Reading Notes, Week 5, Scheherazade, Part A.

 

Scheherazade, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang:

• An educated woman is the storyteller for all the rest of the storytellers. She is, quite literally, the epicenter for the story, and it's her knowledge and scheme towards the Sultan that the stories go on.
• The stories within stories end with some type of lesson being learned:
• The stories told to the Sultan, and the stories within those stories, heavily use the plot of someone being wronged and pinning it on an unsuspecting individual; in other words, the actions of another typically negatively affect one of the main characters.
• An allegory for the type of behavior the Sultan was exhibiting? The murder of countless women that led to the title one thousand and one nights.
• The plot can be broken down as such:
• The Sultan is wronged by his first wife; that betrayal leads into him fabricating this assumption that all women will behave like her.
• As a result, women are married to the Sultan and promptly killed off the next day because of this fabrication. Scheherazade takes matter into her own hands and with her continuous storytelling is able to thwart death.
• The usage of a life and death scenario adds tension to the plot.
• The stories, as mentioned, focus on an innocent persons' supposed crimes that lead to these encounters by potential-executioner and death-evader.
• The point, altogether, is the avoidance of death, but the intellect and creativity of a woman subtly outlining the wrong of the Sultan's initial assumption.

Scheherazade, painted in the 19th century by Sophie Anderson
(Commons Wikipedia)

• Selfless characterization; Scheherazade takes up the task of dealing with the Sultan for the sake of the women, and parents that have to deal with the loss or the potential loss of a child.
• "If I fail, my death will be a glorious one, and if I succeed I shall have done a great service to my country."
• She doesn't do this for herself, why would she get married to him if that was the case?, but is determined for change.