Summary Of ' The ' Of Khoja 's Camel '

Poverty and hardship are shown to create vulnerability in female characters, particularly the female servants, allowing powerful men to manipulate and sexually abuse them. Kent illustrates how poverty perpetuates maltreatment and abuse in a society like Burial Rites using the characters of Agnes’ mother Ingveldur and Agnes. Agnes’ mother is forced to make invidious choices as her children are “lugged along” from farm to farm, where she is sexually exploited by her employers. In spite of these circumstances, Agnes’ mother is commonly referred to as a whore in their society which abhors female promiscuity yet disregards male promiscuity as a harmless character trait; as in the case of Natan, who is merely “indiscreet” despite all his philandering. Born into poverty, Agnes experiences similar sexual coercion and manipulation from her “masters” and yet is labelled “a woman who is loose with her emotions and looser with her morals”. The severe poverty of Agnes is explicitly demonstrated to the reader by Kent through the intertextual reference of her entire belongings - a very dismal, piteous list to be “sold if a decent offer is presented”. Furthermore, Kent contrasts the situation of Agnes, a “landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty”, to the comparative security Steina has experienced using a rhetorical question from

The merchant claims that he knows nothing of long-suffering wives. Rather, if his wife were to marry the devil, she would overmatch even him. The Merchant claims that there is a great difference between Griselde's exceptional obedience and his wife's more common cruelty. The Merchant has been married two months and has loathed every minute of it. The Host asks the Merchant to tell a tale of his horrid wife.

This became one of the boldest acts of defiance during this time. Yet, she didn't stop there. There is much more to her journey. This book illustrates her life like none other from the beginning to the end.

She was beaten, shackled and “was wet with the dew of all the men who had covered her before” him(4). He quickly recognizes her because his mother is also an Ila woman. He takes care of her — washing her disarrayed body, starting a fire for warmth and protection, and hunting for food. He also believed in fasting for ten consecutive days as a way of a spiritual cure those who are suffering, “in this way the spirit of the dead one grows weak, finally it lets go and journeys to the land of the soul” (5). He grew weak, yet still taking care of her. They began to love one another, and did not want to be apart. Taking her first steps, she ventured to short travels, but was not ready for a lonesome journey. With each trial, the journey becomes a little farther. Twelve days later, she was gone. He holds himself back from calling her name aloud to take her back forever. He continues on with his journey to the village, hunting for food as he returns to the village not

She asks for pity, yet the townspeople are strict with keeping with their traditions and her pleas of kindness neglect to draw in anybody's consideration and she is stoned to death.

After an extended period of mourning, her father asked her why she would not remove her veil, for surely "the woman...led you into wickedness. How long will you mourn her, who deserves no mourning?" to which the girl replied, "It is my own...sin that I mourn." From then on she slunk about in rags and with ashes covering her face, forgotten by most everyone, and always sitting by the hearth, refusing to wash up, for she was "glad to be humble before God and men."

She is a person that took every day as it came to her and did what was necessary in order for her to survive. There was no shame in her trying to obtain happiness by keeping her cousin as a lover, nor killing an unborn child to keep herself from being punished. She is attempting to open the eyes of a naive priest who sees nothing but what he has learned from books.

Mariam struggled often with the constant rigor of her daily housewife work. As a child, Mariam encountered many horrific adversities and obstacles that she had to fight through. She lived with her mother, who she refers to as Nana. Nana was a very strict, bitter, and nasty woman. Mariam was the only thing she had in her life and she constantly treated her as dirt. She referred to Mariam as a harami, which translates to a sinner and/or a bad person in our culture. Her mother’s source of bitterness derived from the fact that Mariam’s successful father Jalil

At fourteen, during her wedding her lover's mistress killed him with a poisoned drink. She went with her mother to their estate in Gaeta. On the way pirates boarded the ship and raped the women and sailed to Morocco to sell them as slaves. There was a war going on in Morocco and the pirates were attacked, the old woman saw her mother and maids of honor ripped apart by men. She somehow survived, fell asleep under a tree and woke up to an Italian man trying to rape her. She met a country man who had once served at her mother's palace he promised to take her back to Italy but took her to Algiers and sold her to the prince. She was then sold several times and ended up owned by a Muslim military commander. He brought her to Algiers to defend the city of Azov against the Russians. Only the commander's fort was left standing and eunuchs wanted to kill and eat her. A religious leader convinced them to only cut one of her buttocks for food. She was taken to Moscow and a nobleman took her as his slave and beat her daily for two years. She managed to escape when he was executed and she worked as a servant in inns around Russia.

The maiden in the story is cast out from her home because of her faith in Allah. That is something the Morisco people could relate to directly and in different ways depending on the time period. The maiden is found and rescued by a king and things look up for her. Unfortunately there were not many times where things looked up for these people. Perhaps during times of uprisings before they were defeated when they could do as they wished. She is then banished with her child to the wilderness. Banishment was not an unknown feeling for these people and mothers alone protecting their children would not be unheard of either. The last part of the story is what gave these people hope, and hope is a very strong thing. Without hope no one could ever get through the things that these people did. That is why this story and others like it were so important and that is what Perry was trying to show with all of the repetition of this story throughout the

The old woman is the quintessence of a fighter “I caught [the plague] it. Imagine to yourself the distressed situation of the daughter of a Pope, only fifteen years old, who, in less than three months, had felt the miseries of poverty and slavery, had been ravished almost every day, had beheld her mother drawn in quarters, had experienced famine and war, and was dying of the plague in Algiers”. The old woman was born the daughter of a Pope and lived in great wealth until she was about 15 years old. After her ship gets taken over by pirates her life goes downhill from there, she is raped sees her mother get killed, loses her love and catches the plague but is still able to say “A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life”. Another fighter is Cunegonde, who has a similar story to the old woman. “I was in bed and fast asleep when it pleased God to send the Bulgarians to our delightful castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh; they slew my father and brother, and cut my mother in pieces. A tall Bulgarian, six feet high, perceiving that I had fainted away at this sight, began to ravish me; this made me recover; I regained my senses.. I wanted to tear out the tall Bulgarian's eyes.. The brute gave me a cut in the left side with his hanger”. Cunegonde has been raped, cut open, seen her whole family slaughtered,

She got pregnant for him, and the people of the town found out. They started to call her names and shun her for her sin. They didn’t know if her husband was dead or not, so they didn’t kill her, but they made her stand on a scaffold in front of everyone,

She began life the daughter of a pope and princess and she was very beautiful. She had a husband who was her equal in beauty and she was in love with him “as one can never love twice.” (Voltaire 50) He was murdered with some poisonous chocolate so she and her mother set sail to go on vacation. Some Moorish pirates captured their boat, strip searched, and raped her and her mother. She was then brought to Morocco where a massacre was in progress. After seemingly everyone had killed everyone else and pulled her mother and other crew literally limb from limb she was rescued by her eunuch teacher from when she was 6. He betrayed her and sold her to the governor of Algiers. She caught the plague and everyone around her died but somehow she survived to be sold many more times as a sex slave. During one of her stays at a harem the guards were starved and ate two eunuchs she was with and one buttock from each of the women. She was sold for a final time to a Russian who abused her physically and whipped her every day until he was executed and she escaped. After she had explained all this to Candide and Lady Cunégonde on the ship she says, “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly

The narrator, Offred, starts off the story depicting her experience of sleeping on cots in a gymnasium space. She describes the harsh and horrid living environment in which she was in the past. She then speaks of her limited freedom and the restricted activities they were allowed to partake in. Then, Offred begins to tell her present story. She is a handmaid a commander and his wife, Serena. The handmaid’s job is to carry the child for the couple who is having difficulty conceiving. Offred tells the story of being raised by a single mother who also believed in fair treatment for women. Offred takes her third and final job at the commander’s house. She lives a very strict life with no freedom. Sometimes she is allowed visitation with another handmaid, Ofglen. Offred is constantly sent to the doctor to be checked for health.

Mayamma, the old caretaker-cum-governess-cum-cook at Mahesh’s house, lived all her life satisfying others. Married at twelve to a useless gambler who came to her every night, “his large hairy thighs rough and heaving on her” (80), she knew no happiness in marriage. When two years of marriage brought forth no child, she incurred the wrath of her mother-in-law, did penance to change the course of her life, invoked the names of all the gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon, till she finally gave birth to a male child. Eight years later her husband worn into middle age, with dissipated excess, disappeared taking with him all the money in the house. Though Mayamma never saw him again, she found his replica in their son. A wastrel from birth, he threatened and cursed and even beat his mother till he finally caught fever and died: “The day he died, Mayamma wept as she had not done for years. She wept for her youth, her husband, the culmination of a life’s handiwork: now all these had been snatched form her” (82). On that day leaving behind her home forever, Mayamma came to Parvatiamma’s-Mahesh’s mother-house and stayed on to tend to the kitchen and