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Mistreatment Of Women In A Thousand Splendid Suns

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Living in a country where everyday it is considered lucky to rise and see the sun due to frequent bombing everyday can make life extremely precious. But, when one also has a severely abusive significant other, it becomes even more delicate to survive the night when one’s every move is looked down upon, to see if the person is “worthy” of their supposed lovers approval. This is what happens to Mariam and Laila in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini. In the novel, Hoseeni uses imagery and tone to highlight the mistreatment of two women, Ultimately illustrating how strong one can be persevering through an abusive relationship.

In the beginning of the novel, the first interactions that Mariam has is with her own mother …show more content…

Before Mariam decides to venture off to her father’s home, Nana whines “ Of all the daughter’s I could have had, why did God give me an ungrateful one like you? Everything I endured for you! How dare you! How dare you abandon me like this you treacherous little Harami!”(27). This evidence showcases how manipulative Nana could be towards Mariam due to the hate for her father Jalil whom Mariam adorns. Consequently, since then tone portrays that Nana has resentment towards her own daughter, it also becomes clear that Mariam’s love for her father is the root of this hatred. Therefore, it also express that one may feel extreme resentment towards one person, due to the fact that the person potentially has done the wrong in the past and still holds a grudge against them for unestablished reasons. After a failed attempt of going to live with Jailil, Mariam returns to her kolba where Nana was wondering “How would she apologize?” or

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PART 1: CHAPTERS 1-15 Characters introduced: Mariam Mariam is the protagonist in the novel. She grows up outside of the city of Herat in a small shack and is raised by her mother, Nana. She was thought to know that she is a “harami”. She dreams of bigger things for herself and tends to question authority.

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(Illegitimate child) In Afghanistan, being a harami, people treated Mariam differently and unfairly. She had to persevere through this her whole life and even to her death towards the end of the book, it is still one of the key personality traits of Mariam. “The years had not been kind to Mariam. But perhaps, she thought, kinder years were waiting still.

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Mariam was just something else on earth that was in his way. This proves what Nana said in chapter 2 to be right. That she and Mariam were nothing but a mug wort, they were just ripped out and thrown aside, made unnoticeable to anyone because it looked

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The injustice Mariam endures in the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, leads Mariam on a struggling journey impacting her future path in life. The injustice that Mariam endures leaves a permanent mark on her life and impacts her from the beginning. Life wasted no time throwing the cruel injustices of life at Mariam. Mariam was marked a harami, otherwise known as a child without a father, even though her father Jalil was alive, near, and well. “She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing: that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person that would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.”

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Hosseini gives Mariam many Christ-like qualities in the novel like forgiveness. Like Jesus, Mariam shows forgiveness in the novel towards Jalil when she reflects “he’d not been a good father, it was true, but how ordinary his faults seemed now, how forgivable, when compared to Rasheed’s malice” (309). Mariam reveals that she knows Jalil has faults and that they seem easily forgivable compared to the

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This took great courage to take the actions that Mariam did because typically, people stay with what they know and understand, not taking any chances to lose what they hold dear to themselves. She later finds that her father bluntly lied to her through his chauffeur while she sleeps on the streets. When she goes home, she finds her mother dead. Soon after, she was forced to marry Rasheed, her second act of bravery. Throughout her later life, she tried to get pregnant so many times, however, she could not because she had miscarriages.

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In Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns , Nana tells Mariam that a man always finds a way to blame a woman. This mistreatment of women is depicted in the novel by utilizing multiple examples. Throughout the novel, men were able to use women as scapegoats in the Afghani society that deemed women as unequal to men.

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When Laila’s parents were killed and she was injured, Mariam took her in and sacrificed her time and space in order to take care of Laila (199). Mariam didn’t have kids of her own, yet took care of Laila as if she were her own daughter. She cared enough for the young girl’s well being to take her in and show her kindness. When Rasheed is about to kill Laila, Mariam hits Rasheed with a shovel so hard that it kills him (349). She viewed Laila as her own daughter, and she wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her daughter.

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Mariam longed to place a ruler on a page and draw important-looking lines”(Hosseini ). Mariam is an example of how women are banned from an education and whose life could have been changed by education. Instead of being educated, she is sheltered by her mother and lives the rest of her life without high expectations of herself. Nana teaches her that an Afghan woman has to endure the life that is chosen for her because she does not have a say. Nana even says "There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don't teach it in school.

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