A New Reading of the Serpent Myth in the Ancient and Modern Arab Culture.docVIP

A New Reading of the Serpent Myth in the Ancient and Modern Arab Culture 　　Literature and myth are two interrelated fields and there is an infinite relationship between the two fields； as Northrop Frye asserts that a myth is a “structural organizing principle of literary form”； （Anatomy， p. 341）. He continues in The Stubborn Structure to define as： 　　Mythology as a whole provides a kind of diagram or blueprint of what literature as a whole is all about， an imaginative survey of human situation from the beginning to the end， from the height to the depth， of what is imaginatively conceivable. （The Stubborn： 102） 　　Therefore， myth is the first form of literature and the knowledge of mythology would certainly help in analyzing literature and revealing its secrets and illusions. Mythology takes the reader to prehistory and the biography of gods and goddesses. Since the end of the nineteenth century， mythologies together with modern anthropology help in understanding the depth of literature and its reflection of human experience. They help to dive into literature searching for what lay beneath the surface of man’s accumulated knowledge. Anthropologists like Sir James Frazer have great influence on 20th and 21st centuries’ literature as exemplified in creative writers such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. The influence is not restricted to the western world but it encompasses the whole world literature as this paper tries to explicit. 　　The tale is about a young peasant Arabian girl， Fatma， whose father marries her off to a serpent-handler. Her husband’s capital is a collection of a farm of serpents. He extracts venom from his serpents and sells that to the people who use it to make remedies. One of these creatures bites her then she embarks into a magical journey of transformation and empowerment. She gains a mysterious resemblance to these serpents. Fatma becomes talented in controlling her kingdom of serpents and she is capable of traveling beyond the realm of ordinar