On Distant View of a Minaret Essay -- essays research papers

In â€Å"Distant View of a Minaret† by Alifa Rifaat, a lonely wife describes life with her husband as â€Å"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 â€Å"half-closed eyes† and being only â€Å"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 made aware that the husband and wife are actually having sex. The immediate impression that the reader gets is that this woman is not only not having her needs met and has obviously resigned herself to this type of encounter with her husband by the offhand way she talks about noticing a spider’s web on the ceiling. The bleak tone of this story takes a particularly sad and disturbing tinge when the wife illustrates a scene from early on in her marriage where she tries to get her husband to satisfy her desire and provide her with mutual satisfaction, only to have him rebuke and reprimand her. In fact, the husband responds in such a particularly brusque and hysterical manner that the reader can see how traumatized the wife would have been at ...