p. 256). While a woman paints a picture of a seemingly mundane afternoon, a minaret viewed in the distance provides the reader with vivid symbols of the underlying resignation of expectation and desire she once had for her marriage and her husband.
The very first paragraph of the story describes the wife looking at her husband through “half-closed eyes” and being only “half-aware of the movements of his body” (Rifaat, 1996, p. 256). While it seems as if the wife is simply depicting waking up from sleep and noticing her husband, immediately upon reading the second paragraph the reader is
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At this very moment the husband, either willfully or inadvertently, turned the wife’s own sexual desire against her. This is clear in that she describes the resulting shame as “an indelible tattoo mark” (Rifaat, 1996, p. 257) that would eventually lead to her sexual and emotional resignation, made evident in that fact that she questioned herself and calling her demands “unreasonable” (Rifaat, 1996, p. 257). The reader is further left with the impression she has cut herself off emotionally from her husband (perhaps to endure the act of being used as a sexual device) when later on during the act of intercourse, she indifferently states that her toenails need to be cut.
It is no surprise then that she would seek emotional fulfillment in her everyday religious activities. She even goes so far as to say that her daily prayers “gave meaning to her life” (Rifaat, 1996, p. 258). In effect, the prayers that she likens to “punctuation marks” and each having a “distinct quality” could very well be a substitute for the kind ‘self-satisfaction’ she had long given up on when describing no longer having the will to “complete the act with herself as she used to do in the first years of marriage” (Rifaat, 1996, p. 257). The manner in which she describes looking forward to praying again could easily be said by someone looking towards seeing their lover, thereby giving this story a painfully sad tone.
By the time the actual minaret is referred to in the
Marriage is a full-time job on its own and people should communicate with each other in order to have a healthy marriage for them to love and appreciate each other so they can grow old together. Most of us know by now that the fairy tale happily ever after stories are full of holes. Carver emphasizes that when there is no communication in the marriage the wife starts to feel unhappy and frustrated with him. The wife’s attitude with her husband suggests that the marriage doesn’t seem to be working for her. Carver states, “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged (38). ” There was unhappiness in the marriage and the narrator and his wife didn’t seem to get along. In other words the
In lines six through nine the speaker says,”She was staring at me with her eyes, her breasts still sturdy, her thigh warming mine.” This sentence shows how the speaker began discovering his love for the first time with her(Harper 6-9). The speaker signifies that the woman is healthy and young when he refers to her still having sturdy breasts. The author uses imagery to represent the connection a person feels when they share a warm sensation of touch. When the speaker realizes she is staring at him he begins to wonder how long she had been staring at him and if she loved him.
T.Ray sits in the house realizing this is where his wife had disappeared to so many years ago. Kidd writes “The thought seemed to awe him. He shook his head and looked around, as if thinking, I bet she sat in this chair. I bet she walked on this rug. His chin quivered slightly, and for the first time it hit me how much he must’ve loved her, how it had split him wide open when she left,” (Kidd 293)
“Interested in your father’s glorious family tree? You aren’t included, it only includes men’s names.” In the film ‘Wadjda’, directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, a girl named Wadjda from the male-dominated culture of Saudi Arabia sees a green bike that she strives her hardest to own. Although could the bike be a metaphor for something deeper? Some may say the bike is nothing more than a plain old bike, but in this essay, I will discuss how and why the green bike symbolises more than a mere green bike. The focus will be on the significance of the bike, why it has been chosen to act as the metaphor, and how/why the director has chosen it to show that Wadjda is subversive.
The man kept going in and out of dream state. With the lack of grammar and Quotations it made some dreams, mainly about how the wife was ‘faithless” and how she hopes for “eternal nothingness” (McCarthy 57). The style made it seem like she was really there but when he awaken from his dreams her realized that it was only a dream. Then he moved on with trying to forgive and forget her. While having the thought that dreaming
Upon realizing just how much his wife’s birthmark bothered him, Aylmer made it his goal to do whatever was necessary to rid Georgiana of her only “imperfection”. While this story is a work of fiction, the way of thinking is anything but fictional. With the gender dynamic in this story in very centered around the man. The man is the one who makes the decisions, and the woman is expected to go along with them. If the man wants something of the wife, she is expected to do everything in her power to satisfy him. The woman, on the other hand, is often heavily pressured into submitting to this kind of unhealthy relationship. Whether she is blinded by love, afraid of what
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi is a graphic novel that provides insight into a young girl living in Iran during the hardship of war. Persepolis takes place during the childhood of Marjane Satrapi. It gives a background of the Islamic Revolution and the war in Iran. Satrapi attempts to guide herself in a corrupted world filled with propaganda. She tries to develop her own morality concerning religion, politics, and humanity. Satrapi was blessed enough to have high class status and parents who had an open mindset about the world around them. Thanks to her slightly alternative lifestyle, she is able to reconstruct gender norms that society has set by depicting the different ways women resist them. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others” by Lila Abu-Lughod is an essay detailing the misconceptions surrounding the veil. Through this essay we can see how colonial feminism, the form of feminism in which western women push for a western way of living on their third world counterparts, has shined a negative light on cultures all around the world - particularly Islamic women. The essay shows how women who don’t conform to American societal structures are labeled as women who urgently require saving. Through this essay one can develop a thorough understanding of the veil itself and the many representations it holds to different entities. Although in Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood Satrapi
One of these incidents occurs when Marjane is in art school. When the students were told that they needed to wear longer headscarves, Satrapi immediately responded that “as a student of art…I need to move freely to be able to draw.” She further questions “why is it that I, as a woman, am expected to feel nothing when watching these men with their clothes sculpted on but they, as men, can get excited by two-inches less of my head scarf?” here Marjane questions the restrictiveness of the veil and comments on the injustice in Muslim society and the gender inequality. The veil represent the repressions and the gender injustices in Iran. By revolting against the veil Marjane is able to protest the repressions. On hearing Marjanes complaint, the school administrators asked Satrapi to design her own veil. Marjane accepts this offer while still in the confines of the veil. Marjane designs the veil to suit the needs of the students and
the narrator reflects on why she too would like to have a wife after a visit with a recently
A veil is an article of clothing that is intended to cover some part of the head, face, or physical feature that may hold some significance. It is especially associated with women and sacred objects. Not only does it conceal a person’s physical appearance, but it contributes to stifling one’s individuality. In Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, Marjane, the main character, lives in Iran and is required, by fear of punishment, to wear a veil that only leaves her face uncovered. The veil becomes an important symbol and throughout the novel, the reader can see the lasting impact the veil has on Satrapi. It begins as something foreign and detestable to young Marjane; a simple piece of clothing that deprived her of her free will,
From a young age, Mrs. Breedlove has struggled to feel beautiful. From a nail through her foot to the judgment she received when she moved north, she has always been put down for who she is. As a young child she impaled her foot with a nail and it “left her with a crooked, archless foot that flopped when she walked” (Morrison 110). The first thing that began the curse of Mrs. Breedlove not being beautiful (besides her skin color), was as a child and got a nail right through her foot. The lack of medical knowledge and care left her with a limp that she was going to have for the rest of her life. From this one injury, she blames the rest of her misfortune in life off of it. She thinks her family does not like her because of it, and blames her foot for her
In the poem “The Wife’s Lament” there is a transfer to a female point of view which was rare during times of a patriarchal society. A theme seen is this poem is exile. The wife who faces exile from her lord later reaches a state of bitter unhappiness. The wife expresses her longing for her husband through use of ubi sunt:
Mariam’s alienation prompted by her mother, father, and husband, in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, reveals the oppression and shame around being a woman in the society of her native Afghanistan. Mariam’s countless, inescapable struggles throughout her life were all regulated by the systematic dehumanization of women in a patriarchal society, which resulted in her living in constant shame and fear. Starting from her birth, she was seen as a bastard because she was conceived out of wedlock, from both her parents, Jalil and Nana, and her society. In her childhood, Mariam is marginalized, by living in a cottage far off from the public eye, because of her father’s fear of humiliation and her mother’s fear of Mariam experiencing the
The summary of this passage is that the woman bound their feet and that was the only way to marry into money.Women are suffering for beauty as a concept for their families and also most of the woman that died and I wonder why will they shave their self.To manipulate them more gently from the bonus because they will break.Women will find away to gained of fame of a sort of forming a bound-feet disco of dancing of troupe which the region.Bound feet and an opium -addict to the husband,the women remnant from another ages.
When the narrator first encounters the girl, his friend's older sister, he can only see her silhouette in the “light from the half-opened door”. This is the beginning of his infatuation with the girl. After his discovery, he is plagued by thoughts of the girl which make his daily obligations seem like “ugly, monotonous, child's play”. He has become blinded by the light. The narrator not only fails to learn the name of his “girl”, he does not realize that his infatuation with a woman considerably older than himself is not appropriate. He relishes in his infatuation, feeling “thankful [he] could see so little” while he thinks of the distant “lamp or lighted window” that represents his girl. The narrator is engulfed by the false light that is his futile love.