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Role of women in thousand and one nights and the city of ladies
The role of women in Canterbury tales
The role of women in Canterbury tales
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Women have played a significant role throughout time and this is portrayed in many works of literature, including Thousand and One Nights and the Canterbury Tales. In both of these works, women are shown to be very intelligent, experienced, manipulative, lovers, and fighters. Women since the beginning have been thought to be liars and both characters in Thousand and One Nights and the Canterbury Tales have all these characteristics and similar themes. The main characters are Shahrazad and the Wife of Bath, Shahrazad is fighting to live while the Wife of Bath is simply on a journey playing a story telling game. Although in very different situations they both have the same strengths and similar characteristics, and this adds up to show the role of women at the current time of the works and now.
In the Thousand and One Nights, Shahrazad tries to change the Kings ways of killing the woman he sleeps with the night before. She lies to him and begins to tell stories each night for the next three years. She manipulates him into wanting to hear these stories for three years, and they end up having kids and the King decides to let her live. Even though she lied it was for her life, and any man or woman would lie to protect themselves from death. Shahrazad was intelligent in saving her life and the rest of the women in her city. Her role was significant in saving the women and helping them be able to keep reproducing and repopulating. If she had not done what she had done, the King would have killed every woman resulting in no way of reproduction for his people. Many women throughout history shared the same strength and intelligence in getting their freedom or point across even to men. For example, wives of presidents would give them idea...
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...Bath and Shahrazad are very significant female characters who play important roles off of each other in two different but similar stories. Both women chose to use love to capture the power they wanted, although one being young and the other being of old age they received exactly what they desired in the end. Shahrazad is fighting to command the King into not killing her or anymore women in the city for his pleasure, and the Wife of Bath is playing a game while journeying to her pilgrimage with a group of people. Their similarities are in their manipulation of men, lies to protect what they desire or love, and strength in their situations in the stories. If these women had not been intelligence, strong will, or pursuit of what they desired, Shahrazad would have died after her one night with the King and the Wife of Bath would be poor and miserable in her marriage.
Vaněčková, Vladislava. “Women in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: Woman as a Narrator, Woman in the Narrative.” Luminarium.Org. Anniina Jokinen, 6 Sept. 2012. 5 May. 2014
... influential women in the history of Europe. She served as an example to women during a period where there was an increasing development in the female’s role in society. She also owned land which was given to her by her father when he died. That was very unusual as land were not normally given to women. When she married Louis, the king of France, she went with him on the second crusade organizing his policy.
Throughout history, women were not always well regarded by men. Because of this, most societies treated their women as second class citizens. The stories from, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, illustrate how the portrayal of women affected Muslim society in the Ninth century. Sometimes women were seen as mischievous, unfaithful temptresses. Other times they were depicted as obedient, simple minded slaves looking to please their master. With the use of charm, sex and trickery, they used the labels that they were put in, to their advantage; demonstrating that women during this century were clever, smart, and sly.
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind; Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Upon first glance, these classics of literary legend appear to have nothing in common. However, looking closer, one concept unites these three works of art. At the center of each story stands a woman--an authentically portrayed woman. A woman with strengths, flaws, desires, memories, hopes, and dreams. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara, and Williams’ Blanche DuBois are beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated women: strong yet fragile, brazen yet subtle, carnal yet pure. Surviving literature that depicts women in such a realistic and moving fashion is still very rare today, and each piece of that unique genre must be treasured. But unlike those singular works, there lived one man who built a career of writing novels that explored the complex psyches of women. Somehow, with each novel, this author’s mind and heart act as a telescope gazing into an unforgettable portrait of a lady. Through the central female characters in his novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence illuminates dimensions of a woman’s soul not often explored in literature.
She written by H Rider Haggard is a novel about two men, Holly and his adoptive son, Leo set out to search for a mysterious queen, Ayesha who killed her lover, Kallikrates. After finding the queen, both of them hopelessly fall in love with her and remain in her control not until she dies. Her beauty is legendary that no man can look up upon her and keep his own will. Arabian Nights is a collection of Arabic short story told by a woman, Shahrazad who willingly to marry her lustful King. The King marries a virgin woman every night and kills them the next day because he is once being cheated by his late wife but not until he is married to Shahrazad. Her generous nature to save other women in the kingdom that motivates her to the marriage. The dominant themes in the two novels are heroism, courage and ever-present sense of danger. Ayesha and Shahrazad are two different women in different situations. Both of these characters have shown the themes of female authority and feminine behaviour but in their own ways. Feminism can be explained in a very simple way that women are equals to men which means that they are as intelligent, as competent, as brave and as morally responsible (Decter 45). Ayesha is a terrifying and dominant figure uses her beauty to seduce and have power over men while Shahrazad uses her intelligence by telling tales to teach the King lessons. Most of female characters in the tales also represent femininity as they have power over male characters. They are both viewed as heroes in the stories. The similarity in them is they uses their femininity as a threat to the masculinity of male characters in the novel and become the causes of the male characters’ downfall.
Both stories have a centralized theme of love and the female characters in both of the stories use love and sexual desires for their own personal gain. However, between the two stories, Alison in “The Wife of Bath” is by far more cynical.
... subjects such as literature, medicine, and philosophy. By knowing all this, Shahrazad is able to come up with a brilliant plan and uses it in a cunning way so that she is able to convince the king to cease killing the women. By use of sexual advancements, sly stories, and the help of her sister, Dinarzad, she is able to successfully follow through with her plan. A main factor driving her is her compassion and drive to help other people in need. The Thousand and One Nights is an intriguing story that will keep readers on their toes, and like King Shahrayar, keep coming back for the rest of the story.
Due to traditional stereotypes of women, literature around the world is heavily male-dominant, with few female characters outside of cliché tropes. Whenever a female character is introduced, however, the assumption is that she will be a strong lead that challenges the patriarchal values. The authors of The Thousand and One Nights and Medea use their female centered stories to prove their contrasting beliefs on the role of women not only in literature, but also in society. A story with a female main character can be seen as empowering, but this is not always the case, as seen when comparing and contrasting Medea and The Thousand and One Nights.
The Wife of Bath represents the "liberal" extreme in regards to female stereotypes of the Middle Ages. Unlike most women being anonymous during the Middle Ages, she has a mind of her own and voices herself. Furthermore, she thinks extremely highly of herself and enjoys showing off her Sunday clothes whenever the opportunity arises. She intimidates men and women alike due to the power she possesses. Because of her obnoxious attitude Chaucer makes her toothless, fat and large. Doubtlessly, she is very ugly, almost to the point of "not-presentable. This to me shows how Chaucer depicts what men don't want. The Prioress, on the other hand, serves as a foil to the Wife of Bath. Chaucer describes her as "tender-hearted" who cannot bear the sight of pain or physical suffering. She will cry at the thought of a dog dying. It could represent that she has a frail soul with low tolerance for pain and suffering. The latter description carries over into the modern stereotypes about women as skittish and afraid members of society who need to be cared for.
There is great concern presented in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath story that women are painted in a negative light as a result of men having written these classic stories; it is argued that women would have authored these stories differently and in such a way that women would be perceived in a different light. The purpose of this paper is to review The Knight’s Tale as it is found in the Canterbury Tales and establish whether Hippolyta is portrayed in a negative, positive, or neutral light.
In the modern world women work, vote, run for office and the list goes on. In most aspects, women are equal to men. However, this was not always the case. In centuries past, women were not viewed as being equal to men socially, intellectually, or politically and were thought incapable of accomplishing anything of value. Consequently, many cultures held the view that women were possessions whose only purpose was to be subservient to men. The view of women as mere objects is evident in various works of literature throughout the ages. Two classic works of literature that exemplify this are The Thousand and One Nights and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. Despite being set in different eras and within different cultures, The Tale of Genji and The Thousand and One Nights share the common theme of viewing women as mere objects. Women only serve to fulfill the desires and expectations of men, differing only in that Shahrazad, the female protagonist of The Thousand and One Nights, manages to rise above the limited expectations of a male dominated society.
In The Canterbury Tales Wife of Bath’s Tale, the author incorporates major events in the text that relate to power in many different ways. In addition, in the text the author illustrates the sovereignty that women have over man in various ways. Furthermore, there is power in knowledge because with knowledge there is freedom. Also, in the text a character loses power over the external events that occurring in their lives. In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, the author illustrates a woman’s power through authority, marriage, and punishment.
Geoffrey Chaucer, and English writer and civil servant, began writing his most famous work The Canterbury Tales in 1386 (Chaucer iii). The story is about a group of pilgrims who journey together to Canterbury to seek the shrines of St. Thomas á Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was killed by order of Henry II in 1170 (1). During this pilgrimage, each character is introduced and is given a chance to tell a story to pass the time. In “The Knight’s Tale,” and “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Chaucer represents two very different type of medieval women by representing women who differ in power over men and virtues.
The Portrayal of Women in American Literature Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different way than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may have represented his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays her as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's, The Great Gatsby, the main female character, Daisy Buchanan, is portrayed by, Nick, the narrator, only by her superficial qualities.
The lesson Shahrazad tries to teach King Shahrayar is that not all women are alike. The actions of one woman should not cause punishment to be dulled out to other women. Shahrazad tells this story to change the Kings mind about looking at women as less than human. The king must learn to look at each woman as her own self with her own story to tell and should be treated accordingly.