Shahrzad’s Storytelling in Succession of Thousand and One Nights’ Tales

Abstract

One Thousand and One Nights is one of the multinational literary works in which women have an obvious active presence. The protagonist is an astute and shrewd woman whose wise stories lead despotic king to a state of self-consciousness. Shahrzad’s storytelling in thousand and one nights and comparison of the themes of the stories via their morphological and constituting components show that she has tactfully stepped in rescuing her female compatriots and performing this humanitarian task. Studying the stories according to the correlation between their components has remarkably assisted the perception of Shahrzad’s storytelling dexterity. This study shows that the procedure in “1001 nights” stories is the repetition of two episodes in the entry which is the story of Shahriar and his brother Shahzaman. This projection takes a gradual development in a way that in some stories women’s betrayal is reflected (including Shahriar and Shahzaman’s traitor wives) and in other stories storytelling is done by one of the characters to save the lives of others (such as Sahrzad’s storytelling). Women’s being in action is depicted by Shahrzad and other narrators as powerful, cunning and magical characters which makes a skilful proportion in storytelling and brings a gradual rise in the status of women after 1001 nights. Even at the end of the stories and in her short speech with Shahriar, Shahrzad intelligently adopts a treatment behavior which exactly conforms to the principles of psychology.

Keywords

• “1001 nights”
• Shahrzad
• Morphology
• Treatment via Storytelling