Another Evening at the Club
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Another Evening at the Club
In the short story, “Another Evening at the Club,” Alifa Rifaat explores a male narrow-minded society in which one woman, Samia, awaits her husband, Abboud Bey, to return from the club. Samia has no rights in her marriage or in her daily life. She has to do whatever her husband tells her to do. Rifaat uses the setting, irony, and conflict to convey the idea of womans inferior role.
This story takes place in Egypt during the time of arranged marriages. “It was only a few years ago that she had first laid eyes on him at her fathers house, meeting his gaze that weighed up her beauty and priced it before offering the dowry” (350). This practice of arranged marriages was common, but it gave the women no real rights. It was essentially telling them that they were property. In this story, Samia loses an expensive emerald ring from her husband. They blame the only person that had come into Samias room in the time that she took it off, until the time she realized it was missing, their new young maid, Gazia. They find out later that she didnt take the ring; Samia had dropped it.
The irony in this story is the fact that instead of the maid stealing the ring, Samia had merely dropped it. “By now the whole town knows the servant stole the ring-or would you like me to tell everyone: Look folks, the fact is that the wife got a bit tiddly on a couple sips of beer and the ring took off on its own and hid itself behind the dressing-table? What do you think?” (353). So, instead of telling the truth and being the laughing stock of the town, Abboud Bey decides to just forget about the ring, and let them think it was the servant girl that took the ring.
One of the conflicts in this story is the marriage of Abboud Bey and Samia. Its not a strong marriage mostly because of their age difference. “He bent over and with both hands gently patted her on the cheeks. It was a gesture she had long become used to, a gesture that promised her that this man who was her husband and the father of her child had also taken the place of her father” (354). Samia thought of her husband not only as a husband, but also as her second father. This must have been hard for her, not knowing whether to think of Abboud Bey as a husband or a father.
In this story, there are many conflicts that both Abboud Bey