Male-Female Relationships In The Thousand And One Nights

Heptameron, Story 8 and The Thousand and One Nights were both brilliantly written. These works portray male-female relationships in there own unique way. This essay will discuss how the male-female relationships are presented, and why they are presented that way. In the story Heptameron, Story 8, there is a unique male-female relationship between the wife and the husband. In this story, the wife does have respect from others, however, it is still male-dominant. The wife tries to deceive her husband by making him believe he had gone to bed with the chambermaid, “Now the good lady of the house, who was very much in love with her husband, had often occasion to suspect him, and was therefore rather pleased to be one up on him, and to be able to show him that she had found out what he was up to”(de Navarre, 2248). However, her plans do not go accordingly. Although she does not know the truth, her husband knows and decides to keep the secret in order to uphold his wife’s honor, “The husband was branched as a cuckold without his wife having done a single thing to disgrace

In the story, not only is Shahrazad portrayed as intelligent, but her stories also serve to educate the king about woman. In the first few stories we can see that the woman are portrayed as destructive. For example, “Meanwhile, my wife grew jealous of my mistress and my son…In my absence my wife, this cousin of mine, learned soothsaying and magic and cast a spell on my son and turned him into a young bull”(Puchner, 1760-1761). Later in Sharazad’s stories we can see that the woman are becoming less chaotic and bring peace. this is especially true when the third old man starts his tale. In The Thousand and One Nights, the male-female relationships are extremely important to the main story and help educate the king. It helps him understand that not all woman are bad, untrustworthy and