Lisa Napell Dicksteen
EGL 374: European Fairy Tales
Final Paper Due:
Errors of Fact and Inference in Antoine Galland’s
“The Jealous Sisters and their Cadette”
While most school children, and the adults they grow into, can claim a passing acquaintance with the collection of tales known either as The Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights, few can, if questioned, relate any accurate information regarding its origin or intended readership. The majority of those willing to hazard a guess refer to the Grimm brothers’ collection and publication of the tales in nineteenth century Germany, or to some unknown author of vaguely European lineage who translated the tales from their original Arabic. Neither answer is entirely accurate. The tales, as we know them today, are so much a function of their translation and simultaneous adaptation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by the Frenchman Antoine Galland that there are scholars in this arena who conclude that he is their true creator.
The Thousand and one Nights, when presented to the contemporaneous eighteenth century European reader by Galland, sparked a passion for all things Oriental, or at least all things appearing Oriental. One of the things that interested Galland’s readers was the “sheer strangeness (5;3)” of the Oriental culture, about which most knew nearly nothing. In fact, modern scholars contend that the tales ended up imparting more cultural and socio-historical information about the French court of Louis XIV than they did about the actual goings on of the Persian sultanates they were meant to suggest.
Prior to the work of Galland, most of numerous tales that make up the Thousand and One Nights (henceforth referred to as Nights) and the death-defying frametale that surrounds and connects them were unfamiliar to Western European audiences. However, once the Nights arrived on the publishing scene, they were an immediate source of fascination and became a
“major and enduring collection of tales to expand and nourish European storytelling.
“Brilliantly crafted and conceived of as a single entity uniting the imaginative variety of its individual tales, [the Nights] epitomizes the frame tale form. Although individual plots and motifs from the collection entered the European storytelling tradition in the Middle Ages, it was not until Galland’s early eighteenth-century French translation that its full range of plots and narrative devices became familiar to European readers of the fantastic. (1; 2)”
According to Robert Irwin’s book The Arabian Nights: A Companion, which traces the oral and written history of the collection of tales that became Galland’s Nights, it was European interest in these stories that led to the production of the first text of the Nights to be printed in Arabic. This collection was printed in India in 1814-18 under the patronage of the East India Company’s College of Fort William, because the first printing press did not appear in the Arab world until 1821. This first Arab-language version of the Nights consisted of only the tales of the first 200 nights. After its release, however, there began to appear publications of the tales translated from Galland’s French into Arabic where they reached an entirely new audience of story readers, listeners, writers and tellers.
Galland, who was fluent in classical Greek and Latin, as well as modern Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, began working on his “translation, or, one could say ‘creation’ of The Thousand and One Nights (6; 827)” in the 1690s. The first work he published was “The Voyages of Sinbad,” in 1701. It was such a huge success that he immediately began working on translating and adapting a four-volume Arabic manuscript he had obtained during his travels. The final volume of his translations and adaptations was published posthumously by his sister in 1717, by which time “he had fostered a vogue for Oriental literature and had altered the nature of the literary fairy tale in Europe and North America. (6; 828)”
Not only did Galland embellish his translations, which have been called “more adaptations than literal translations,” by numerous scholars in this field, but he added eight tales for which there were no manuscripts: “The Tale of Sayn-Asnam,” “Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,” “Adventures of Khudadad and His Brothers,” “History of the Caliph’s Night Adventure,” “Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Story of Ali Khwajah and the Merchant of Baghdad,” “Adventures of Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Peribanu,” and “The Two Sisters Who Envied their Cadette” [also known as “The Jealous Sisters and Their Cadette”]. The provenance of some of these tales is thought to be Galland’s transcription of stories told to him from memory by Hanna Diab, a Maronite Christian Arab of his acquaintance, although scholars have concluded that Galland wrote some of these so-called “orphan tales” himself, using his knowledge of the Arab world and the other fairy tales he’d collected and translated. In either case, he clearly embellished and altered them with European fairy tale motifs and the cultural and sociological norms of his time. “Comparing the notes which Galland took from dictation with the final printed versions of the stories, it is clear that Galland took extraordinary liberties with the stories he received from Diab. (5;17)”
In addition to removing the poetry and the sex from the original tales, Galland took a series of tales in which the majority of remarkable or astonishing events are “attributed to strange and wonderful happenstance, each of which the text accounts for by citing Allah’s all-powerful and all-encompassing rule over the world and its inhabitants, (2;2)” and filled them with the “magically-mediated transformations (2:2)” his countrymen expected in their fairy tales. As a result of his interpretation and alteration of the original Syrian manuscripts, all the nineteenth century and post-ninteenth century versions of these tales, including Galland’s, include European fairy tale motifs that were not present in the original manuscripts.
Taking the orphan story “The Jealous Sisters and Their Cadette” as an example, one finds a number of glaring errors of fact or inference in even the most cursory modern reading. These errors went unnoticed by Galland’s intended audience for several reasons. First, he was a noted Arabist of his day, having collaborated on and published the Bibliothéque Orientale, the first encyclopedia of all things Islamic. This allowed his readership to presume they were in the hands of someone who knew more about this exotic and foreign land and its culture than they did. Also he was reputed to be translating directly from an original Syrian manuscript and/or from the stories told him by an “actual Arab” of his acquaintance, Diab. Thus his readership had no reason to distrust him in matters of fact regarding customs and traditions within this alien culture.
Today’s more educated reader, even one not steeped in the study of Arab culture, can recognize the Europeanization of the tale. Among the errors are the insertions of animals not extant in Persia, the choice of a clearly blasphemous punishment for the Islamic sultan’s wife, (not to mention the idea that he had a wife in the European sense in the first place), and the unlikely involvement of the sultan in the choosing of his queen’s midwives.
In a scene toward the end of the story, when the two brothers meet the sultan in the woods and are invited to hunt with him,
… they saw many different beasts
appear at one time. Prince Bahman chose a lion, and
Prince Parviz chose a bear. They both took off after
the beasts at the same time without fear, and this impressed the sultan. They
soon found their prey about the same time, and they threw their javelins with
such skill that each pierced the beast he was chasing, Prince Bahman, the lion, and Prince Parviz,
the bear, and the sultan saw the animals tumble to the ground. Without
stopping, Prince Bahman pursued another bear and
Prince Parviz another lion, and a few moments later
they pierced these animals and took their lives. (6; 292)
The first biological errors are that these two species are not usually found in the same habitat and that lions, while they do travel in packs, generally travel with only one male (lion) and many females (lionesses) within a large hunting area that is well defended from encroaching lions. This disallows the immediate sighting and killing of the second lion. In the same vein, bears tend to be loners unless it is mating season or a mother is tending her cubs, making the immediate collection of the second bear equally unlikely.
Secondly, neither lions nor bears have ever been native to the part of the world then known as Persia and now encompassing all of modern-day Iraq as well as parts of present-day Iran (8). While parts of Persia bordered what is today known as India, whose native fauna does include the lion, it never ventured that far south. As for bears, while they can be native to Afghanistan and northern India, neither of these areas is near enough to the Persia of the stories for any type of realistic migration to have occurred. It is unlikely that Galland himself had ever seen either a lion or a bear, but that they were included to add to the exotic feeling of the story. (4)
The punishment by the deceived sultan for what he believes are his wife’s monstrous births is one which, while it is conceivable that it could have been instituted in the France of time of Galland’s writing, would not have been considered by a Muslim ruler as it is “completely blasphemous. (8)” After being dissuaded by his grand vizier from his impulse to put her to death, which is his initial (and believable) reactive desire after each birth, Galland has the sultan of Persia, a Muslim of good standing and an example for his people’s religious practice, devise an alternate punishment after the third monstrous birth.
‘Let her live then,’ he said, ‘since
this is the way it is. I shall give her life, but in a condition that will make
her want to desire death more than once a day. I want a lodging built for her
next to the door of the main mosque with a window that is always to remain
open. She is to be locked in there with a coarse robe, and each and every
Muslim who goes to the mosque to say his prayers is to spit in her face. If
anyone fails to do this, he will receive the same punishment. To make sure that
my command is obeyed, I order you, vizier to have guards watch over this
place.’ (6; 275)
This punishment, directed as it is to be administered by people on their way to prayer, is unthinkably disrespectful, not to the punished, who were often summarily executed or subjected to amputations under a strict eye-for-an-eye judicial system, but to the Prophet Mohamed and Islam in general. Thus it would never have been devised by an observant Muslim. To conjoin humiliation with prayer is a supremely sacrilegious act. The European literary classes who were Galland’s audience were utterly ignorant of the laws and customs of the Muslim world, and so were unable to discern this error. In fact, the punishment might not have met the standards of the Christian Bible either, but this is not at issue here.
In
terms of the selection of the midwives; Islamic society is sexually divided. It
was then, and it is now. While the rule of the sultan was indeed absolute, it
is historically unlikely that he would have been involved in deciding something
so clearly within the realm of the feminine. This is not to say that he did not
care about his wife or the safe delivery of his children and potential heirs,
but rather that the affairs of women were handled by women, and nothing so
clearly falls into this purview as giving birth. According to Massoume Price, an
ecologist and social anthropologist educated in modern-day Iran at Pahlavi University, and at both Kings and University
Colleges of London University, in England, who has been studying women’s
history in this part of the world, “the king’s mother had the highest rank and
seems to be the head of the female members of the household. (7) Notice that
she refers to the monarch as king rather than sultan, as “king” is the title
used by rulers in the early history of this region. Galland
erroneously refers to the supreme ruler in his story as “sultan.”
The next
was the Queen (mother of the crown prince or the principal wife) followed by
the kings' daughters and sisters. They all had titles with recognized authority
at the court, and had their own administration for managing their considerable
wealth. Funerary customs and inscriptions commemorating the death of royal
women also reflect the official recognition of these women, particularly the
king's mother and wife. The king was the ultimate source of authority and the
royal women acted within a clearly defined spectrum of norms and standards set
by the king. However within the spectrum they enjoyed economic independence,
were involved in the administration of economic affairs, traveled and
controlled their wealth and position by being active resolute and enterprising.
(7)
In “The Jealous Sisters and Their Cadette,” the cadette (a familiar name in French for the youngest
daughter of the family and so surely a Galland
alteration), has become queen after marrying the sultan.
Some
months after her marriage, the queen found herself pregnant, and the sultan
showed immense joy. After the news was communicated throughout the palace, this
joy spread throughout all the districts of the capital of Persia. The two
sisters came to express their compliments, and right then and there,
anticipating that she would need a midwife to help her during her confinement,
they asked her not to choose anyone but them.
The queen
obliged them and said, ‘My sisters, as you might imagine, I could not ask for
anything better if the choice were to depend on me alone. Despite the fact that
I am infinitely obliged to you by your good will, I must submit myself to
whatever the sultan orders. Therefore, I suggest that you have your husbands
employ their friends to intervene on your behalf with the sultan. And if the
sultan speaks with me about it, you can rest assured that I shall not only
indicate the pleasure that it would give me, butI
would also thank him immensely if he would choose you as midwives.’
…the
sultan promised to think about it. Indeed, the sultan kept his promise, and in
a conversation with the queen, he said that it seemed to him that her sisters
were more suitable to help her in her confinement than some other strange
midwife. But he did not want to nominate them without having her consent. The
queen, sensitive to the deference the sultan was showing her in such an
obliging manner, told him, ‘Sire, I am inclined to do what your magesty commences. But since you have had the kindness to
cast your eyes on my sisters, I should like to thank you for the consideration
that you have for them out of love for me, and I must confess that I would
prefer to have them as my midwives rather than a woman whom I don’t know.’
Thus the
Sultan Khusrau Shah named the two sisters of the
queen to become her midwives.
(6;272-3)
Thus attended, the queen gives birth three
times, and three times her jealous sisters serve as her midwives, using their
positions to place her children (two sons and a daughter) in baskets in the
river, ostensibly to drown. They replace the princes and princess with dead
household animals, a puppy for the first child, a kitten for the second, and a
piece of wood wrapped in cloth and presented as a mole for the princess. The
royal children are rescued by “the chief caretaker of the sultan’s gardens, one
of the principal and respected officers of the realm. (6;273-4)” He takes them
home to his wife and the formerly childless couple raises them as their own.
Galland has the vile sisters “wrap the baby in
swaddling clothes, (6;273)” a European rather than an Oriental custom; another
example of the wrong culture’s habits or traditions being inserted into a
supposedly Oriental tale. In this case, a somewhat natural error as Galland, being a man, was unlikely to have had too much
intimate knowledge of the caretaking of infants only moments old even in his
home country. Surely he was never privy to these moments during his
international travels.
Next he has the caretaker and his wife name
the boys Bahman and Parviz,
“names which the ancient kings of Persia had borne. (6;275)” The girl was named
Parizad, “which many queens and princesses of the realm
had also borne. (6;275)” In all the research for this paper, none of these
names came up as monikers for any Persian royalty in any time period.
Specifically, they are not listed in, Aryanhwy
merch Catmael and Ursula
Georges’ research on “the names of Persian poetesses and royal ladies from the Safavid dynasty, that is, the late 15th century through the
early 17th century.” Not having access to Galland’s
personal diaries, I am unable to discern whether these names came to him via
Hanna Diab as filtered through her knowledge of the
fairy tales of Giovan Francesco Straparola
of Vienna, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy of Paris. Perhaps these are names Galland
heard during his travels to Arab countries, or perhaps they are merely letters
combined in a way that “sounded” Arabic to his ears. After all, he was fluent
in several Oriental languages. In either case, it seems to be another cultural
error.
In
investigating the question of whether a woman heroine would have been tolerable
to the audience even in a fairy tale in Persian society of the time, several
indications that this would have been acceptable surfaced.
The texts dealing with the royal and
aristocratic women provide a remarkable picture of the lives of the people and
the workings of the ancient Empire. These documents clearly identify royal
women but also give us a glimpse into the lives of others involved in the royal
circle. We learn about Artim the nanny for a royal
daughter receiving rent for a property she owns. The tax paid by Madamis another female employee in the royal court
indicates that the land ownership by women was not exclusive to the royal women
and must have been a lot more widespread than anticipated. Such information
indicates a level of independence and recognition of women as legal entities
that could own sell or lease their properties.
… In summary the evidence of the
Fortification and Treasury texts provide us with a unique insight into the
social and economic situation of Persian women, royal and non-royal, as well as
female workers. These women owned property, were involved in managing their
assets. Participated in economic activities of the estate and other economic
units. They had employment opportunities earned wages and as a result were able
to be economically independent. Patriarchal system prevailed and husbands and
other males had far more rights and privileges than their wives or children.
Nevertheless such evidence clearly indicates that women in ancient Iran were
not an undifferentiated mass leading a secluded life behind high walls without
any function and purpose other than child rearing. (7)
Price’s research indicates that the idea of independent, intelligent women was not so foreign to the Persians of the eighteenth century as it would be to the writers of European fairy tales less than 100 years later. Score one for Galland.
Her research is echoed by Robert
Irwin’s more extensive undertaking in The
Arabian Nights: A Companion, in which he notes that “one of the striking features
of the Nights (especially if one compares it with western literature in the
same period) is how active and vigorous the heroines of the stories are and,
contrariwise, how passive and idle many of the nominal heroes are. (167)” This
statement follows the detailed description of a story involving Amazon warriors
and hunters of great skill.
The next question that occurred concerned whether it was possible that the audience would accept that the girl child of the caretaker (the princess) would have been schooled in reading and writing as well as, “fine arts, geography, poetry, history, and the sciences, and even the secret sciences [as well as learning to] sing and play many different musical instruments … ride a horse, shoot a bow and arrow, and throw a stick or a javelin with the same agility that [her brothers] could. And she often beat them in some races. (6; 276)” The information gleaned from reading Price and Irwin indicates that in fact they would. This accounts for another point for Galland’s accuracy. Unfortunately, it is his last in terms of this research.
On the level of religious observance, Galland is able to take advantage of his audience’s lack of knowledge of Islamic prayer ritual. He does this when he needs to insert the plot device that will activate the quest and the eventual unveiling of the children’s true identity to themselves and their parents.
One day while the two princes were
away hunting, and the Princess Parizad was resting, a
devout Muslim, who was very old, appeared at the door and requested permission
to enter to say her prayers because it was the hour to do so. The servants went
to ask the princess’s permission, and the princess ordered them to let her
enter and to show her to the oratory [a place for prayer, such as a small
private chapel] which the caretaker had built because there was no mosque in
the vicinity. (6; 277)
In this way Galland contrives to bring the old woman into the presence of the princess who, being a properly brought up young woman, instructs her servants to give the old woman a tour of the property and then bring her into the salon for food and drink. It is during the ensuing casual conversation that the old woman performs her duty to the plot by telling the princess about three unbelievable items of which she has heard; setting the scene for the quests to come. The flaw in this scenario is that there was no need for the old woman to request permission to come inside in the first place. There is no requirement in Islamic law for praying inside a mosque, oratory, or other structure. (8) Ritual requirements include praying a specific number of times per day, at proscribed times, always facing East toward Mecca during prayer, and praying in a prostrated position. Tradition gives the supplicant a prayer mat for his or her comfort, but even that is not required. Thousands of devout Muslims pray out-of-doors every day all over the world, and have done so for centuries. Surely this old woman, no matter how devout, could have done so as well – but that would not have served the needs of the plot. Galland may have been unaware of this, or he may have known but been sure that his audience didn’t (or wouldn’t care), and so he went ahead with it.
Concurrent with the scholarly acceptance of the polygenesis of tales, (the idea that important ideas germinate concurrently in multiple locations and thus the same basic story line can bloom simultaneously, and unconnectedly, in disparate parts of the world), is the acceptance of the idea that all story tellers borrow from each other. The silk, spice, and slave trades brought European and Oriental cultures in contact as the merchants involved traded goods and stories. “The enormous cultural reach of the Muslim world was bound together by land routes. These gave swift-moving armies as well as caravan travelers access to distant caliphates and provided relatively close commercial links among the governments of today’s Middle East and Far East.
“It is almost axiomatic in the study of literature that stories follow salesmen, or put another way, that salesmen disperse stories as they dispense goods. (2:3) As watering stations on what became known as the Silk Road expanded into more permanent communities, story tellers learned each other’s common cultural motifs, plot lines, heroic tales, fables, and morality plays. These were incorporated into their own repertoires and changed again with the telling for different audiences or locations. Among the common motifs ingested from Oriental culture are “individual deeds of heroism undertaken by poetry spouting warriors, as well as captive princesses, battles and single combats, enterprising gangsters, disguises and mistaken identities, marvelous poisons, Amazons, talismans and automata. (5;92)
Many of the stories found in The Thousand and One Nights made their way through Spain and Sicily into medieval Europe long before Galland was even born. In fact, “so much material which is common to the Nights has been found in collections of stories put together in Europe in the centuries prior to Galland’s translation that it has led some scholars to speculate that the Nights did circulate in Europe in an earlier translation – perhaps a translation in Latin made in Spain in, say, the twelfth century. However, no such translation has been found, and there is no reference to such a translation ever having been commissioned. Although there is plenty of evidence for items like parts of the Sinbad cycle and the odd individual story like ‘The Ebony Horse’ being recycled in Latin or one or other of Europe’s vernacular languages, most of those stories were added to the Nights only in the later stages of its growth, from the fifteenth century onwards. (5; 97)”
In the case of Galland’s retelling of those of his tales that seem to have been centuries old, it may not have been so much the tales themselves as the timing and the alterations that made them so popular. By systematically removing all references to the will of Allah, pulling out the many poems and verses inserted between and during the original tales, and localizing the more central customs such as marriage, midwivery, and the like, Galland created the right tales for his time. In fact, “Galland’s transformation of Thousand and One Nights began the staggeringly successful career of the Arabian Nights throughout Europe. The changes he made reached not only European readers, but eventually they were reflected back onto the Arabic tradition itself (2;23) through the re-translation of Galland’s tales into Arabic over the ensuing decades and centuries.
Works Cited
1)
Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms’ Bad Girls & Bold Boys: The Moral
& Social Vision of
the Tales.
New York: Yale University, 1987.
2) Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Untitled. Unpublished MSS, 2004.
3) Catmael, Aryanhwy merch (Sara L. Friedman) and Georges, Ursula (Ursula
Whitcher). “Persian Feminine Names.” H ttp://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/persian.html. (Accessed May 11, 2004).
4) EGL 374: European Fairy Tales. Lecture Notes Taken by Lisa Napell Dicksteen.
Professor, Ruth B. Bottigheimer. Stony Brook University, 2004
5) Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. London: Penguin Group, 1994.
6)
Galland, Antoine. “The Jealous Sisters and
Their Cadette.” The Great Fairy Tale
Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. New York: Norton.
2001. 270-302
7) Price, Massoume. “Women’s Lives in Ancient Persia.”
http://www.iranonline.com/History/Women's-Lives/2.html. (Accessed May 10,
2004).
8) Sheik, Omar. Interviewed May 5, 2004.
Clarification:
Sources quoted within
this paper are noted immediately at the end of the quote. They are identified
parenthetically by the number of the source, followed by a semi-colon and the
page number from which the quote was taken, when applicable.