The lady and her five suitors - a 1001 nights

The Lady and Her Five Suitors – A 1001 Nights
The Lady And Her Five Suitors is a story from the collection “ A 1001 Nights” that has a key character as a woman, a merchant’s daughter and married to a husband who traveled quite a lot. From the beginning of the text, it is easy to pick the trickery character of the lady way from the time her husband leaves to a far country and stays there for long. For pure ennui, the woman is consecutively in love with a young man who is also a merchant’s son and they are exceedingly in love.
However, on one particular day, the lad engages in a dispute with another man who files a complaint with the police chief against the youth leading to his imprisonment. On receiving the news, she nearly loses her wits. She arises, don herself with her richest attire and perambulates to the household of the police chief. She greets him and presents to him a written petition that purports that the lad had been imprisoned wrongfully. She claims that the youth was her provider and the only one who would come in to her where she then appeals to the mercies of the police chief to have him released. To this point, the lady has used deception, and she uses her dressing and donning to lure the police chief into succumbing to her wishes. It is easy to see her line of trickery in saying “.. and I have none other to come into me..” (Byatt), which appears like a sexual appeal in that she has no one to come into her, making the chief to start thinking in those lines.
On reading the piece of paper, the magistrate casts an eye on this women and immediately falls in love with her, a classical reaction we find in all her five suitors. She has learned of her charm on men, and she uses it to trick her way through to have them make decisions to her favor. When the magistrate preempts that she has to come in to his place, she uses wits, tricking the magistrate again to come into her lodging, as she would do to all her five suitors. She then leaves leaving his heart entirely taken with love for her.
She then proceeds to the Kazi of that city to present her case. The woman leaks of cunningness and goes ahead to protest the arrest of the lad, but this time, she says it’s her brother. Sure of her capabilities to mesmerize men, she airs her complaints and as expected, the Kazi casts his eyes on her and falls in love with her, even offering that he would, out of his purse, pay the fine imposed on the woman’s brother. On the request that she comes in, she gives him a date in a place and at a time the same as with the magistrate. She then goes to the Wazir, The king, and a carpenter, doing the same charm and tricking all of them to cooperate to have the youth released. When they all arrive, one by one, she tricks them into entering the cabinet for a hiding every time there is a knock, and she thereby successfully brought all the state’s chief officers. She took the release letter for her lover, went and got her freed, and they fled. When they were finally released from the cabinet, the chief officers all laughed and sent for clothes from their folks because the woman also took their clothes. She had pulled a trick on all the five of them and had run off with her lover.
The woman has displayed a great level of trickery to have her lover freed throughout the story. The height of her trickery character is when she lands all the state’s chiefs in the cabin.
The entire story is built on deceptions and her trickery that she uses on men who have desire for her, and it supports the hypothesis of cunning and trickery being a central life facet in the civilizations that evolved these stories.
Works cited
Byatt, A. S. The Arabian nights: Tales from a thousand and one nights. Modern Library, 2009.