How Does Mariam Change In A Thousand Splendid Suns Culture

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini uses Mariam’s cultural and physical surroundings to implant and further develop her moral traits. Mariam’s cultural upbringing taught her to be submissive, cautious and left her with a sense of hopelessness. She later learns through her physical surroundings how to show empathy, become loyal, and have great courage. While her culture ingrained some questionable morals, her physical surroundings taught her new, and arguably more important, traits.
Over the course of Mariam’s entire life, she has had to deal with the repressive and submissive culture she lives in. Once she realizes her role as a woman and that it cannot, theoretically, be changed, she succumbs to the idea instead of fighting

When Laila marries Rasheed her reality is “virtually identical” with that of Mariam’s (Stuhr). In the beginning “Mariam sees Laila as a rival” but softens when she realizes how similar the two are (Kakutani). While Mariam had every right to be angry with Laila coming into her home, Mariam soon became her protector (Marciniak). Mariam takes the brute of Rasheed’s punishments by taking the blame of every problem to protect the young and ambitious Laila (Stuhr). Laila physically being around Mariam helps Mariam start to become a loyal and compassionate human being towards anyone in her similar

Every person and creature has their own path to enlightenment, which goes back to the idea that the road to Nirvana cannot be taught, only to be experienced. The stone on the river bank can represent God, Govinda’s old pal Buddha or just simply be a stone. Siddhartha contemplates the idea that the stone could be anything and everything and still look like a stone. While every stone may look a little different, at the end of the day they “all [pray] the om” and are “worthy of adoration” (Hesse 113). In the same regard, humans or plants or animals could be a stone on the river bank. They all come together and make one