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Comparing Women In The Thousand And One Nights

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Through the characters of The Thousand and One Nights, how are women depicted? What does this say about the authors’ view on women and how do theses views compare to how women were viewed historically?
The Thousand and One Nights is mainly centered around a king who goes from a beloved king to a tyrant. He becomes a tyrant because he discovers that his wife has been cheating on him with a slave. So, King Shahrayar, which is the name of the once beloved king, comes to the conclusion that he will avoid the deception of women by taking a new bride every night and having her killed the next morning. The deaths of young women in the kingdom began to rise, and the kingdom was filled with mourning parents. However, a young woman came up with an …show more content…

Several times did the female characters exhibit lustful tendencies. King Shahrayar’s and his younger brother King Shahzaman’s wives cheated on them. Their wives committed adultery. Then when King Shahrayar and his brother left to travel in order to find some that has suffered just as much as they have from the infidelity of their wives, they came to a meadow and happened upon a demon walking out of the ocean carrying a large glass chest. Within the chest was a woman, whose beauty was beyond compare. As the demon slept on the woman’s lap, the woman looked up in the tree and saw King Shahrayar and his brother hiding in fear from the black demon. She forced them to lay with her or she would wake the demon and have him kill them. So, they laid with her and found out that she was tricking the demon that she was still a virgin. This part of the story shows how lustful the authors of The Thousand and One Nights saw women. The women in the chest, after sleeping with King Shahrayar and his brother, had slept with a hundred men without the demon knowing. King Shahrayar even says, “There is not a single chaste woman anywhere on the entire face of the earth,” (Thousand, 562). This can be translated as meaning that all women are naturally lustful and can’t stop from participating in lustful acts. Throughout most of The Thousand and One Nights women are depicted as extremely lustful

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