International Journal of Social Science and Business (IJSSB)

This paper examines how in the frame story of The Arabian Nights, Shahrazad defied the established understanding of gender and authority with all its paraphernalia thus, subverting the representation of women in dominant male discourse. The frame story is the backbone of the whole text, if omitted the tales will be incoherent. Gender and authority play a very important role in the development of the frame story of The Arabian Nights and in the development of the text itself. It is understood that authority has different manifestations, many of which, including coercive authority, are the scope of men only. However, this is contested in the frame story, where Shahrazad challenges this paradigm. Unquestionably, this long accepted conventional role is transformed by Shahrazad, who became in world literature, an iconic model for a different kind of authority that inspired the empowerment of women. She has an emancipatory project where she unconsciously gives voice, as a powerful narrator, to the unheard aspirations of women, inclusive of all women; across gender, class and ethnicity - along with controlling her male counterpart. Manifestly, she has optimized her life options through a seemingly passive yet potentially active resistance - the act of storytelling. This seems to be an overtly passive resistance in the face of a blindly oppressive king, yet proves to be effective. It is the different discourses and concepts within this frame story that give us a sense of the questions that must always be addressed. Problems such as authority, gender, social class, ethnicity, and tradition are seldom questioned; and advocates of an unchanging status quo refuse to permit its exploration, stifling the potential for questioning or intellectual discussion. These challenges and questions which are raised in the frame story and also in the text itself should be regarded as an affirmation of its revolutionary characteristic, and a testimony to its survival through different ages and across various cultures and languages.