Persepolis Gender Analysis

Persepolis is a graphic novel of a girl, Marjane Satrapi, who had to grow up in the time of the Islamic Revolution, or the Iranian Revolution, in the 1970’s-80’s. The novel, of course, is full of images depicting Marjane’s life and the hard times that she had to live through. These images in the novel also often portrayed a symbolic meaning to other things, such as gender roles and loss of innocence. The use of graphic images in Persepolis positively affects the representation of religion, imperialism and gender roles in the novel.This image shows some of the many symbols of different religions. They are all types of religions that people can believe in but it also conveys the point that because there are so many types of religions, people

The images furthermore explain this fact and that the images were effective in showing this.In this image to the left, you can see that the man is wiping down the car while the woman is cleaning the dishes. This is a great example of gender roles because it shows the diversity of the two people and what they had to do in their daily lives. Men work while women do work at home, and although that isn’t how it works now, that’s how it was back then. In Persepolis, women were forced to wear veils. As seen in Persepolis, one of the images on page 76 of the novel depicted Marjane’s mother crying after she had been verbally assaulted by fundamentalist men. This image was put into the novel to show how frustrating it was to be a woman in these times and the difficulties it produced. Gender roles were greatly magnified in these times, with men and women doing certain things and having to wear certain things. This further shows the affect of graphic images in the novel.The picture at left depicts a kind of British octopus man with his hands on multiple countries. This, in fact, is imperialism because Britain believed it was better than other countries, therefore making them believe that they have a right to take over and control other countries as well, although this was a little earlier than the events that took place in Persepolis. In Persepolis, an image on page 11 in the book portrays Uncle Sam and a British leader