Content Warning: This section includes descriptions of child sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape, physical violence, and domestic abuse.

“Firdaus, however, remained a woman apart.”

In this single sentence within the Preface, Saadawi describes Firdaus in a simplistic and straightforward way. By the time Firdaus is arrested for murder, she’s apart from everything that previously enslaved her: fear, hope, and want. All of these things she has finally let go, and for this reason, she feels free for the first time in her life. This early description of Firdaus foreshadows the way in which she rises above patriarchal domination by refusing to live and refusing to fear death.

“Murderer or not, she’s an innocent woman and does not deserve to be hanged. They are the ones that ought to hang.”

Saadawi meets a female warder at the prison where Firdaus is being held, and the woman vehemently defends Firdaus’s honor. Saadawi isn’t yet sure of the context of this defensiveness, but it’s an early representation of the novella’s experimentation with guilt and innocence and how these concepts are much more subjective than initially realized. Patriarchal domination resulted in Firdaus’s life of abuse, captivity, and fear; for this reason, both she and the warder believe that Firdaus and all other women are innocent of their crimes.