Introduction
The story begins with deceitfulness of the king’s wife and ends with Scheherazade trying to save the women of king Shahrayar’s kingdom from being executed for the crime committed by the king’s wife which she eventually does. The king decided all women are the same after he discovers that even his brother’s wife is unfaithful and he makes a vow of marrying virgins and executing them the next morning before they cheat on him. It is because of the bitterness and grief that his unfaithful wife caused him that he comes to this conclusion. After all virgins are no more, the viziers daughter decides to marry the king against his fathers will with a mission to save the remaining virgins from the executions. She tells unending stories to the king after marrying him and this led the king not to execute her for he was very eager each day to hear the conclusion of her stories. Scheherazade did not conclude her stories to make the king anticipate the finishing of the story and postpone her execution. After a thousand and one nights, she confessed to the king that she had no story left for her to tell luckily, the king had fallen in love with her so he could not kill her. She was finally made the queen and she accomplished her mission of saving the women in their kingdom.
Stereotypes of women in the story
In a thousand and one stories, the conflicting issue regarding stereotypes of women is that some are viewed as sex objects who are supposed to be submissive to their husbands at the same time as treacherous and disloyal to men. Their opinions are not counted and they are supposed to be subservient and despite this, they are very cunning in most of the stories. They are considered to be inferior, passive, and subservient and are oppressed yet they maneuver through their own creative ways so as to remain alive and acquire material wealth and power. In the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves, he calls his wife silly when he finds her counting gold meaning she has no intelligence and has no common sense. Conversely, in the story of the first brother of the barber, we see a woman using her sexual prowess to acquire clothes. In the Tale of Enchanted King, a woman poisons her husband in order to have an affair with a black slave. These two women outdo the female roles of being inferior and submissive to the men as their culture demands. Women were considered as slaves and concubines who are subjected to obey the men who own them yet just like the king’s wife they still were not submissive for they committed infidelity. In these stories, there are faithful women, magical women, silly women, cunning women, and treacherous women.
The two specific portrayals of women in this story are good and evil. Scheherazade’s narration of her stories of different women is very interesting. She talks of how good they are and again she tells of how treacherous they can be. She tells of how bad women can be by being unfaithful and using magic to trick men. In the tale of the second dervish when a woman threatens to awake the jinni if the two kings refuse to have sex with her. She also shows how good women can be by even sacrificing their own lives for men and through the slave girl in Ali baba and the forty thieves who saved his life. She shows both sides of the women.
How does Scheherazade address and handle this issue in her stories
Scheherazade decides to tell stories to the king in order to make him see women in a different perspective. She tells her stories to the king describing different types of women, the good and evil and her stories contain good verses evil messages. She tells most of the stories to interest king Shahrayar in order to make him trust and change his perspective about women and stop looking at them as unfaithful and bad people. The first set of her stories talks about forgiveness, warning and justice.
In the story of Ali baba, she portrays the slave girl as very intelligent and witty. Through the slave girl’s intelligence, she was able to save Ali baba from a certain death in the hands of the forty thieves. Through the girl’s intelligence, they managed to kill the thieves. Through this story, Scheherazade was trying to prove to the king that women are good people who are intelligent and can save men’s life. She also told of how bad women can be in the story of Enchanted king whereby the queen could not wait for the husband to leave for her to have an illicit affair so she poisoned her husband so all in all, she showed the king in her stories both the good and the bad side of women.
Scheherazade portrays the beauty of women in her stories. According to the king, women deserved to die due to unfaithfulness and thus he could not see their beauty, but through her stories, the king wandered at the sight of her beauty and loveliness and this also helped her change his perspective about women and respected them even though they were seen as not intelligent and silly, (“The Thousand and One Nights” 682). The stories she tells to the king have good morals that she believes that they will change his mind like making him understand that one should do to others what he expects them to do to him. She challenges the king through her stories to think of if he was the one being killed instead of the brides he married, through this challenges, the king comes to respect women.
Why she handled the issue in this manner
When Scheherazade married the king, she strongly believed that stories could heal madness and save lives, so she had to use as many stories as she could with moral messages to challenge the king in order to change the his perception on women. She wanted the king to understand that as much as bad women exist out there, there are good women as well who are intelligent and kind and are ready to die in order to save men life so in whatever he does to women, he should consider that. In the tale of the second dervish, the princes and the jinnee’s woman sacrificed their lives in order to save the life of a man that is the pentagonist. The jinnee’s woman asked, “ Why should I kill an innocent, man whom I have never seen before?” (“ The Thousand and One Nights” 115). This was like a question to the king that why he was killing innocent women that he knew nothing about them because of his wife’s infidelity. It was also a warning to him to stop killing innocent women because of his anger and grief.
Scheherazade also wanted the king to understand that he was being cruel and heartless for killing and ending innocent lives because of a crime committed by one person. In the tale of second girl, Scheherazade reflects upon her fate in the hands of the king whereby this girl in the story had not committed any adultery but she was about to be put to death for the uncommitted sin. This story explains that the king’s distrust and suspicion that the woman he marries will commit adultery caused him to kill all the virgins he married without mercy and through this story, he will understand that what he was doing was wrong and put an end to women being executed, (Berggren ).
Scheherazade wanted to prove to the king that all women are not the same, there are good and evil ones and the sins of the evil ones should not be put on everyone. Furthermore, she was destined to save herself and the lives of all the other women from execution so she had to use all the means and ways to make the king change his mind on women. She believed that she could make the king change his mind on women and at the end she managed. Additionally, through her belief that a story can change someone’s perspective and save someone’s life, she had to do it this way by telling stories to the king to satisfy her conscience and make the king change his perception on women and see the errors he is making in his life.
Through her stories, the king learned through her that women were chaste, tender and wise at times.
Work Cited
Berggren, Paula. “The Thousand and One Nights”, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature. New York: Norton and company Inc., 2002.
