- Merchant and His Wife
- Merchant and the Demon
- First Old Man's Tale
My reaction:
In the Merchant and His Wife, the merchant puts his wife in her place by beating her, and the people celebrate afterwards. What sort of lesson does this teach? Gender inequality and domestic abuse, that is what it is.
The Merchant and the Demon was only interesting in the fact that it set up another frame story, with the old man within the story telling their life tales, in perhaps the hope of saving the merchant's life.
The old man tells us his odd tale with his mistress and son becoming cows, and his wife being slaughtered. However, his wife ends up becoming a deer. Like its an everyday sort of occurence. And of course the woman is to blame, by being jealous. No wonder, because she was happily married and the old man decides to have a mistress, who manages to have a child. I understand where she is coming from, especially when childbearing was basically really important in that culture.
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