The Arabian Nights Group 5 Summary & Analysis

Group 5: “The Third Dervish’s Tale,” “The Tale of the First Lady, the Mistress of the House,” & “The Tale of the Second Lady, the Flogged One”

Summary: “The Third Dervish’s Tale”

Through a series of unfortunate events, the third dervish, the son of a king, finds himself shipwrecked on a rock, where he dreams instructions to topple a brass horseman, which he later does. In his travels, he witnesses an old man sealing a youth being beneath a trapdoor. Curious, he unseals the trapdoor and meets the youth, who explains that his father sealed him inside to protect him from a man who topples a brass horseman.

One day, the king’s son accidentally slips with a knife and pierces the youth’s heart. He flees before the old man returns. In his travels, he watches ten one-eyed men enter a copper palace. They tell him how to get inside. Once inside, the king’s son meets forty ladies, whom he sleeps with night after night. They tell the king’s son that he can go into any room of the palace, except one. Each door reveals a new paradise. Soon, he’s obsessed with the last door. Inside is a flying horse gouges his eye with his tail, the same fate met by each of the ten one-eyed men. When the ten men reject him, he becomes a dervish.

Summary: “The Tale of the First Lady, the Mistress of the House”

The two older sisters become destitute when their husbands spend their inheritances and leave. The youngest sister journeys to a foreign city where she sees people made of stone. She enters an opulent dwelling, where she meets a beautiful young man reciting the Quran who tells her his story.

One day, a mighty voice tells everyone to abandon their worship of fire and instead follow the Almighty. All but the young man refuse and are turned to stone. The youngest sister and the man marry, but while sailing home, two of her sisters become jealous and throw the couple into the sea. The young man drowns, but the youngest sister washes ashore. Walking home, she meets a she-demon with two black dogs. The demon explains that she turned the jealous sisters into dogs and that the youngest sister must beat them every night or she will be turned into a dog, too.

Summary: “The Tale of the Second Lady, the Flogged One”

One day, an old lady invites the sister to the woman’s daughter’s wedding. At the wedding, the sister meets the bride’s brother, whom she later marries. Later, a merchant at the market asks to kiss the sister’s cheek instead of accepting payment, but he bites off a piece of her flesh instead. Back at home, the sister refuses to tell her husband how she got the wound. He orders three slaves to beat her. When he orders her death, the old woman intervenes and returns the sister to her own home, where she recovers.

Upon hearing the stories, the caliph summons the demon who turned the two jealous sisters into dogs. The she-demon appears and tells the caliph that the man who beat his wife is the caliph’s own son. The caliph turns the dogs back into women. He arranges for all the guests to marry, receive riches, and palaces of their own.

Analysis: “The Third Dervish’s Tale,” “The Tale of the First Lady, the Mistress of the House,” & “The Tale of the Second Lady, the Flogged One”

These tales complete the cycle begun in “The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies.” The three sisters are the element that connects all the stories, and at least one of the sisters appears in nearly every tale. Also, “The Tale of the Third Dervish” completes that trilogy. The next cycle includes the caliph and his vizier as focal characters, so the stories continue to have their common threads.

Some stories in The Arabian Nights follow the classic rags-to-riches plot. For example, a poor fisherman become a wealthy member of the king’s court, his daughter married to royalty. However, in the case of these stories, sometimes fate works in the other direction. The three dervishes began their lives as the sons of kings but end up wandering mendicants, each for his own reason.

Curiosity gets the better of the third dervish and causes him to lose an eye and forfeit his relationship with the forty beautiful girls. In fact, curiosity is the motivation behind several of the characters’ actions, including the caliph who wants to know why the sisters beat their dogs. Curiosity is what keeps The Arabian Nights going, since Shahrayar’s curiosity is what prevents him from killing Shahrazad, the storyteller. Sometimes, curiosity leads to knowledge and wisdom; at other times, it causes trouble. The sisters tell the porter that he can stay if he does not question what he sees, a rule that later applies to the caliph and his vizier too. This condition, the opposite of curiosity, creates just as much suspense because readers learn about actions without learning about the reasons behind them.

Readers may interpret one of the lessons behind these stories to be: Some things just should be accepted as they are, or some truths are better left not known. If the king’s son hadn’t opened that last door, he’d still be living a life of luxury and love. If the first guests hadn’t questioned why the dogs were beaten and how lash marks appeared on the other sister, their lives wouldn’t be in jeopardy. Truth is good, but we are sometimes better off not knowing everything.

God is often evoked in The Arabian Nights, always revered and usually the source of insight and forgiveness. Often, characters ask God for help and protection. However, in these stories, God can be changeable, sometimes benevolent and merciful, other times vengeful and violent. For example, in “The Tale of the First Lady, Mistress of the House,” a mighty voice orders that the people in a certain city abandon their worship of fire and instead worship the Merciful God. When they refuse, they are turned into stone, all except the king’s son, who lives to tell the tale. On the other hand, in these stories, this god is often worshipped as the Almighty, the Magnificent, Supreme Lord, and Creator and is praised several times each day with exclamations such as “God is Great!” Although The Arabian Nights is not a religious text by any standard, it shows how religion permeated all Arabian life regardless of social class.