Dickinson’s Poem and Rifaat’s short story both reflect the patriarchal expectations women were expected to meet in their respective times in contemporary society. Though the times for each may have been different, the theme remains the same. Women were expected to shed everything in their lives and let their identities become subsumed in their husbands through marriage. Dickinson speaks to this idea in the first lines of her poem, “She rose to his requirement-dropped the playthings of her life to take the honorable work of woman, and of wife” (Dickinson). This stanza reduces all the innate complexity of the woman’s life to “Playthings” or children’s toys and she only becomes a woman by shedding these things through marriage to her husband.
Rifaat’s story continues this theme when retelling the events leading up to Samia’s marriage to Abboud Bey. Their first meeting is likened to a business transaction between her father and Bey, “It was only a few years ago that she had first laid eyes on him at her father’s house, meeting his gaze that weighed up her beauty and priced it before offering the dowry” (Rifaat 149). Bey assesses her value, makes an offer of sale, and is sold by her father with the form of payment being her dowry. Her father assuages Bey’s concerns about Samia’s secondary school attendance, assuring him that she like the woman in Dickinson’s poem will drop the “playthings of her life” and take up the work of wife, “As from today she’ll be staying at home in readiness for your happy life together, Allah permitting. And at a glance from her father she had hurried off to join her mother in the kitchen” (Rifaat 150). Her education is subsumed into her spousal role.
Though Rifaat and Dickinson come from different periods and cultures, Samia’s plight as a woman in 20th century Egypt is familiar to the woman in Dickinson’s poem. The erasure of the women’s individuality within the role of wife is echoed in both these works of literature through a concurrent theme of patriarchal dominance and feminine submission.
