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Who Is The Encounter In 'Detached Belongings'?

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The short story "Detached Belongings" is written by Dilruba Z. Ara. It is about a woman’s struggle and search for her identity after she moves to Sweden and is forced to be hospitalized when she is pregnant due to a rare disease that ultimately ends in her losing her child. Even though the woman is cared for by the Swedish medical staff and her husband, she still feels alone and longs for her home country. I am going to explore and explain why I think the main character’s encounters throughout the story is primarily negative. The first encounter is when the protagonist meets the Swedish male doctor. She tries to explain her situation to the doctor, but it looked like he could not understand her Swedish that well, and he emphasized this by, "Each time she …show more content…

The midwife continually dismisses the woman and tells her that nothing is wrong with her. During the visit the woman telling the midwife that she has read a lot of literature and knows that something is wrong with her. The midwife ends the visit by saying, "You read too much" said she putting on a grave face, "doctors are for ailing people. Pregnancy is not an ailment. Go home and rest."(p.3) This is a way for the midwife to maintain in control by sending the woman home, thus ending the meeting. The midwife also tells her that she "…read too much…" in a condescending way, meaning that her knowledge in literature does not have any impact nor effect perhaps because of her cultural status being lower than the midwifes’. The need for the midwife to tell the woman that "…pregnancy is not an ailment…" is humiliating as well as a way to diminish the pregnant woman’s suffering. In this encounter the midwife’s behaviour can be interpret as her being superior and the woman being beneath her, due to prejudice about where she is originally

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