The Story of Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp

Where the story of Aladdin comes from is not known with any great certainty. One of the most popular tales from what are known variously as the One Thousand and One Nights, 1001 Arabian Nights, The Arabian Nights, or The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, it wasn’t included in the collection until a French edition translated by Antoine Galland in 1710. In fact, a number of the most popular and famous stories from One Thousand and One Nights, including Ali Baba and Sindbad, were not part of the original collection.

In its original shape, One Thousand and One Nights is a flexible anthology of Middle Eastern folk tales collected during the Islamic Golden Age. Between the 8th and 13th centuries CE, the Islamic world went through a period of tremendous cultural, scientific, and artistic advancement. This period was fluid, acting, reacting, and interacting with a variety of cultures. The preservation of Greek writings by Eastern Christianity and Christianity’s invention of concepts like the hospital and university helped develop the framework of the Islamic Golden Age, and extensive trade brought knowledge and ideas from the corners of Africa, India, and Asia. Knowledge also worked its way through the Middle East to these regions and to Europe, reintroducing Western Christianity to Greek philosophy. The story of Aladdin reflects this by making Aladdin himself a Chinese man (despite his distinctly Arabian name meaning "nobility of faith" or "faithful" and being specifically identified as a "Mussulman," which is an archaic term for Muslim) and the evil magician from North Africa. In the world of the original teller of the story, whoever that may be, those would have been farthest Western and Eastern reaches of the Earth.

Among the things imported from India and Persia were a group of stories collected and translated into Arabic as The Thousand Nights. This formed the nucleus around which The One Thousand and One Nights accumulated.  The oldest known fragment of the text dates to the 9th century, and the earliest reference to it in another text dates to the 12th. The variable number of stories included in The One Thousand and One Nights were all linked by the framing story of a jilted Sultan who executed his wife for her infidelity. Each evening he would take a new wife, and each morning thereafter have her executed before she could betray him. The last was Scheherazade, who preserved her life by telling the Sultan a fragment of a story each night, leaving him too curious about what happens next to have her executed. After her last story ended on the 1001st night, the Sultan had a change of heart and they both lived on in marital bliss.

The first European translation of The One Thousand and One Nights began in 1704 from the pen of Antoine Galland, a French archaeologist and scholar on the Middle East. Besides translating extant copies of the original story, he took it upon himself to add other folktales he had come across in his journeys. He did not have to travel very far to find the story of Aladdin: according to his own account, he heard it in Paris from a Christian monk visiting from Aleppo, Syria. No known Arabic original of Aladdin's story exists, and scholars are divided over whether it is an authentic Middle Eastern tale or whether Galland made it up. It is known that he adapted his translation to the tastes of the time and the vogue for fairy tales that were increasing in popularity. Later translations by the likes of Sir Richard Burton reintegrated the more questionable and erotic passages excised by Galland. Left in Galland's version were the attitudes towards race prevalent at his time.

The following translation and abbreviation of Galland was by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Smith for a 1909 edition of The Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales. Acknowledging that "It would be a delightful task to any boy or girl to begin at the beginning and read the first English version of these famous stories, made from the collection of M. Galland, Professor of Arabic in the Royal College of Paris" they are still forced to admit that "We, like many other editors, have shortened the stories here and there, omitting some of the tedious repetitions that crept in from time to time when Arabian story-tellers were adding to the text to suit their purposes."

Even with these edits, the story of Aladdin is still a brisk 31,400 words. I've posted it here in its entirety, so buckle in and keep your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the carpet at all times...

Feminism and the Disney Princesses - Part II: Tropes vs. Men in Disney

In my original article Feminism and the Disney Princesses, I set out to address specific claims about how the canon of Disney fairy tale films represents its female protagonists. My approach was academic, engaging in a close viewing of the films to determine if these claims had any justifiable basis. While that article examined – and, I believe, ultimately refuted – claims that Disney's animated films present a negative image of women, the other side of the coin is whether they carry an otherwise patriarchal message.

Just as my previous analysis attempted to examine the films without intending to ignite a debate about feminism as a social construct, my discussion of male image in Disney is not intended to ignite debate about male advocacy and men's rights movements. I am a proponent of women's rights, freedoms, and social and economic justice, as well as unequivocally denouncing misogyny, violence towards and oppression of women, and thus am not throwing my fedora into the ring on any particular side. My goal is to employ academic analysis to answer the academic question of how male image is represented in Disney films. Do they reinforce a positive image of male domination and patriarchal power relationships? And more particularly, can the same lens of negative interpretation be brought to bear on them that is frequently brought to bear on Disney's representation of female characters?

Feminism and the Disney Princesses

As such a significant cultural force, Disney and their Princesses franchise serve as a touchstone for gender issues that more often than not reach far beyond the actual content of the films upon which the franchise rests. Perhaps you have seen images like the one above before, or read certain feminist analyses of the Disney Princess films that arrive at similarly negative conclusions. Unfortunately, when such analyses present themselves as being "feminist," the resulting debate tends to focus on the nature and reach of feminism rather than more pedestrian concerns like whether the analysis is actually accurate to the source material. I am a proponent of women's rights, freedoms and social and economic justice, so I do not intend to make a criticism of feminism as such. It does seem to me that, sometimes, the legitimate concerns of feminism can override clear-thinking and sound research when analyzing works of art like Disney's animated films. What I hope to do by wading in with this article is nothing more than engage in the academic practice of closely and carefully summarizing the source documents - in this case the films - to determine whether these accusations are accurate without troubling to ignite a debate over feminism in-and-of itself.

The easiest accusations to dispense with are those which apparently missed the entire message of the film and arrived at a conclusion opposite to that message. For example, the above image states that the theme of Aladdin is that Jasmine's political worth is determined by her marriageability, which is true insofar as we're talking only of her political worth and even then it is only true up to the denouement. The overarching and (what one would think of as the) unmistakable theme of the film is that one's personal worth is determined by their character and not their economic, social or political rank. The Sultan does attempt to marry Jasmine off against her wishes, in accordance with the law of the land, which she actively rebels against. Jasmine goes so far as to flee the palace, whereupon she meets Aladdin, the thief who dreams of nothing more than being able to rise above his poverty and be afforded at least minimal human courtesies (though living in the palace would be awfully nice, he believes). After Jasmine is recovered and Aladdin comes across the magical lamp, he adopts the persona of Prince Ali Ababwa to woo her. For her part, Jasmine rebuffs his showiness and expresses absolute outrage at her father, Ababwa and Jafar discussing her fate without her consultation. It is only when she realizes that Ababwa is the same thief in the market that she softens to him. Jafar, the villain, also seeks the hand of Jasmine, but only for her political worth and her physical beauty. The villain is the one who degrades Jasmine, first figuratively and then literally after he acquires the lamp. In the end, when the villain is dispensed with, the Sultan realizes the error of his ways and changes the law to suit Jasmine. He recognizes the folly and disgrace of making his daughter act against her wishes, thus exercising his political power to enable Jasmine to marry the man of her own choosing, who himself has demonstrated that good character supersedes the merits of wealth and power.