WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST: MINIMAL JOURNEYS AND THEIR FRAMES IN THE

"THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS", "THE MARK ON THE WALL" AND "THE MAN WITH
THE BUTTONS"
Author(s): P. T. Whelan
Source: The Comparatist , MAY 1994, Vol. 18 (MAY 1994), pp. 150-163
Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44366872

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 WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST :
MINIMAL JOURNEYS AND THEIR FRAMES IN THE
THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS , 'THE MARK ON THE
WALL" AND "THE MAN WITH THE BUTTONS"

P. T. Whelan

Though tradition tends to reserve the quest for male heroes, there
have always been female questers. Indeed, the first quest in literary
history, extant on a series of clay tablets dating from the early second
millennium BC, is that of a goddess.1 After that date patriarchal
societies by and large relegated the woman's quest to the oral folk tale,
reserving to women in literature the domain of the home, a world
bounded by walls and by doors that seem to be closed most of the time.
Yet world literature features female characters who, though house-
bound, engage in quests as inspiring as those of their male counter-
parts. My purpose here is to establish the domestic quest among the
types of quest that scholarship already acknowledges, and to explore
three examples of women's adventure within the limits of the home.
As a rule, the historical situation of the female hero is that de-
scribed by Dana Heller in The Feminization of Quest Romance ; she
suggests that prior to the present century female heroes (as well as
heroines) "remain entrapped by social restrictions and definitions of
female 'goodness' that demand their passivity, submission, and obedi-
ence" (6), even when they are able to leave the house. How can such
women engage in quests?
Of course, though all quests involve a journey, the journey need not
be arduous or unusual. And a quest undertaken in a dream or a vision
entails no physical movement at all. In the nineteenth century, the Ro-
mantic movement suggested opportunities for the housebound quester.
Heller cites Harold Bloom's essay, "The Internalization of Quest
Romance," for drawing attention to a reorientation of quest literature:
"Romantic internalization confirmed that the individual mind could be
as vast and challenging as the world; it, too, contained its own antago-
nists and its own courageous heroes" (Heller 5). The domestic quest as
I propose to define it, however, is not merely a version of the internal-
ized quest, for it essentially entails a protagonist who is confined not
within the mind but within the home. The domestic quest is under-
taken in domestic surroundings by a hero who contends on her way
with the difficulties of domestic life. In each of my three examples
there is a journey in prospect which, though physical, is so narrowly
circumscribed as to fit within the compass of each woman's own form
of seclusion. And in each the enclosure of domesticity has its analog in
a literary frame surrounding the woman's story.

Hailed by Fadwa Malti-Douglas as "one of the most powerful

narratives in world literature" (11), the opening of the Thousand and

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 THE COMPAHATIST

One Nights2 is also one of the most familiar of frame stories. However,
the versions most familiar to us are apt to omit certain interesting
episodes. Briefly, two Eastern sultans, brothers, rule neighboring
kingdoms. Shahzaman, the younger, is about to set off to visit Shah-
rayar, the elder, when he discovers his wife in the arms of a scullion.
Enraged, he slays them both and arrives at his brother's palace deeply
depressed. His depression lifts, however, when he learns that half of his
brother's slave girls are really men in disguise, and that they only wait
for their sultan's back to be turned to begin an orgy with the other half.
The Sultan's wife is the instigator, and has her own athletic lover who
leaps to and fro over the palace wall. Naturally, Shahzaman is im-
mensely heartened.
Shahrayar, while he has considerately refrained from mentioning
Shahzaman's depression, is overcome with curiosity now that the latter
is suddenly more cheerful, and Shahzaman reluctantly tells him why
he was depressed. Shahrayar, "greatly amazed at the deceit of women,"
offers his opinion that what happened to his brother "has never hap-
pened to anyone else" (7). Whereupon, Shahzaman tells him about his
own household.
The two sultans then decide to wander incognito to see if they can
find anyone in a worse case than themselves. The next day they are
frightened by the sight of a great black pillar emerging from the sea,
and run and hide up a tree. The pillar turns into an afrit, carrying a
glass chest with four steel locks, out of which he takes a beautiful
woman. "Mistress of all noble women," says the afrit, "you whom I
carried away on your wedding night, I would like to sleep a little" (9).
He lays his head on the woman's lap and begins to snore. Looking up,
the woman spies the two sultans and insists they come down to her.
"They motion [...] to her, saying, 'This sleeping demon is the enemy of
mankind. For God's sake leave us alone.'" But she threatens that
unless they come down and have sex with her she will wake the afr
and have them killed. Naturally, they comply. When she has had he
way with them she takes their rings, and adds them to her collection,
which now numbers a hundred:

A hundred men have known me under the very horns of this filthy,
monstrous cuckold, who has imprisoned me in this chest, locked it
with four locks, and kept me in the middle of this raging, roaring sea.
He has guarded me and tried to keep me pure and chaste, not realizing
that . . . when a woman desires something, no one can stop her. (9-10)

"Great is women's cunning!" quote the Sultans from the Koran.3

They take the point that since even the fantastic precautions of the
afrit have failed to keep the woman from cuckolding him, the whole
notion of a faithful wife is no more than a delusion. The two return to
the city, and Shahrayar makes his notorious vow to marry for one night
only and kill his bride the next morning.
After the sultan's ogrish way of life has continued for some time,
the Vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, a young woman of learning, wisdom,
and refinement, asks her father to offer her to the king in marriage.

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 WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST

There can be no doubt that Shahrazad is on a quest. She confides her

aim to her sister, Dinarzad, who is to be her accomplice: "I will begin
to tell a story, and it will cause the king to stop his practice, save
myself, and deliver the people" (16). The Sultan's palace is thus an
analog of the Labyrinth, Bluebeard's castle, and all the other minor
Infernos of fairy tale and legend, and by the same token an analog of
the mythic Underworlds to which Orpheus, Herakles and Jesus also
descend on missions of rescue.
Naturally her father is reluctant, but she is very firm with him
and eventually he does as she tells him. The cycle of embedded tales
begins on her wedding night as Shahrazad, having satisfied the sultan's
body, proceeds to engross his mind.4
Enclosure is thus a leitmotif in the Thousand and One Nights even
before the embedded stories begin. Shahrazad's quest-journey is under-
taken within the social norm of female seclusion; she takes the one
journey traditionally undertaken by all women under any patriarchy:
she leaves her father's house and goes to her husband's. We never see
her out of doors, and the heroic story-telling takes place within the
inmost sanctum, the room within rooms within walls within walls, the
sultan's bed-chamber. Embedding (no pun in Arabic) and framing are
metaphors for, perhaps even a natural expression of, a way of life.
Female seclusion/enclosure is of course carried ad absurdum in the
episode of the afrit and the woman in the glass chest. It is not inciden-
tal that Shahrayar learns entirely the wrong lesson from this parable.
He concludes that the perfidy of women is incorrigible. The reader
might prefer to note that the episode is a bathetic and very irreverent
caricature of patriarchal marriage: a woman is taken against her
wishes and kept by a male in a box from which he removes her only in
order to . . . lay his head in her lap and snore! A less illogical conclu-
sion might be that the more atrociously a woman is oppressed, the less
likely she is to respect the desires of her oppressor, and that locking a
woman up and expecting her to keep faith are mutually contradictory.
Shahrazad proceeds to educate the Sultan, her husband, over the
course of many nights, not merely by showing him that a relationship
with an intelligent and well-disposed woman is worth preserving for its
entertainment value, but, we trust, by showing him the error of his
ways. The stories of the Thousand and One Nights deal with arbitrari-
ness, injustice, tyranny, and cruelty, with the exploits of brave and
brilhant women as well as treacherous ones, with women as victims of
male incompetence and cowardice, with women who exercise competent-
ly the male prerogatives of rule and the dispensing of justice. Reflex-
ively, some tales deal with the power of stories to divert anger and
preserve the life of the teller.5 Many of the tales take on new resonance
and meaning from the reader's awareness of the framing fiction. In
their turn, as David Lodge has noted of frame stories in general, the
embedded tales make the frame seem closer to the reality of our own
lives.6 Though the frame story is certainly no more realistic than those
it encloses, Shahrazad's heroism seems closer to us, indeed, leaps out
towards us as a representation of the height to which a real woman
may aspire.

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 THZ COMPAKATIST

Years pass in storytelling, and each night the Sultan decides to

spare his wife for one more night. But finally, when presented with his
growing family, Shahrayar decides to release Shahrazad from the
threat of death and formally to abandon the abominable custom from
which Shahrazad set out to deliver the people. At the end of Gallanďs
edition, the Sultan makes the following pronouncement: "I wish you to
be considered the liberator of all the girls who would otherwise have
been sacrificed to my just resentment" (482). Very handsomely spoken,
I'm sure, and perhaps as much as we can expect from a Sultan.
Certainly the Sultan would be as foolish still to believe that all women
are corrupt as to cling to his earlier conviction that no husband before
Shahzaman had ever been deceived by an adulterous wife. Were he a
little more intelligent he might say again, "Great is woman's cunning!"
noting how Shahrazad has rehabilitated the word kayd by using hers
to such excellent purpose.
The work of redemption is done, and Shahrayar has at least
learned what a family is and something of what a woman can be. And
because she never ceases to operate within the enclosure that en-
compasses women in her society, Shahrazad serves as an example of
heroism calculated to appeal both to men and women. Shahrazad
remains within the enclosure of the harem, the frame around the
frame, whose textual analog I have never seen translated fully. In
Muhsin Mahdi's scholarly edition of the Nights, a foreword precedes the
frame story. The foreword is addressed to "my lords and noble gentle-
men," and every paragraph of the frame story is preceded by "qala al-
râwi" (the [male] story-teller said . . . ), "qala sāhib al-ta'rikh" (he
whose story it was said . . . ) or some such phrase, whose gender, in
conjunction with the foreword, conjures up the presence of a male story-
teller recounting Shahrazaďs tales to a male audience.8 She has sub-
verted only tyranny, leaving patriarchy enlightened, but intact.

II

The story I would like to explore next begins and ends, I suggest,
like a parody of a medieval quest story. Judith Davidoff has written
that the "framing fiction + core structure is . . . one of the most perva-
sive patterns in medieval literature" (196). One variant on this pattern
is the "dream vision," a tale in which the poet begins by narrating
under what circumstances he or she fell asleep and proceeds to devote
almost the entire tale to the content of a dream. The frame is closed
when the dreamer wakes, or remains open if the reader is not told of
the moment of waking. Davidoff notes that the prototype of this "highly
formalized" genre was the Roman de la Rose (60).
The opening of Virginia Woolf s "The Mark on the Wall" (1917)
certainly suggests that the author had medieval romance in mind. The
fiction begins with the chanson d'aventure1 s typical placing of a past
experience at some particular "day, hour, and season" (Davidoff 37):
"Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first
looked up and saw the mark on the wall . . ." (83). A recent critic has
been puzzled by this opening, but its significance is to be apprehended

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 WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST

in conjunction with the motifs within the story so framed.9 The first of
these motifs follows immediately: "I looked up through the smoke of my
cigarette [there is no need to labor the significance of what soon became
a cinematic cliché] and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning
coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle
tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights
riding up the side of the black rock" (83). The medieval atmosphere of
the quest romance is invoked, but only to be immediately rejected as
"an old fancy, an automatic fancy."
This is the first of several deliberate rejections of masculine
questing activity during the story. The epic journey to Troy is ridiculed
when the narrator implies that the city has been buried in dust three
times and reduced to a heap of pot-sherds for lack of a "vigilant house-
keeper" to keep it clean. The Troy motif returns when the enterprises
of Odysseus are parodied in those of a superannuated Colonel assisted
by "parties of aged laborers." The colonel is investigating a small
tumulus, which may be a military camp - like that of the Greeks on the
Trojan shore - or a tomb (compare the great burial mound of Achilles).
The narrator also rejects - and this is what brings the tale within
the scope of this paper - what might have been her own domestic quest
for knowledge. Were she to "get up at this very moment" and cross the
room to find out what the mark "really" is she would gain only knowl-
edge, and the quest for knowledge is itself an outmoded enterprise:
"What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and her-
mits who crouched in caves and in woods" and who learned to play
upon the fears of the superstitious for their own aggrandizement. One
thinks at once of the strangely furry male academics in A Room of
One's Own, latter-day cavemen, clothed in skins (8).
Of course, this domestic quest is undertaken in the end by a man,
the narrator's husband, who is responsible for the interruption of the
reverie and thus for the closure of the frame. Into her spiritual fancy
bursts a "vast upheaval of matter" (a male body rising from the sofa),
and a male voice announcing that he is about to sally forth on a quest
for newspaper-knowledge about the current war. This is a quest which
in the next breath he admits is futile. Meanwhile he has evidently
taken the three strides necessary to discover that the mark on the wall
is not a nail but a snail, the absurdity of whose presence is, of course,
the point.
There is no need, implies the narrator, for people these days to be
rushing off on quests for knowledge or for anything else. Life is no
longer, as the medieval trope would have it, a road along which we
walk or ride at a foot's pace. Nor is the symbol of full life to be found
in that Victorian vestige of the quest, the Sunday afternoon walk. On
the contrary, modern life is much more like a train-ride, or "being
blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour." The modern quest,
therefore, is for stillness and serenity. The goal is to be sought not by
walking across the room or going out for a newspaper, but by sinking
"deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate
facts" (85) into a normally inaccessible world, "a world which one could
slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin" (87). It

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 THE COMPAKATIST

is a world where one may find one's root "in the center of the world and
gaz[e] up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light,
and their reflections" (87-88).
The narrator is referring to the world of the unconscious, which
she sees as a source of mental riches accessible in a state of profound
meditation or reverie. Woolf alludes to this world in A Room of One 's
Own when she writes of letting down her line into the depths to fish for
an idea (5). The metaphor appears again in the essay "Professions for
Women." The world of the unconscious is scarcely less hazardous,
however, than the world of the Odyssey. In "Professions" the young
fiction writer's imagination has "sought the pools, the depths, the dark
places where the largest fish slumber" ( Women and Writing 61). But
there is a most distressing "smash" when she comes across an obstacle
which stands for "something about the body, about the passions which
it was unfitting for her as a woman to say." Her sense of "what men
will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had
roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness" (62). The writer's
quest, therefore, is the "internalized quest" which Harold Bloom
attributes to the Romantics: "The hero of the internalized quest is the
[writer her]self, the antagonists of quest are everything in the self that
blocks imaginative work" (8).
Woolf goes on in "Professions" to re-embody the obstacle to a wom-
an's writing of her vision in metaphors which evoke the quest: "she has
still many ghosts to fight"; there is always "a phantom to be slain, a
rock to be dashed against." In "A Mark on the Wall," the rock is
Whitaker's Table of Precendency, and the thought of Whitaker causes
the narrator to return to the mark as to "a plank in the sea," which she
grasps as did the shipwrecked Odysseus. In a witty reversal, she
returns to contemplating the mark in order to save herself from jump-
ing up and finding out what the mark "really is" - which would be the
equivalent of drowning. Further meditation on the mark returns her
once more the world of the imagination, from which she is finally
roused by the "vast upheaval of matter," which is her husband. The
"upheaval" may parody the appearance of Ino, the "slim-legged, lovely"
Nereid who rises out of the sea beside Odysseus as he clings to his
plank (Book 5), at the same time as it comically recalls the waking of
Tennyson's Kraken.
The pattern of the story, then, is complex. Around the simple,
physical there-and-back loop of the journey to the mark and return to
the sofa is the frame of the dream -vision. This journey is rejected, as we
have seen, but nevertheless remains an implied option throughout. In
addition, there are the mental expeditions which begin at the mark and
return to it having visited the fields of asphodel, Troy, the green depths
of the pastoral world, the grey depths of the sea. Finnaly, in a deliber-
ate tour de force, the narrator's beautiful meditation on the tree (a tree
which began as an Odyssean plank in the sea) takes her all over the
world at once, "into a million patient, watchful lives" (89), finally rest-
ing on "rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes."
The "circular diction" (Davidoff 190), or repetition at the end of the
story of a formula present at the beginning, is also found in medieval

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 WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST

frame stories. Here, the repetition signals the final awakening and end
of a series of quests that so attractively contrast the rich appeal of
mental life with the banality of the physical. The pattern left in the
mind at the end of the fiction is that of a flower on a stem, within a
frame.10 In the references within the fiction to a rose leaf (84, 88),
"rose-shaped blots" (84), and flowers in ancient gardens (85), we may
apprehend a parodie suggestion, perhaps, of the Roman de la Rose, a
framed, dream-vision quest whose goal is a woman who is also a rose
in a walled garden. But to insist on this might be to fall into the mode
of behavior the fiction satirizes so beautifully.

Ill

My final story is a contemporary one by the Egyptian feminist

writer Nawal El Saadawi.11 In the West, El Saadawi's best known
work is her study of women's condition in Egypt, The Hidden Face of
Eve, but a number of her novels and volumes of short stories have also
been translated, and have received some critical attention, notably in
Fadwa Malti-Douglas's recent book, Woman's Body , Woman's Word.12
In the brief short story "The Man With the Buttons" the primary
narrator is a fiction writer and a physician, as is El Saadawi herself.
The narrator tells us that ten years ago a young married woman came
to her clinic with a copy of a story the narrator had published recently
concerning a loveless marriage. The young woman clearly did not
admire the narrator's story, and left a tale of her own composition in
the clinic when she departed. The physician put it away in a drawer,
where it lay until she (the physician is presumably a woman) came
across it "folded up like an old letter" (104).
The woman's story begins like a letter: "My Dear Husband Amin
Fadhil Afifi ..." The letter- writer, who finally signs herself Firdaws,
explains first of all that she only learned her husband's full name when
a policeman came one day and shouted it through the spy hole in the
front door. 14 She still knows very little about his face, as she has never
looked at him from the front. Every evening she serves in the kitchen,
making endless cups of tea for her husband and his crony. When the
crony leaves,

you turn out the light in the salon and you see me sitting in the living
room, gazing into the darkness. Then you go off to bed and stretch out
your enormous long body like a crocodile. There is hardly any room
for me, so I go to sleep where I am, on the sofa, except for the one
night each month, or two months, or three, when you suddenly
remember, for no reason I know of, that I am there on the sofa. On
that night you shout for me in a hoarse voice, full of thick saliva, and
I know that thing is going to happen and the black wart [on your
forehead] is going to strike my forehead and my body is going to
become stagnant, like a pond, while nothing stirs in the heart, neither
pain nor joy, and the skin becomes cold and numb with the numbness
of death (106).

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 THE COMPAHATIST

In terms of myth, romance or fairy tale, this woman, whose name

means Paradise and who likens her husband to a crocodile, is actually
living in an underworld, the captive of a serpent-ogre. Such is the
relation of a real, live afrit and his stolen bride; her life is an obscene
parody of the early days of Psyche with Cupid, infinitely more squalid
and soul- destroying than the caricature in the Thousand and One
Nights could possibly depict it.
Her recreation, when her husband is away at work, is to visit the
woman in the upstairs apartment. This she does often, but on the
particular occasion she goes on to describe she meets a man there, and
the nature of the encounter turns her commonplace visit into a quest.
The young man, who remains an anonymous, mysterious, Dionysian
figure, somehow knows all about her husband and holds him in con-
tempt. Most importantly, he is the first male to rouse her sexually, and
though their contact is no more than a touch it seems to shatter her.
She wants him to take her away, but he refuses, and she asks in
despair why he came into her life at all.

"To rescue you from death," he replies.

"And you're letting me return to death."
"You won't go back to what you were. You'll be reborn; you'll
become a different woman."
"I'll never accept my life the way I did before."
"That is what is required."
"Are you driving me mad?"
"Yes. It's the way of salvation." (108)

Roused by a Dionysus, her madness is that of a Maenad. Running

downstairs she meets her husband coming home and attacks him,
striking him frenziedly and ripping off all his buttons. Mythically and
psychologically, she receives new life at the unstopped fountainhead of
her own sexuality, and this gives her the strength to challenge the
crocodile who has held her prisoner. In Egypt, women's traditional
clothes do not have buttons. The buttons, which the story has presented
as a symbol of male authority, are also a phallic symbol, and ripping
them off is a symbolic castration.
The mythic or fairytale aspects of the story can scarcely be ignored,
but the story is utterly modern, nevertheless. Above all, its apparently
simple manipulation of the frame device produces an openness which
rapidly deconstructs any attempt to come to conclusions about the
reality of the events it contains. First of all, the frame is emphatically
realistic. Placing the opening in a physician's clinic invites the reader
to assume that the primary narrator is in fact the author. This as-
sumption might be supported by our knowledge that El Saadawi has
written stories based on her own case histories. The brief, understated
encounter with the bearer of the story remains within strictly realistic
parameters, and it is implied that we are about to hear a more real
account of marriage than the physician's earlier tale.
But how real, on any level, is the inner tale? According to the
narrator, the bearer of the tale offers it as "her own composition," using

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 WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST

an expression which could apply equally to fiction or to non-fiction: min

ta īifihā. Firdaws's story is conveyed in a letter, a primarily non-fic-
tional genre. Is it a real letter, written with the intention of sending it
to the husband? This seems unlikely. But is it fiction? The fact that
the letter closes with the name of the letter- writer, Firdaws, meaning
Paradise, only emphasizes the fact that we know nothing of her. Who
is Firdaws? Is she the woman who wrote the story and left it with the
physician? If Firdaws is the author of the story, which may be intended
as a letter or may merely take the form of one, is she offering the physi-
cian an account of reality, or a fiction, or a wish-fulfillment fantasy, or
a combination (another possible translation of ta īif) partly real and
partly fiction or fantasy? Only the mysterious figure of the young man
seems to come from a region beyond the bounds of everyday life.
If the events are to any degree real, what happened next? Did
Firdaws's husband beat her up, divorce her, have her locked in a
mental asylum, or was he cowed by her fury? Did her rebellion open
doors or close them? El Saadawi has said, "Sometimes I feel non-exis-
tent if I don't write."16 Tsvetan Todorov, writing of the Thousand and
One Nights, has also said that "narrating equals living" ( The Poetics of
Prose 73); "[n]arrative equals life; absence of narrative, death" (74).
Todorov refers to Shahrazad, who saves lives by telling tales, and to her
story of the physician Duban, whose terror renders him unable to
postpone his own death by telling "the story of the crocodile" (The
Arabian Nights 45). Firdaws's letter, then, is the affirmation of Fir-
daws's selfhood as well as El Saadawi's.
Firdaws tells the story of the crocodile and in doing so offers the
reader one certainty: she has achieved the ironic perspective of one
who has transcended a state of mental incarceration. She has escaped
her husband's power at least to that significant degree. In doing so she
has recapitulated the stages that Heller derives from Carol Christ17:
"woman's spiritual quest leads her through stages of nothingness,
awakening, insight, and finally, an act of self-naming that calls her
identity into being by transforming a relationship between her individu-
al spirit and the world which she inhabits" (18). Firdaws has indeed
been reborn.
Much of the power of this extraordinary tale lies in the manipula-
tion of frames, physical and literary. The fiction, both frame and that
which is framed, is structured on enclosures and openings, closures and
disclosures. Even the frame itself contains a box, a drawer. Like the
afrit's glass case, it opens to reveal a woman who behaves in a manner
not incompatible with docile wifehood, yet goes on to reveal herself as
the enemy of a male who has controlled and perverted her life.
The comparison also displays the difference between the two tales
with regard to the patriarchal order. In the Thousand and One Nights
the woman has been illegally wrenched out of her proper status in the
patriarchal order - that of a bride on her wedding night - by an emphat-
ically non-human male. It is this oppression, which we may translate
from non-human to inhuman (both concepts could be rendered by the
same Arabic expression, ghayr insani), which causes the woman to
rebel against her husband whom she despises, and to acquire tempo-

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 THE CöMVAKATIST

rary control over a hundred men, two of whom are kings. Man's inhu-
manity to woman, therefore, constitutes a threat to society. In El
Saadawi's tale we are offered the same combination of what English
would express as the non-human (the crocodile) and the inhuman, but
the context emphasizes not only the legality but the ordinariness,
indeed the banality of the situation. The result is a far more radical
satire on marriage itself as the basic social unit of a patriarchy.
Indeed, it might be said that this story treats marriage as itself an
"ARCHETYPAL ENCLOSURE" recalling Annis Pratt's view of the
institution. In marriage:

Each attribute of authenticity meets with its opposite: freedom to

come and go is abrogated; early, ideal lovers are banished, to be
replaced by a husband who resembles the Gothic villain; erotic
freedom is severely limited; intelligence too becomes a curse, and,
correspondingly, too much consciousness of one's situation leads to
punishment or madness (45).

Firdaws's home, the objective correlative of marriage, resembles a

jail, as we have seen. But it is occupied by a married couple, like the
room with the mark on the wall. Both rooms are enclosures which the
husband leaves, while the wife remains. We might naturally expect that
such a room would have a different symbolic value in London in the
1910's, and in Cairo in the 1950's. Yet whatever the nature of our
stereotype of Arab society, we may not be so complacent about the
narrator's situation in "The Mark on the Wall." At the same time that
Woolf s narrator is inviting us to join her in good-natured contempt of
strenuous masculine endeavor, the narrative reveals her vulnerability,
her openness to invasion even in the inmost enclosure of her being. Her
train of thought is finally disrupted by her husband's physical invasion
of the imaginative space she had created. But she had created this
space in mental flight from the specter of Whitaker's Table of Prece-
dency. The Table of Precedency is a kind of litany to the patriarchal
order, the final statement of convention in a fiction that parodies even
the convention of its own form. The Table is also, of course, a metaphor
for the ineluctable mind-forged manacles which are the unconscious
heritage of anyone raised subject to this order.
Like the underwater obstacle, the Table of Precedency is a kind of
computer virus that infests the most intimate spaces of the mind, and
the walls of a room, no matter how entirely one's own, are no defence
against it. As Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own , "the desire to be
veiled still possesses [women]" (52). In the narrator of "A Mark on the
Wall" we feel that desire to be strong. The reader cannot agree that one
may stay indoors and strive to remain within an aesthetically pleasing
fantasy while men make war outside. A room of one's own is too like
a tomb if the door is always shut, even if one shuts it oneself. 18
If, to quote Woolf again, fiction is "attached to life at all four
corners" (A Room of One's Own 43), then writing and fighting can be
equivalent, and Firdaws's letter may tear off more buttons than her
blows. It is a letter which is finally addressed to other women, other

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 WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST

prisoners with serpent-jailers of their own, and in order to be delivered

(again, no pun in Arabic) it has to be brought physically out of the
house into the world which the female narrator of "The Mark on the
Wall" appears to shun. Only with the letter's delivery is Firdaws's
quest complete.
The "The Mark on the Wall" and the frame of the Thousand and
One Nights leave us with a sense of enclosure; "The Man With the But-
tons," of opening: the drawer opens, the letter, the body and then the
mind of Firdaws, the door through which the "composer" of the letter
left her house to visit the clinic, and the frame of the story, in which the
last word is Firdaws's signature. The effect of these opened frames is
to pull the reader's mind into the inmost enclosures to seek vainly for
the answers to questions that were ten years old when the physician
rediscovered the manuscript. It is a Borgesian effect which finally
reverses its direction and casts the mind forth with a question concern-
ing patriarchy that Shahrazad never raises and that Woolf s narrator
evades: what is to be done? Like Heller, El Saada wi surely implies
that the quest for "authentic selfhood" entails engagement with a wider
world.

Francis Marion University

NOTES

1 Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth 125. Th

story of Inanna's quest to the Underworld is "The Descent of Inanna," 51-89.

^ The translation I have used throughout is Husain Haddawy's. Haddaw

renders the Arabic Kitãb alf lay la wa layla (literally, "The Book of A Thousan
Nights and a Night") as The Arabian Nights, but I have preferred to keep the
more literal title to refer to the collection both in its Arabic manuscript form a
in English translations. Haddawy's source text is Muhsin Mahdi's Arabic editio
which is based on the Syrian manuscript known as the Galland manuscrip
Dating from the fourteenth century, this is the oldest extant manuscript of th
Thousand and One Nights. Haddawy's translation is full and fairly literal.

3 Fadwa Malti -Douglas (19) points out the Koranic origin of the phrase
" inna kaydakunna 'azim" (Muhsin Mahdi's edition, 64); literally: "verily your
[+ feminine,-!- plural] cunning is mighty!" The phrase is a direct quotation from
verse 28 of the Sura of Joseph. The words are spoken by the Egyptian (named
in Genesis 39 as Potiphar) whose wife has tried to seduce Joseph and the
accused him of attempted rape. In the Koranic version of the story her lie is
exposed and Joseph vindicated.

4 Malti-Douglas makes the point that Shahrazad's decision to marry th

Sultan is taken freely, in full consciousness of both her goal and the ris
involved in it. This seems perfectly obvious to an unbiased reader, but Malti-
Douglas justifiedly takes the trouble to refute some previous commentators wh
have seen Shahrazad as an "innocent" or as a victim of "destiny" (Malti-
Douglas 13).

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 THE COMPAKATIST

^ Ghazoul's study, The A rabian Nights: A Structural A nalysis (1 980), deals

fully with the issue of the themes of the collection as a whole. And the linkage
of text and theme is treated by Molan (1988) and by Pinault (1987). It is
beyond the scope of this essay, however, to deal in detail with the stories framed
by the story of Schahrazad's adventure.

^ As Lodge suggests in The Modes of Modern Writing , "It would seem to

be a general rule that where one kind of aesthetic presentation is embedded in
another, the 'reality' of the embedded form is weaker than that of the framing
form" (37; quoted in Miller 73).
7
Malti-Douglas, together with other commentators, notes the anti-feminist
character of the ending, which in the longest version (available in Sir Richard
Burton's translation) becomes a sort of soft-porn show starring Shahrazad and
her sister (26-27).
o

Haddawy translates the foreword, but not the phrases introducing

paragraphs.

Baldwin asks in his study of Woolf s short fiction, "Why present it as a

recollection, slipping in the first paragraph from past tense to present, as if there
were no time barriers?" (13). Miller, in her very useful study of the many
occurrences of framing in doors, windows, and rooms in Woolf s fiction, takes
only a cursory glance at "The Mark on the Wall" (96-97) and does not deal with
framing as a narrative device.

^ This kind of architectural patterning is seen in the "Chinese boxes" of

"Kew Gardens," a fiction from the same period as "The Mark on the Wall."
And in A Room of One's Own , Woolf writes that "a book is . . . made ... of
sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes" (80). See also Miller
(33-34) on Woolf s tendency to construct graphic patterns in the shape of her
fiction.

1 1 El Saadawi's name is variously transliterated. According to the Library

of Congress system which I have used for transliterating text, her name is
written "Nawal al-Sa'dāwi." I use the form she typed on her correspondence
with me.

12
Malti-Douglas has chapters on the frame of the Thousand and One
Nights and on several fictions by El Saada wi, including the story I deal with
here. She comments briefly on the technique of embedding these works have
in common, but her approach is in general quite different from mine. Regard-
ing El Saadawi, she is chiefly concerned with the narra tor-as-physician.
13
The story is from El Saadawi's collection, Konat hiya al-ad'af. The
collection has been translated as She Has No Place in Paradise , but quotations
in this paper are from my own translation of "The Man With the Buttons,"
published in WRIT.

^ His crime, apparently, is appropriating the third of an acre which was his
sister's share of their inheritance. He has transgressed the bounds, therefore, of
what was allowed him by Islamic inheritance law. Islamic law, though it

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 WOMEN'S DOMESTIC QUEST

apportions a smaller share to the daughter than to the son, still insists on the
right of the daughter to her share. This right, stipulated by the Koran (Sura 4:
7, 11), is often ignored in practice in parts of the Muslim world.

15 See for example, "Eyes," banned in Egypt and published in 1989 in the
Index on Censorship. "Eyes" is also a story about an oppressed and lonely
young woman. It shares with "The Man with the Buttons" motifs such as death
in life, the underworld, staring into the dark, a touch that feels like an electric
shock to the heart. No rebirth occurs in "Eyes," however. In addition, as Malti-
Douglas points out, El Saadawi has actually published a story with the title
mentioned in this narrative: "My Husband, I Don't Love You."

16 See El Saada wi's interview with Rosemarie Clunie, "Writing is Power,"

1735.

17
See Chris, Diving Deep and Surfacing , chapter 2.
1X
This narrative should not be taken as an illustration of Woolf s own
position on matters of domesticity and worldliness. The attitude of the Blooms-
bury group as a whole toward the War is well known, and A Room of One
Own is the story of a successful and physically energetic quest for "Truth,"
eventually glimpsed through the window of a room as a man and a woma
board a taxi together in the street outside (99-100). Of course, Virginia Woolf
also recognized the ambivalence of rooms for women, who have traditionally
been "kept in one room," and had as many "doors shut upon [them]" to keep
them in as to keep them out (87).

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