by Maria Tatar
One critic points out that Celie’s pen and needle revisit, revise, and rewrite the story of Philomela’s rape as well as the master narrative of women’s subordination in patriarchal cultures.32 But perhaps it makes sense to challenge the notion of Greek influence on modern fiction, as Toni Morrison did in 1989: “Finding or imposing Western influences in/on Afro-American literature has value, but when its sole purpose is to place value only where that influence is located it is pernicious.”33 The Greeks did not invent filicide, but “Medea” has become our shorthand for a mother who murders a child. The ancient world of the Greeks is credited (like it or not) with having produced the foundational text about that subject, with the result that Toni Morrison’s Beloved becomes an adaptation of Euripides’s Medea rather than what it is: one link in a golden, global network connecting all stories.
What Alice Walker fashions is a counter-discourse to narratives about muting and silencing women. Her work is something of a liminal text, drawing on the legacy of the mythical past with its silenced women engaging in handicrafts, yet also looking forward to a time when speech, storytelling, writing, and revelation become powerful instruments for women. Scheherazade, a woman whose name has become synonymous with storytelling, will serve, once again, as our guide, this time as we enter the universe of women using words to pass on stories, with tales about telling tales and about the power of finding and using your voice.
Scheherazade: Storytelling, Survival, and Social Change
Scheherazade has always been a mystery, and we do not know exactly how she became a collecting point for a vast ensemble of texts from the Middle East to the Far East. She first materializes in the frame tale for The Thousand and One Nights, which made its way from Persian to Arabic manuscripts in the second half of the eighth century CE, and then she migrated into cultures all over the world.34 Like Europa, Persephone, Danaë, and Arachne, she is the product of a collective imagination shaped in large part by men of letters. But unlike the figures of Greek mythology, she has a voice, a powerful instrument that secures her survival and changes her culture. In what follows I will move from the mute and muted women of Greek mythology, whose efforts to broadcast misdeeds are severely limited, to folkloric inventions that equip women with voices. Scheherazade, alone of all her kind, stands at the head of a procession of women who begin to deploy narrative in strategic ways—using it to protect themselves from peril, to speak truth to power, and to transform their social worlds.
If you read The Thousand and One Nights as a child, you probably did not have access to an unexpurgated version. I can still see, in my mind’s eye, the magnificent gold-embossed spines of a multivolume Arabian Nights in the foyer of a childhood friend’s home. Those volumes were among the few books verboten for their racy content (Balzac’s Droll Stories were on that same shelf), off-limits to the teenagers in the house. Of course, the teens in the family all tried, with varying degrees of success, to see what was inside them. What is tastier than forbidden fruit? Editions of The Thousand and One Nights designed for children not only omit some tales and bowdlerize others but also eliminate the shocking details of the frame narrative, with its account of lascivious women, sexual intrigue, and courtyard orgies.35
Scheherazade may be celebrated as a cultural heroine, but in her stories womenfolk in general are revealed as dissipated and deceitful. The collection’s frame narrative is anything but child friendly and stands as a stark reminder that what we think of as fairy tales for the young were in fact what John Updike correctly called “the television and pornography of an earlier age.”36 The Thousand and One Nights starts with accounts of Shah Zaman and Shahriyar and their spectacularly failed marriages. Women’s promiscuity, we learn, knows no bounds. In a culture that placed strict restrictions on women’s mobility and constrained their social conduct in severe ways, we encounter wives who are boldly lascivious and who routinely engage in sexual mischief.
Shah Zaman of Samarkand declares his plan to visit his brother Shahriyar, but turns back home mid-journey to retrieve a gift, only to find his wife in flagrante. There she is, “lying on a couch in the arms of a black slave” (the tales have been charged with both racism and misogyny) and, in a rage, he kills the “foul” woman and her lover. When Shah Zaman arrives at his brother’s palace, he does not immediately share the story of his wife’s “treachery,” and his wretched mood keeps him from going out to hunt with his brother. Brooding in the palace, he witnesses an even more flagrant example of dissolute behavior in his brother’s garden: “As Shah Zaman was looking, a door opened and out came twenty slave girls and twenty slaves, in the middle of whom was Shahriyar’s very beautiful wife. They came to a fountain where they took off their clothes and the women sat with the men. ‘Mas’ud,’ the queen called, at which a black slave came up to her and, after they had embraced each other, he lay with her, while the other slaves lay with the slave girls and they spent their time kissing, embracing, fornicating and drinking wine until the end of the day.”37
Misery loves company, and Shah Zaman finally tells all, whereupon the two betrayed brothers leave the kingdom in search of other victims of women’s treachery. Their first stop is with a jinni who keeps “a slender girl, radiant as the sun” imprisoned in a trunk. While the jinni is sleeping, the girl beckons to the brothers and tells them they must “satisfy her” or she will betray them to the jinni: “Take me as hard as you can or else I’ll wake him up.” Reluctantly, the brothers agree, “taking turns with her.” As a final sign of her depravity, she demands to add rings from Shah Zaman and Shahriyar to her collection, which numbers anywhere from 98 to the 570 listed in Edward Lane’s translation, as well as in the later translation by Richard Burton.38 In a coda to the episode, wisdom is extracted from the tale with the following verse:
Do not put your trust in women
Or believe their covenants. . . .
They make a false display of love,
But their clothes are stuffed with treachery.
Take a lesson from the tale of Joseph,
And you will find some of their tricks.
Do you not see that your father, Adam,
Was driven from Eden thanks to them?
Women are not only untrustworthy, false, treacherous, and deceitful but also responsible for the Fall. Never mind the duplicity of the jinni, who abducted the young woman when she was betrothed to another, and now keeps her under lock and key, save for a few moments of liberty when he is sleeping.39 Eve, too, gave in to temptation. (No mention is made of how Eve does nothing more than commit the “sin” of eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and offering some of it to Adam.) There is more, and in an unnerving addendum, we learn that a poet has written:
I am a lover, but what I have done
Is only what men did before me in old days.
A true cause for wonder would be a man
Never before trapped by the allure of women.40
In other words, men have engaged in the very behavior women display, and they also perpetually succumb to temptation. Yet it is never really their fault, for they are constantly “trapped” by seductive women. In some ways the captive girl’s behavior does nothing more than remind the two brothers as well as the audience listening to their story about a brazen double standard that sees depravity in behaviors that are not sanctioned or censured when men engage in them.
What about Scheherazade? She enters the picture three years after Shah Zaman and Shahriyar have returned home, once the two have found a man who has suffered a fate worse than their own. Shahriyar’s first act on arrival in his palace is to behead the queen who betrayed him before his adventures with Shah Zaman commenced. He then slays all the slaves who cavorted with her. Finally, as noted earlier, he crafts a plan with razor-sharp consequences. Each evening he will take a new bride, and, after a night of pleasure, an execution will follow. The practice commences that night, and for three years it continues, until soon, “no nubile girls” are left in the city. It is then that Scheherazade volu
nteers.
Who is Scheherazade? First, she is the daughter of the man in charge of procuring brides for Shahriyar and also tasked with dispatching them. Scheherazade’s father would have been all too familiar with the daily ritual established by the king; indeed he is a part of its most horrifying aspects. Oddly, Scheherazade, for all her wisdom, seems unaware of her father’s daily mission and his connection to the disappearing virgins in her city. Unshaken by Shahriyar’s vengeful fury, she insists on marrying him: “Either I shall live or else I shall be a ransom for the children of the Muslims and save them from him.”41 Both strategic thinker and compassionate idealist, she is a woman ready for action or self-sacrifice.
How did Scheherazade become a master storyteller? The answer may have less to do with immersion in an oral storytelling culture than in a passion for reading. Scheherazade is, in fact, a voracious reader: “She had read books and histories, accounts of past kings and stories of earlier peoples, having collected, it was said, a thousand volumes of these, covering peoples, kings and poets.” As one critic points out, she was revered as a reader and a scholar, a “bookish” heroine, whose natural habitat is the library, not the king’s bed. Then she combines the two “by turning the king’s bed into a place of storytelling.”42 And what kinds of stories does she tell? There are tales of demons and monsters, thieves and harlots, morality and depravity, pirates and beasts, adventures and puzzles, all manner of tales, as might be expected in a volume of its size. Through storytelling, Scheherazade not only saves her own life but also transforms Shahriyar from a tyrannical despot into an enlightened and compassionate ruler. The cliff-hangers she crafts “educate” the king by exposing him to the entire spectrum of human behavior, arousing his desire to know not just “What’s next?” but also “Why?” She tells stories, but she also creates a partnership in which there is much to talk about, so much so that the king presumably comes to a better understanding of how to rule.
Scheherazade is not just a mystery but also a paradox. Her aim is to cure the king of his misogyny. But she tells him stories that seem designed to strengthen his conviction that women are licentious, wily, and crafty. Take the story “The Porter and the Three Ladies,” in which three wealthy sisters invite a porter they have hired to join them in the city of Baghdad for a day of carousing. After they have wined and dined the porter, each of the sisters disrobes, sits on the porter’s lap, and, pointing to her private parts, asks, “What is this?” The porter plays the same naughty game, asking the sisters to name his anatomical counterpart. Or consider the “Tale of the Husband and the Parrot,” with a parrot murdered for speaking the truth about “a woman of perfect beauty and grace” who engages in double deceptions. Then there is “The Semi-Petrified Prince,” in which an enchantress married to a prince engages in hanky-panky with one of the slaves in the household. When her husband discovers the adultery, she casts a spell on him, turning the lower half of his body into marble, and transforming his kingdom into a lake and its former inhabitants into fish.
When the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk reflected on his reading of The Thousand and One Nights, he recalled how impressed he was, as a child, with its “lies, tricks and deceptions, the lovers and betrayers, the disguises, twists and surprises.”43 But reading it in his twenties, he was “troubled” by much in the stories. “Men and women were perpetually at war,” he observed. “I was unnerved by their never-ending round of games, tricks, deceptions and provocations.” And most important, the volume sent the message that “no woman can ever be trusted—you can’t believe a thing they say—they do nothing but trick men with their little games and ruses.” The Thousand and One Nights, he concluded, was the product of a culture in which men feared women and the power of their “sexual charms.”44 Only later in life did he find the volume to be a “treasure chest,” a book that shows us “what life is made of.” His recollections are revealing, for they remind us that Scheherazade’s wisdom may turn less on converting Shahriyar to a new value system than on recruiting him as a conversation partner in the interstices of the stories, gaps to which we are not privy, but that we fill in as we read. Stories like the ones in The Thousand and One Nights fire us up and demand processing through conversations about the messages they send.
Like Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scheherazade has a dual mission. She is no mere “clever survivor,” but also a “transforming agent.”45 Philomela weaves the story of her rape into a tapestry not only to exact revenge but also to model ways of airing what has been silenced by a culture. Both Philomela and Scheherazade begin as victims, but the arc of their stories takes them to a position enabling them to speak for themselves and to a culture in ways that let them live on in story and song.
The Danish artist Kay Nielsen’s illustration for the frame tale to The Thousand and One Nights reminds us that Scheherazade, for all her heroic vitality, remains small and weak. Seated before the king, she is naked, exposed literally and figuratively, the target not only of his gaze but also of his regal power. Made to appear superhuman through his oversized turban and flowing royal robes in Nielsen’s image, Shahriyar may fall under the spell of Scheherazade’s stories, but he remains in charge nonetheless. And Scheherazade looks more like Hestia, goddess of the hearth, than Aphrodite or Athena. Who will not conclude, while contemplating Nielsen’s rendering of the relationship between the two, that Scheherazade becomes a figure affiliated with submission and domesticity?46 Her voice and her body are placed in the service of the king.
Scheherazade may lack the mobility and appetites of male cultural heroes, but she transcends the narrow domestic space of the bedroom through her expansive narrative reach and embraces bold defiance as she sets about remaking the values of the culture she inhabits, using words alone. She not only arouses curiosity but also turns herself into a storytelling transvaluation machine, for she understands at the deepest level that words can change you. Behind her transformative art lurks the ruse of the disempowered, and Scheherazade, despite the physical constraints placed on her, uses language in ways that reveal what the philosopher J. L. Austin referred to as its “perlocutionary” power, its ability to persuade, teach, or inspire. Scheherazade operates at a level that is culturally productive and also biologically reproductive. Creative and procreative, she produces children with Shahriyar and also sets the stage in powerful ways for the literary progeny that spring from her story—the many female storytellers whom we will encounter in the chapters that follow.
Scheherazade will always remain a mystery, a paradox productive in its power to generate an infinite regress of conversational sites. Each time we read The Thousand and One Nights, we discover new facets to her identity, features that challenge us to rethink how we once viewed her. Just as Orhan Pamuk revised his understanding of the Nights with successive readings, so we modify, adjust, and fine-tune our appreciation for a master storyteller who continues to keep us waiting, breathlessly, for the next installment of her enchantments.
The Compulsion to Confess: Victims and Stones of Patience
In one version of the story about Philomela, Procne, and Tereus, Philomela does not lose the power of speech. Instead, she uses her voice to tell her story, but in the form of a lament rather than a communication. When an eavesdropper hears her, the story of her rape gets out. Before investigating women’s speech—along with rumor, gossip, and storytelling—in the next chapter, I want to explore a story that reveals just how it is that murder (or other shocking forms of criminal behavior) will out. The compulsion to confess and tell all affects not just wrongdoer but also victim, as folktales from around the world tell us.
For centuries, women in fairy tales have made use of veiled speech and clever ruses as they prowled around the margins of storytelling worlds. They have engaged in a practice one expert calls “idionarration,” talking to themselves as much as to others, using words to get their story “out there,” even when, or perhaps especially when, no one seems to be paying attention.47 Like children in fairy tales, t
hey are often silenced, by fathers, brothers, and other male relatives, and in some cases even by creatures exceptionally low in the food chain, but also by those high in divine hierarchies.
I will look first at some stories in a collection published by the Brothers Grimm, two German scholars and statesmen determined to use folklore as a way to consolidate cultural identity at a time when their country had been occupied by French forces. What began as a project with nationalistic aspirations turned into the creation of a storytelling repertoire that went global to create a shared body of folklore with a recognition factor far beyond the Grimms’ wildest dreams of success. The tales were translated into English soon after the publication of the two volumes in 1812 and 1815 and quickly traveled to England and to the United States, where they became bestsellers and began to rival domestic lore. Then along came Walt Disney, who drew on the Grimms’ fairy tales to make the first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When the film was released in 1937 (and subsequently shown in forty-six countries), the New York Times anointed it a “folk-film,” a movie that marked the beginning of a new transnational canon of folklore: “As folktales were once passed from tribe to tribe and nation to nation, so that few societies have lacked something resembling the Cinderella story, or the Aladdin story, so we may have folk-films.” Without any misgivings about the sinister side to this corporate takeover of a heterogeneous folkloric heritage, the reporter cheered on the process of standardization and commercialization.