Justice in Saikaku, Pushkin, and El Saadawi: A Literary Analysis
This paper examines the concept of justice as depicted in three works of world literature: Alexander Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades," Nawal El Saadawi's "In Camera," and Ihara Saikaku's "The Barrelmaker, Brimful of Love." Drawing on Webster's definition of justice as fairness and righteousness, the paper argues that none of these stories portrays justice as truly achievable within their respective social institutions — whether courtrooms, marriages, or social agreements. Instead, self-interest, fate, and entrenched power consistently override fairness, propriety, and basic human decency. The paper traces how each author uses narrative structure and character outcome to interrogate the possibility of justice across different cultures and historical periods.
- Introduction: The Ambiguity of Justice in Literature: Justice defined and questioned across cultures and texts
- Fate and Self-Interest in Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades': Hermann's obsession and fate's role in denying justice
- Power, Torture, and the Mockery of Justice in El Saadawi's 'In Camera': State power renders justice impossible for Leila Al Fargani
- Conclusion: Is Justice Possible?: All three stories suggest justice is unattainable
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper opens with a sharp cross-cultural framing device — contrasting Islamic Sharia law with Western norms — to immediately establish that justice is culturally constructed and contested, not universal.
- It uses direct quotations from each primary text with precision, grounding interpretive claims in textual evidence rather than assertion alone.
- The comparative structure allows the paper to build a cumulative argument: each literary example adds a new dimension (fate, state power, social convention) to the central claim about justice's elusiveness.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative close reading across culturally and historically distinct texts. Rather than treating each work in isolation, the writer identifies a shared thematic thread — the failure of social institutions to deliver justice — and uses each story to illuminate a different facet of that failure. This technique requires selecting textual evidence that speaks to the overarching argument while respecting each work's cultural specificity.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a definitional introduction that establishes the central thesis. It then proceeds text by text, devoting sustained analysis to Pushkin before moving to El Saadawi. The Saikaku text is referenced in the introduction but the surviving body focuses primarily on the first two works. Each analytical section moves from plot summary to interpretive commentary, consistently looping back to the question of whether justice is achievable. The paper ends mid-sentence, indicating the source was truncated.
Introduction: The Ambiguity of Justice in Literature
The concept of justice, in literature and in life, is a universally cherished yet complex and inherently ambiguous one. All societies have respective — sometimes opposing — ideas about what justice means. Islamic Sharia law (once enforced in Afghanistan by the Taliban) states that cutting off a hand is apt justice for theft. Western society would consider that act not only unjust but barbaric. Webster's New American Dictionary defines "justice" as (1) "the administration of what is just (as by assigning merited rewards or punishments)"; (2) "the administration of the law"; and (3) "FAIRNESS; also RIGHTEOUSNESS" (p. 285).
By any of those — admittedly Western — definitions, particularly the last one, neither Ihara Saikaku in "The Barrelmaker, Brimful of Love," Alexander Pushkin in "The Queen of Spades," nor Nawal El Saadawi in "In Camera" depicts justice as feasible within the socially constructed institutions (e.g., insane asylums, courtrooms, marriage) or other elements of perceived human nature (e.g., agreements, promises, exchanges of goods for services, verbal contracts) depicted within these three stories. Instead, self-interest takes precedence over justice — or even over fair play, propriety, or basic human decency.
Fate and Self-Interest in Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades'
In Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades," a once practical young military engineer, the German-born Hermann, is obsessed with growing rich by learning an old Countess's elusive card-playing secret. After her grandson Tomsky tells how his grandmother was saved by and still possesses this gambling secret, Hermann — who earlier "never held a card in his hand, never doubled a single stake" (p. 865) — stops at nothing to learn it. His methods include breaking and entering, frightening the Countess to death, and cynically toying with the affections of Lizaveta, the household's servant.
When the Countess dies suddenly — Hermann looming threateningly over her, revolver in hand — it appears that his boorish quest will go unrealized. Then, at the Countess's funeral, Hermann believes he experiences the dead woman communicating her winning card secret to him as she lies in her coffin. But when he goes to play these cards on three consecutive nights, just as he is about to take everything, he somehow mistakes his queen of spades for an ace and loses all. Subsequently, Hermann — once rational to a fault — "went mad. He is now installed in Room 17 of the Obukhov Hospital; he answers no questions, but merely mutters with unusual rapidity: 'Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen'" (Pushkin, "The Queen of Spades," p. 883).
The poor servant girl Lizaveta Ivanovna, according to Pushkin's curiously detached, newspaper article-like conclusion, fares somewhat better: she marries "a very agreeable young man" ("The Queen of Spades," p. 883). However, Lizaveta Ivanovna is now also "bringing up a poor relative" (Pushkin) — one whom she may very well in turn tyrannize, just as she herself was tyrannized by the Countess. Justice, within such circumstances, is deeply ambiguous.
Arguably, since Hermann likely contributed to the old Countess's death, he should not be rewarded by successfully executing her secret and growing rich — and he is not. Yet it seems a harsh justice that Hermann should go mad (except, perhaps, as an ironic punishment for his excessively rational approach to life). In terms of human concepts of justice, one could also reasonably wonder whether it was just, early in the story, for the Countess to insist on keeping her lucrative gambling secret when others — including her own grandson — might have benefited from it. It might further be considered unjust that the Countess, given her own chronic card-playing compulsion, was ever told the secret in the first place, instead of being forced, as most gamblers are, to simply endure her losses.
If justice indeed exists — and the question of whether it exists is never answered in this story — Pushkin implies in "The Queen of Spades" that it is up to fate, rather than human beings, to understand, recognize, or dispense it.
Conclusion: Is Justice Possible?
Across the works examined in this paper, justice consistently proves elusive — undermined by self-interest, arbitrary fate, and the abuse of institutional power. Whether in Pushkin's St. Petersburg gambling world, El Saadawi's authoritarian courtroom, or the social institutions depicted by Saikaku, the stories converge on a shared and troubling conclusion: the mechanisms human societies construct to deliver justice are themselves subject to the very flaws — greed, cruelty, and self-interest — that justice is supposed to correct.
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