Week 7 Essay: Crime and Punishment

In The Chinese Fairy Tales unit, I saw recurring themes of crime and justice. Typically, characters would commit wrongdoings and then receive punishment for them. For example, in the story about The Cave of Beasts, the daughters ate eggs that didn't belong to them, and they were lead into the deathly forest as a result. Another example of justice happens in The Maiden Who Was Stolen Away. The ogre traps the maiden in an attempt to make her marry him, and in the end, he is beaten for his wicked ways. A third example from this unit is in the story about The Panther. Because the panther ate the mother and her son, he endures a lot of pain and eventually death.

 

(Image information: "Black Panther"  by Bruce McAdam 2008.)

To go into detail about the daughters in The Cave of Beasts, I would say their crimes seem the most harmless of the three examples above, especially because their mother gave them the eggs to eat. But regardless, the father saw this as a crime and abandoned them in dangerous forest. However, this might be considered the real crime in the story because the father soon missed his daughters and went back to find them, and it seemed like he had seen the error of his ways. He definitely changed his mind about punishing his daughters when he found out about all of the gems they had discovered!

In the story about the maiden who was stolen away, the ogre could have taken a very different direction. When the maiden was blown on top of the pagoda, he could have helped her down and won her over that way instead of trapping her up there until she agreed to marry him. Once he had done that, I felt like his defeat at the hand of the maiden's brother at the end of the story was completely deserved.

Finally, in the story about the panther, it is clear to the reader that eating a mother and her son is a crime. And so the daughters worked up a whole series of punishments for the panther. He sat on a cushion of needles, was stung by a scorpion, had hot egg yolk sprayed in his eyes, and was bitten by a turtle, and finally, he was beaten to death by wooden clubs. If that isn't justice, I don't know what is.