Friday, September 25, 2015

Essay: Scheherazade the Trickster


Within the Arabian Nights unit there are many stories that are actually stories within other stories originally told by a woman named Scheherazade. Her own personal story is the first one within the unit. In her story there is a Sultan who weds a different woman every single day then kills them off the following morning. He does this because he once had a wife that he loved dearly but she betrayed him. The Sultan had her executed and from that point on felt that all women were truly evil deep down inside. In marrying so many women he felt he could rid the world of their evil.
This is where Scheherazade came into play. Her father was the executioner for the Sultan and he was the one in charge of bringing him a new woman every day. She was a very intelligent woman and she pleaded with her father to marry the Sultan for she had a plan to end the slaughter of the innocent girls. Reluctantly her father obliged and brought her to the Sultan. She married him then carried out her plan so that she may keep her life and he could not marry others. Every morning she would tell the Sultan a story. Within these stories the characters would then tell a subsequent story. This would go on and on day in and day out.
We don’t often see a trickster as the hero or heroine of a story but Scheherazade certainly was. We don’t learn much about her but we do know she was able to save many people with her cleverness. The Sultan was quite foolish and never caught on to what she was doing. Every day he simply listened to and enjoyed her stories with the promise of it continuing the next day. She is a pretty clever trickster, but I wonder what she would do when she ran out of stories!
scheherazade

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