Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp

After reading "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," I can honestly say that was not what I was expecting. I love the movie Aladdin but I only the know of the story from the Disney movie. I had never heard of the original story so I guess I didn’t know what I was expecting from it. However, according to the 2nd article we were assigned to read about Aladdin, this story has a weird and mixed up origin. I was surprised to read that the story of “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” isn’t even found in the original Arabic book of “One Thousand and One Night,” but instead was written by a french writer who supposedly “heard” it from a monk in Aleppo. This could obviously be a lie and instead the French writer made the story up. However, the story of Aladdin was so popular that it was still surprisingly added to basically all of the English translations of  “One Thousand and One Night” even translations that were mostly based on the original manuscript of the story. 

Now to discuss the story I read, I found a lot of things that happened to be very interesting and weird. First of all, instead of being a common thief with his monkey sidekick, Aladdin was just this lazy boy that never wanted to do anything. Also apparently his laziness actually “killed his father” which I found to be crazy and strange. I am going to need more elaboration on that. Also the villain of the story that would resemble Jafar pretended to be his uncle and was a magician. Then in the end after the magic dies, the danger apparently isn’t over because his even worst magician brother comes along and tries to kill Aladdin. 

Something I found to be very confusing in the story was the concept of the ring and lamp. Normally, when you think of a genie, you think of them living in and being a slave to a lamp. However in this story, the genie is a slave to this magical ring but also requires the presence of rubbing of a magical lamp in order to fully grant the big wishes. Nevertheless, Aladdin was able to get the Genie to take him to Africa and the magician with just the ring in his possession and not the lamp. Does this mean that with the ring, you are able to grant small wishes but not anything extreme? Also, the magician was able to ask for big wishes from the genie without the magical slave ring in his possession. Does this mean that you don’t actually need to have the ring for the genie to grant your wishes? I am still confused on this concept. In addition to this, the genie seems to grant limitless wishes and the wishes themselves didn’t seem to have any limitations. I know in the Disney movie, and most other shows or movies with genies, the genie can only grant three wishes. 

Something I found a little disturbing was when Aladdin was spying on the princess and watching her bathe. I also found it disturbing when Aladdin wished for the princess and the Vizier’s son to be brought to him. The princess had never met Aladdin and out of the blue appears at his house with her bed and is told by him that she was suppose to belong to him. Obviously, that was going to freak her out or scare her. Then he just slept in the bed with this poor, freaked out princess. Then after spending the awful night with some stranger, she still agreed to marry and live with him later on in the story. 

Although, the people seem to love Aladdin, they don’t make him the most likable character. This is a story of rags to riches but Aladdin in no way earned his riches. He was lazy from the start to the end and never really changed. He received everything he wanted all because he got his hands on a magical lamp. 

Although, I am very critical of the story, it was a very interesting one and nice to read something that was very different from the rest of the princess stories. Disney obviously didn’t have to Disneyfy the ending of the story too much because in a way you could say that Aladdin and the princess lived Happily ever after.