The Power of Female Speech in two Medieval Tales: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The story has been a fundamental vehicle for teaching throughout history, especially during the medieval period. Two enlightening medieval collections of stories are the eastern The Arabian Nights and the western Lais of Marie de France. Several Comparative Literature programs teach these two literary works in their courses. The tales within these collections function for the two female storytellers, Scheherazade and Marie de France, to educate their political authorities through the positive influence of their speech. This paper examines the power of speech in convincing Medieval rulers to change their attitudes toward women. Throughout these two collections of stories, we find several types of indirect persuasive methods of speech, such as cause and effect, logic, evidence, seduction and emotion, used by the characters to have a positive effect on their audience. The target of the paper is to discover how these two female storytellers make use of the duality of speech and quick convention in a way that supports their efforts to change a powerful ruler’s attitude toward women and to convince him that speech, in general, and women’s speech, in particular, are valuable things.