Posted by Amarissa on October 23, 20011 at 13:08:21:
I've been thinking more about Scheherezade, that good, sweet girl, and I thought I'd share my thoughts ...
So what can we say that we know about Scheherezade's story? The pitiless Persian King Shahryar found his wife to be unfaithful and killed her. The experience convinced him that all women were faithless, and so he vowed to take a fresh virgin bride to his bed every night and put her to death in the morning before she had a chance to betray him. This he did, night after night, for years -- an endless procession of young brides passing through his bed, destined each to pleasure him for a few hours and then die in the morning.
Shahryar had killed a hundreds of girls this way, and showed no sign of relenting, and his chief minister, Jafar, began having difficulty finding enough new brides to supply the royal bed. The most beautiful and eligible girls had been killed early on, and those who were still alive had fled the country if they could. It became harder and harder to find fresh virgins fine enough for the king to deflower and kill. When a thousand girls had been killed, he began to fear for his own fate if he failed to produce the required nightly sacrifice.
At this point Jafar's own daughter, Scheherezade, stepped forward. Scheherezade was the most beautiful, intelligent, and charming girl in the kingdom (even before the other girls were mostly eliminated). She had read a thousand books of history, and committed the works of all the poets to heart. She had studied the arts, the sciences, and philosophy. She was polite, witty, and poised. She was a little like a heroine in a Jane Austen novel, but on a more epic level. She also loved her father dearly, and wished to spare him the dilemma of having to supply more victims to the king or else incurring the royal wrath himself. So she offered herself to the king, knowing that along with her virginity he would take her life. Her father tried mightily to dissuade her, but she would not be turned aside from her path. She went to the king and offered herself; they were married that day and she came to his bed after dinner to do her duty and meet her fate.
After he took her, Scheherezade spoke kindly to the king; she assured him of her devotion and betrayed no fear of what the morning would bring. She made love with the king all night, enthusiastically and inventively, and found that his gifts in that realm were most astounding. In the intervals while he rested, she entertained him with stories and legends she had learned from her vast reading.
Pitiless as he was, King Sharyar spared her in the morning in order to allow her to continue her story that night, and then spared her the following morning for the same reason, and so on, for a thousand and one nights of delightful lovemaking and incomparable storytelling. Here the traditional accounts tell us that he renounced his vow, made Scheherezade queen, and lived with her happily ever after … much as the Book of Job adds an epilogue to the effect that God relented, revealed Job’s sufferings to be a test, and rewarded him for his faithfulness and loyalty. Any clear-eyed reading of Job, however, shows that the epilogue was added later, by different authors and in a different style, in order to try to change the burden of the main story, which was one of submission to fate. A similar, more modern, example is Handel’s oratorio Jephtha, where he introduces an angel who intervenes at the last moment to prevent the Israelite commander from sacrificing his daughter Iphis; while the original version in the Hebrew Book of Judges states unequivocally that Jephtha “carried out his vow with her that he had vowed” after granting her two months’ reprieve to “bewail her virginity.” (Montéclair’s opera on the same story takes the same approach as Handel, while Carissimi’s oratorio focuses on the tragic aspect and has Iphis killed by her father.)
Stories from ancient times do not always follow patterns we find appropriate; ancient authors saw life differently. Iphegenia is sacrificed to Artemis by her father Agamemnon on the shore of the Aegean in return for a fair wind to sail to Troy; she submits willingly, out of concern for family honor and patriotic devotion to the Greek cause. Later Euripides substituted a deer for the virgin girl (à la Abraham and Isaac), but the Homeric version is hundreds of years older and completely remorseless. In the original story, her willingness to die is only meaningful and compelling because she has to go through with it. In light of such considerations, the story of Scheherezade as made popular in the nineteenth century by Richard Francis Burton may stand for an older version of the story where Scheherezade is not spared by the King Shahryar after all, but put to death like her sisters who have gone before her in the king’s bed.
Certainly her ability to tell stories, and the education and breeding that gave rise to it, moved the king to keep her alive for a while, while she entertained him with all the resources at her disposal. But she knew she would run out of stories one day, and one night – the thousand and first – after satisfying the king’s lust and her own, she told him her last story. Then she announced that there were no more stories to tell, and that it was time for the king to let her meet her fate. Remorseless, Shahryar rose from the bed and walked across the room to where his bow hung on the wall. Scheherezade followed him with her eyes, then as he turned to face her, she knelt on his bed. There she had experienced life at its fullest, and there she would now experience death. She was not afraid. With the casual gesture of a practiced warrior he notched the arrow and released it deep into her breast. As she lay dying on the love-tangled sheets, she whispered her love for him with her dying breath.
The king could never take another girl after Scheherezade, nor could he bear to rule after losing her. He cast off his royal clothes and left the palace before dawn, vanishing perhaps as a hermit in a foreign country, or maybe going mad and drowning himself. The disappearance of the cruel king was a great blessing for the people, but Scheherezade’s death was mourned deeply by all, from her father to the father of every child, and not excepting those whose daughters had perished before her. But from that day on, no girl needed to fear being taken to the king’s bed and murdered. Her sacrifice was the gift of a full life to every father’s daughter.