Women in the Canterbury Tales and the Arabian Nights: Parallels and Contrasts

Abstract

This study identified the values and virtues, weaknesses, and vices of the twenty-one significant women characters from The Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales. It further investigated how the other men and women in the tales treated them. Moreover, this study examined the gender roles women portrayed in the tales and identified similar and contrasting characteristics displayed by women characters. This study employed a qualitative research design using textual analysis, focusing on the woman characters of the Canterbury Tales and the Arabian Nights, and employing Aristotle’s Mimesis and De Beauvoir’s theory on feminism. The study enumerated all the twenty-one women characters, and their actions, descriptions and thoughts were treated and analyzed using a table. Based on the analysis, the major values and virtues exhibited and shared by women from the two tales are magnanimity, fearlessness, confidence, intelligence, courage, self-sacrifice, forbearance, dutifulness, kindness, bravery, faithfulness, and submissiveness. The common weakness is lustfulness. As to how men treated women subjects, the findings of the study show that women are found to be: treated as sexual objects even when they are worshipped and adored, thus trivialized; and idealized, as reflected from the virtues and values that is inherently embedded to their womanhood. In Chaucer’s tales there are some instances of women unfaithfulness to a husband. While, in the Islamic tales, the instance of lustfulness is only showed by an evil Queen who is almost dehumanized because of her supernatural attribute. As regards the gender roles of women, only two women depict their duties as nurturers. Other women perform in sword fighting, while others excel in their display of wisdom, faith, and self-restraint. Overall, these two tales presented the diversified nature and individuality of women which prevail amidst a similar societal culture where they grew up and nurtured. With the representation of women characters in the Arabian Nights, this study found that the women concept of the Arab folk as early as the 12^th century, qualifies the women characters as feminist ideals as they exhibited power over men through using their strengths in the battlefield. They are the transcendental women envisioned by de Beauvoir. And they surprisingly exist in this age-old tales which was supposed to picture women as the second sex-the inessential. However, they also portray the stereotypical women who served as nurturer and as sexual objects to men. Chaucer’s tales likewise characterize women in a balanced scale. Some of Chaucer’s women characters are viewed as sexual objects, thus, trivialized. However, he also depicts women power in his tales in the form of extremely impressive virtues that these women characters possess. On the whole, women characters in this study are not discriminated. They instead picture some instances of transcendence which is the clamor of the feminists advocate.