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An essay about the thousand and one nights
An essay about the thousand and one nights
An essay about the thousand and one nights
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A frame tale is a narrative structure containing a series of related tales within the larger story. In the “Prologue” of The Thousand and One Nights, King Shahrayar witnessed his wife unfaithful, by having intercourse with another man. Because of this tragedy, the king decides to put his wife to death and marry a new woman each day so he will never have to deal with the pain or treachery caused by women. As the tale goes on, the Vizier, the king’s assistant, finds a new woman for the king to sleep with each night and then sends her off to her demise. Until one day the Vizier’s daughter, Shahrazad decides that she wants to put an end to the kings antics. Shahrazad ask her dad, The Vizier, to marry the king and her. After a long fought argument between father and daughter the Vizier decides to give his daughter to the king. This is when frame tale comes into play. In order to survive she must tell a story each night in order to keep the kings interest. “The Porter and the Young Girls” is one of the tales told in the larger story.
“The Porter and the Young Girls” was a great story to keep King Shahrayar attentive. In this tale it talks about three young girls and their generosity to this porter. They feed and bathe the man. One rule was given to the porter though. This rule says “Speak not of which concerns you not or you will hear that which shall please you not,” ( page number here) meaning don’t ask questions and if you do then you will have to deal with the sufferings. Along the way six other men made their way into the young girl’s palace. The girls treated all these men equally and just as generous by fetching drinks whenever the men asked for them. All the other men though still had to oblige by the one rule that the porter ...
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...ing stories. Shahrazad uses Zubaidah as a relationship to her, to make King Shahrayar understand her position. To make the King understand she must tell a story to hopefully change his mind. In order for this to happen Shahrazad tells the tale“The Porter and the Young Girls.” Zubaidah is most closely related with Shahrazad because in order for Zubaidah to stay in her form, she must whip her two bitches three hundred times every day and must tell her story to the caliph to save her life.
The lesson Shahrazad tries to teach King Shahrayar is that not all women are alike. The actions of one woman should not cause punishment to be dulled out to other women. Shahrazad tells this story to change the Kings mind about looking at women as less than human. The king must learn to look at each woman as her own self with her own story to tell and should be treated accordingly.
The Afghan and Muslim community take the idea of honour very seriously. They honour their family name and reputation very dearly. If someone within their family were to act or behave in such a way that the family’s honour is put into question the head, typically the father or the eldest male will act in a barbaric way that could potentially be deadly. This extreme sense of honour is prevalent throughout the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and the documentary “Honour Killing”. If a female were to act in a way that dishonors their reputation the husband or male relative believes they are allowed to punish those who brought the shame to their family without being held accountable for their actions.
Shahrazad is seen as a heroic figure throughout the Nights because she comes up with a well thought out plan to stop King Shahrayar’s killing spree and spare the lives of the women who would eventually fall into the king’s trap. Shahrazad was very intelligent, she knew what was happening to the women who married the king then disappeared the day after and wanted to put a stop to it. She told her father that she wanted to marry the king so that she could “either succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest” (1182). She was not very sure if her plan would work but she would even die trying to save the lives of her people. To complete her mission she would tell a story, more exciting than the first, to King Shahrayar every night to keep him entertained so that he would not just spare her life, but the lives of others as well.
In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Cantebury Tales, many stories are told leading to a wide range of topics. One particular and significant topic Chaucer touches on many times is the role of women. In stories such as The Millers Tale, The Knight's Tale, and the Wife of Bath's Tale the women of each story are portrayed extremely different. Alisoun, Emelye, and the wife of Bath, each exemplify three dissimilar ways in which women love. The way Chaucer describes each of these characters is dependent on the out come of each particular story. Chaucer is careful with his word choice and figurative language with each woman, enabling the reader to get a very visual and sometimes humorous picture.
The theme of gender oppression is greatly shown throughout the story. Making it easier for the reader to comprehend the roles that were expect of women in Egypt. This theme is greatly shown when Abboud Bey and Samia’s father are discussing wedding arrangements. Abboud asks Samia’s father “And the beautiful little girl’s still at second school? She lowered her head modestly and her father had answered:” This shows the lack of respect males have for women in their society. Viewing women merely as a pretty face, incapable of answering simple questions. This also shows that Abboud views Samia as naïve and innocent by referring to her as “little girl”. He seems to be taken by her
This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them are as important as the grandmother. In fact, through her narration the reader gets the basic information concerning the familial context. The story revolves around a grandmother, a mother and a granddaughter, which thus sets the point of view of the story, the grandmother is the narrator therefore the reader gets her perception. Besides the domestic context, the lack of other contextual clues, such as the time or the location of the story, gives room to her story and her final purpose: teaching and, at the same time, protecting her grand-daughter from risks represented by men here symbolized by a wolf. The way this unnamed grandmother reveals her life exemplifies two properties of fairy tale as mentioned by Marina Warner in “The Old Wives' Tale”: “Fairy tales exchange knowledge [using morals] between an older [most of the time feminine] voice of experience and a younger audience” (314). As suggested in the text, fairy tales are a way to teach insights of life through simple stories directed to, most of the time, younger generations. Most of the time because fairy tales' moral work on dif...
In the Middle East it was male-dominant, male’s had all the control in the family. Women’s rule in life was to give birth too many children to continue the family blood line and take care of them, while the men go to work and come home find something for them prepared to eat. Men were the head of the house, whatever they said, had to be obeyed. Women were limited in their rights, even in marriage they weren’t asked for their opinion, “Would you like to marry this guy?” But rather they were forced by their family members to participate in arranged marriages. In this story we see that the slave woman had no rights, this woman obeyed them without saying a word. In addition, to this she was a slave, and slaves had no rights when it came to their master’s commands. She didn’t have a choice but rather obeyed what the master said even if she didn’t agree. Women were mistreated sometimes by men. "Bring the mule’s nose-bag along with you," he added to the groom; "she has not finished her feed, I think; when we get to the palace, put the bag on her again—she can eat the rest of her fodder while I am with the caliph. “Hear and obey," said the groom "(Portland, Maine: Wheelwright, 1955, p 310-313). One can see in this quote that they placed a bag over the girl and limited to when should she eat. The woman was treated as if she was a toy, played with for a while and then placed to the side when they were
This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them is as important as the grandmother. Through her narration, the reader gets all the information needed to understand the story. Indeed, by telling her own story she provides the reader the familial context in which the story is set with her granddaughter and her daughter but even more important, she provides details on her own life which should teach and therefore protect her grand-daughter from men, and then save her to endure or experience her past griefs. This unnamed grand-mother is telling her life under a fairy tale form which exemplify two major properties of fairy tale, as mentioned by Marina Warner in “The Old Wives' Tale”: “Fairy tales exchange knowledge [through the moral] between an older [most of the time feminine] voice of experience and a younger audience”. As suggested in the text, fairy tales are a way to teach insights of life through simple stories directed to, most of the time, younger generations. Most of the time because fairy tales work on different levels of moral which are directed to categories of people, for instance in “Little Red Riding Hood” the moral ...
Ahmed’s mother is the first to fall into playing her stereotypical social construct after her husband; Hajji Ahmed beats her for not supplying him with an heir, a son. “One day he struck he struck her, because she had had refused to subject herself to a last, desperate ordeal…” This act shows Ahmed’s mothers weakness, a gender normative of women, compared to her husband. However instead of lashing back she accepts the fate she has put herself into. She punishes herself similar to the acts her husband acts onto her. “She, too, began to lose interest in her daughters…and struck her belly to punish herself.” At this point in the novel, it is evident that Ahmed’s mother is adjusting her own belief to match that of Hajji. His reoccurring distaste for his seven daughters has rubbed onto his wife. This compliance to accept her husband’s belief fits into that mold that says that women are not assertive and follow with what their husbands want. The next section femininity is seen in it’s natural essence is seen at the end of chapter three when Ahmed has been attacked and his father confronts him about his girlish ways.
Throughout history, women were not always well regarded by men. Because of this, most societies treated their women as second class citizens. The stories from, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, illustrate how the portrayal of women affected Muslim society in the Ninth century. Sometimes women were seen as mischievous, unfaithful temptresses. Other times they were depicted as obedient, simple minded slaves looking to please their master. With the use of charm, sex and trickery, they used the labels that they were put in, to their advantage; demonstrating that women during this century were clever, smart, and sly.
Enderwitz, Susanne. “Shahrazad Is One Of Us: Practical Narrative, Theoretical Discussion, And Feminist Discourse.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 18.2 (2004): 187-200. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.
When a person becomes trapped in a situation that stems from an individual with greater authority, being manipulative can be a very promising method to escape. The Thousand and One Nights does a very good job of being a good example of someone in this situation that uses stories within a story to capture encapsulate the attention of the reader. Despite the many little stories that go into the text, the main story behind it all is about a king named King Shahrayar and how he goes insane after catching his wife having sexual relations with a slave. After he sees this happen, he realizes that he can never trust any woman again and none of them are trustworthy. By expressing his views on women, he decides to marry a different woman every night, then the next morning have them killed by beheading. This is an ongoing event that brings death to most of the women in the village. Soon after, the king’s Vizier’s daughter, Shahrazad, came up with a brilliant idea that will end up saving her fellow countrywomen and hopefully keep the king from murdering so many innocent people. Her method behind all this is by telling the kind a different story every night that leaves him on a cliffhanger, making him curious enough to keep her alive for another day to continue her story. Shahrazad keeps herself spared from the king because of her cunning, and compassionate personality.
The parallels that have been presented show that there are not just similarities in the tale and the Wife’s life, the prologue and the tale are the real and the ideal way that the Wife sees her world. She, like many women of her time and ours, wants control over her husbands and will do what it takes to gain it. She tells us how she gained control over her husbands, even when it lead to the oldest trick in the book, withholding “pleasures”. Then she backed up her desire for sovereignty by telling us in her tale that it was not just herself who wanted this dominance, but every woman wants the same, even if they don’t know it. Finally she idealizes what she wants from a husband with the tale of the knight and the hag. If only it were as simple as the tale told.
Stories like Sindbad, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp and other popular stories are very common today in the western culture. Animated movies were also made for the entertainment of kids on these popular stories. One might wonder that where these stories originated and how it came down and made place in the western culture. Although these stories are very popular in both the western culture and the eastern culture but the original literary work is not so popular in common people. Theses stories are some of the stories from the Arabic work "The Thousand and One Nights." The work of "The Thousand and One Nights" represents basically a female that is a strong and clever idol and continuously imaginative and creative. It is an anonymous work which is widely known in the Arab world. It is an Arabic collection of a thousand tales, which is derived from the Persian version, telling of a King who was in the habit of killing his wives after the first night, and who was led to abandon this practise by the cleverness of the Wezir's daughter, who nightly told him a tale which she left unfinished at dawn, so that his curiosity led him to spare her till the tale should be completed. Many people have written about these stories, that where they originated, what time period was it originated, how they have been changed, and also literary criticism of the work.
The frame story describes an exchange between the narrator and the vicar of the town Beauvale in England. The narrator has come to learn about the book that the vicar is writing, which is a compilation of stories about the English people and their personal encounters with non-worldly beings. The vicar reads the narrator a story about monks who lived in Beauvale in the fifteenth century and their encounter with what they believe is a devil. The monks look up from praying in the church to find a devil prying away at their window. The narrator, however, does not dwell on this story; instead, he moves on to inquire about the book the vicar is writing. In moving past this initial story, Lawrence sets up the frame story, but the reader is left to wonder how the story of the monks will connect with the inner story. The vicar subsequently begins telling the narrato...
In her book Princess, Jean Sasson conveys through the Princess Sultana's story of the many abuses of women in Saudi Arabia. For thousands of years, women in Saudi Arabia has earned no respect, given no identity (as if invisible), and were treated like sexual objects. Their only use is to produce male offspring, and to service their husbands sexually. This goes for all women. Although women of royalty are born free, they are just as insignificant as the lower class women. Through the eyes of Princess Sultana, Jean Sasson tells the cruel and unjust ways of the male society in Saudi Arabia.