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On "Distant View of a Minaret" Essay examples

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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 …show more content…

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

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