Aladdin Inciting Event: The evil wizard Jafar seeks the absolute power contained in the lamp, but fails to obtain it. Submitted by Aaron McCausland. Sign Up Today Sign up to receive K.
Helping Writers Become Authors Welcome! The Story Structure Database is an archive of books and movies, recording all their major plot points. Unsure of a structural point in a story? Want to browse examples of story structure? Click here for more information on getting the most out of the database. Summary A poor thief obtains a magical lamp after meeting the princess of the land.
The genie of the lamp will grant him three wishes. Most of these qualities however, are absences of certain traits that would classify the work as a conservative piece. I am not sure if this means the book or movie is progressive; just because something is lacking a characteristic of one classification does not mean it can be classified as the other.
There are progressive elements that you can trace through all the books, much like the conservative elements that were discussed earlier. The stories set out to give power to those who do not have it, like Aladdin. However, the stories do this by making Aladdin a prince, or a figure of authority.
In other words, the stories are not actually counteracting the way society is arranged, only giving Aladdin a higher status in that society.
However, at the end of the books we are convinced that those who originally do not have power, Aladdin, should have power. This shows that Aladdin is telling his mother what to do, even though she is the parent, and thus the figure of authority. Another progressive element found throughout the books is that Aladdin is not a good person.
This is unsettling to us as readers, because traditionally we want the hero to be a good character that can be looked up too. We want our children to believe that by being good and working hard, you can do anything. Also, we want our children to have good role models. Having the hero of the story, the character we want to win, be a miserable good for nothing, who gets what he wants through magic is unsettling, and also very progressive.
When looking at The Arabian Nights Entertainment , there were many conservative and progressive elements. First off, this is the only book which was not written expressly for children. Also, because it was not originally written for children the text does not simplify the language nor does it try to hide the fact that Aladdin is a bad person.
As discussed earlier, Aladdin is introduced in the stories as an idle, careless boy who was no help to his poor widowed mother. This is the first and rather obvious sign that Aladdin is a bad person. The second sign comes later on when Aladdin is lured into the cave of riches with the promise of great treasures. This tells us that Aladdin is a greedy boy, and since greed is one of the seven deadly sins, also a bad person.
A third time that we are lead to believe Aladdin is not a good person is when he does something quite awful to the princess and her new husband. When Aladdin discovers this he has the Genie bring him the princess and her husband in their bed.
He then has the genie take the man to a swamp and leave him there until daybreak. Aladdin sleeps with the princess, and at daybreak the couple was put back into the castle as if nothing had happened. This practice continued until the young man left the princess, refusing to be married to her. We have analysed the story of Aladdin itself in detail here.
Scheherazade, in a cunning move devised to save her life, decided to start telling the sultan a story, but each night would break off in the middle of the narrative … so the sultan would keep her alive until the next night, when he would find out what happened at the end of the story. Hence the title, One Thousand and One Nights. Or is it? Is this true, or is this — as is so often the case here at Interesting Literature — actually only what we think is true? For starters, where does Aladdin live?
Not in the Middle East. In the earliest version of the story we have, Aladdin is a poor youth living on the streets of China. Nor is he an orphan: in the earliest versions of the story, Aladdin is not an orphaned street urchin but a lazy boy living at home with his mother. As Krystyn R.
She observes:. Composers and librettists sometimes chose Persia as the setting for the tale because One Hundred and One Arabian Nights was from that region of the world and, like China, was a popular imaginative space for Americans and Europeans. Okay, so where does Aladdin that is, the story come from?
Not from the One Thousand and One Nights. Or at least, not really. The Aladdin story was added to the collection by a French translator, Antoine Galland, in the early eighteenth century. But, since Galland added it to his version, it has become arguably the most famous story not in the Arabian Nights. The reason we think of the story as one of the true-born Arabian Nights is that many of the characters in the tale of Aladdin are Arabian Muslims with Arabic names.
But Aladdin is Chinese … at least, he is if you go back to the known origins of the story. None of the three most famous stories from the Arabian Nights are actually, strictly speaking, from the Arabian Nights. So, what stories were actually in the original One Thousand and One Nights? The most famous — or perhaps that should be infamous — English translation of the Arabian Nights is undoubtedly that by Richard Burton — that is, Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer who led a fascinating life which we have summarised in five curious facts here.
Far from toning down the sexual suggestiveness of the Nights for his Victorian readers, Burton actually added information, including footnotes explaining Oriental sexual customs for his readers fittingly, Burton also translated the Kama Sutra into English. As a result, his translation had to be privately printed for paying subscribers, rather than published in the conventional manner.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Image: Aladdin and Jasmine by bubba-courtlz , on deviantart. Reblogged this on Crossing Cultures. Pingback: Jasmine ajhoffman1. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. He falls for the princess, he wants to marry her, he uses the genie to make it happen. This is because in earlier works, the princess is described to give off the scent of jasmine.
Disney just ran with it, and this is the kind of thing that happens when stories this old are retold, not stolen, Alaa, retold. And in retelling, things are often changed to reflect the time and audience of the period in which it is being told. The gist is the same in each version, but they are different enough to set each one apart. And if it matters to you to know the original Aladdin story, like Brian said, read it. Thanks for the great article. Thanks for the wonderfully detailed and useful comment, Paul — much appreciated.
And they wants any small thing to destroy our image and even our culture and stories. On thousands night and one night is arabian tales all of its are arabian not persian or Chinese or Indian. Aladdin, Alibaba, Jasmine and Genes all are arabians stories and names.
And this stories takes place in Baghdad in Abbasid era. Islamic Golden age. Perhaps you are correct. However, there is an entire region in China called XinJiang, where the environment is much like the Middle East. Their script, names, architecture, appearance, language, culture and religion are very similar to the Arabs.
You write in English, so therefore you must be English not Arab. Because the thing is its NOT a Chinese story. In the original story it was just set in China. In the original story there once was a evil guy who wanted a magical lamp, and he wanted it so badly, that he went all the way from Africa to China. This would be one of those exaggerated features for the readers to marvel at.
Aladdin was a Chinese boy with an Arabian name. The story was meant to be set in China but the narrator, who probably never set foot in China, just regarded China as you know, one of those countries no one knows about except from wild and probably fake stories so I can convieniently use this in my story.
As you said yourself, you are an Arab. You know your stories and folktales. But have you read ours? China has folktales and stories too, but I doubt that you have read any of them. Then go read up on the rest of the world. Though Galland never credited Diyab in his published translations of the Arabian Nights stories, Diyab wrote something of his own: a travelogue penned in the midth century.
In it, he recalls telling Galland the story of Aladdin. In that memoir, Diyab describes his own hard-knocks upbringing and the way he marveled at the extravagance of Versailles. This idea is hugely significant in the history of the story. For years, scholars thought that the rags-to-riches story of Aladdin might have been inspired by the plots of French fairy tales that came out around the same time, or that the story was invented in that 18th century period as a byproduct of French Orientalism, a fascination with stereotypical exotic Middle Eastern luxuries that was prevalent then.
The idea that Diyab might have based it on his own life — the experiences of a Middle Eastern man encountering the French, not vice-versa — flips the script. As a teenager Diyab had been an apprentice with one the great merchant families of the Levant, but he had been dismissed, ending his hopes of achieving success in the profitable textile trade of Aleppo. So Diyab ran away from home, and eventually met Lucas.
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