Alifa Rifaat's short story "Another Evening at the Club" paints a clear picture of the powerless, inferior role of women in Egyptian society: the main character Samia is trapped in an arranged marriage in which she is repeatedly forced into betraying her own values and beliefs.
For example, when Bey, her husband, says to Samia "Tell people you're from the well-known Barakat family and that your father was a judge," she is obliged to lie about her own family's social status, in spite of how she was raised to be an honest person, just for the sake of making Bey look more important in the public eye.
In the end, Bey forces Samia into the ultimate act of dishonesty: protecting a lie that is causing their servant to be tortured, only to avoid his husband's embarrassment, when he says "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 of sips of beer and the ring took off on its own and hid itself behind the dressing-table."
I’d believe the informal would be “Can you...?”
disrespectfulness
In the play the word is used when Keller says, "You be quiet! I’m badgered enough here by females without your impudence." The first trick to identifying a word's definition using context clues is to decide if the word is used in a positive way or a negative way. After reading Keller's statement, we can tell he is frustrated and annoyed, so he is not going to be talking in a positive way. This eliminates the first two options immediately. Disrespectfulness is your answer.
