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People's who do not receive affection as children impacts their future relationships. In Khaled Hosseini novels, he illustrates the psychological results of people’s lack of affection in their early ages. Hosseini’s novels take place in Afghanistan during the Soviet Regime. In his novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the story follows Mariam and Laila, two co-wives of a middle aged man, Rasheed. Mariam is first introduced in the novel; she is the daughter of Nana and Jalil. She is a harami, a child conceived out of wedlock, with a father that is ashamed of her and a mother who is unable to provide her with the love and affection that she needs. At the age of fifteen, Mariam decides she wants to go and discover her father’s life and meet his family, which results in Nana committing suicide. After the death of her mother, Jalil and his wives, force Mariam to get married to Rasheed who is older than her by at least thirty years. Her marriage with Rasheed is filled with mental and physical abuse. The novel then introduces, Laila who becomes Rasheed’s second wife but she does not have a choice. At the time she gets married, she has just lost her entire family including the love of her life, Tariq. Laila and Tariq are childhood best friends who become intimate and have sexual intercourse before marriage. In Islam, this is considered to be haram which means forbidden. When Laila comes to the Rasheed household, she is injured and he tricks her by convincing her that her best friend is dead. Unfortunately, Mariam marries him because she realizes that she is already pregnant with Tariq’s child. Mariam never has children of her own but makes a strong connection with Laila's children, especially Aziza. Aziza is also a harami. Laila and her two ch...
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...iam s enduring from Rasheed is cruel. Her own husband rapes her because she does not consent of sex with him but he still decides to rape her. Rasheed is projecting his frustration out on Mariam. He witnessed the death of his only son and he is ready to have more sons. Therefore, Mariam projects her feelings into having a baby.
Works Cited
Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print.
Hunter, Jeffrey W. Twenty First Century Novels: The First Decade. Detroit, Gale Cengage Learning. 2001. Web.
Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print.
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. A User Friendly Guide. New York, NY: Rout Ledge, Taylor & Franas Group. 2006. Print.
Rasheed tries to convince Mariam that the only way to keep Laila safe is by marrying her. He ends up hiring a man named Abdul Harif to tell Laila that he had met the love of her life, Tariq, in the hospital and that he had died. Laila is told this right when she finds out that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child. Rasheed had hired Abdul Harif to tell Laila this because he wanted to get Laila to marry her. When Rasheed brings up marriage to Laila, she jumps on board right away, and falls into Rasheed’s trap. After Rasheed and Laila get married, he treats her like a queen. He becomes very protective of Laila. Almost all his attention is spent on her, and in a sense, forgets that he is even married to Mariam. But him acting affectionate and caring does not last very long. When Laila gives birth to a baby girl, named Aziza, Rasheed starts to treat Laila how he treated Mariam when she could not successfully carry a child full term. Again, Rasheed ends up not getting what he wants, and therefore he turns onto Laila. The abuse, both verbal and physical, starts to get worse in the household. A particular situation that displays just how violent the abuse in their household can get is when he locks Laila and Aziza in their room, and Mariam in the shed because they tried running away from Rasheed and the abuse. He leaves them without water or food, and it ends up almost killing Aziza. This is where Rasheed falls into the paradox of power again. “ ...the 16th century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli insisted that compassion got in the way of eminence. If a leader has to choose between being feared or being loved, Machiavelli insisted that the leader should always go with fear. Love is overrated” (Lehrer The Power Trip). Rasheed would rather have his own family be completely afraid of him and almost
From start to finish, one could see how much Mariam values Laila, Aziza, and their friendship. The first example is when Mariam vows to help Laila while they are in the hospital for Laila’s unborn child: “I’ll get you seen, Laila jo. I promise” (287). This simple promise is a deep portrayal of Mariam’s desire to help Laila find a doctor and deliver her baby. Additionally, one can see Mariam’s love for Laila when she protects her from Rasheed’s grip of death, “‘Rasheed.’ He looked up. Mariam swung. She hit him across the temple. The blow knocked him off Laila” (348). Rasheed was going to kill Laila, but Mariam steps in and knocks him off of her with a shovel to save her life. Mariam forms a tight-knit bond with Laila, and when Hosseini includes their relationship, one can see how Mariam values Laila enough to kill another man. The author also describes their relationship after Mariam and Laila discuss plans for leaving: “When they do, they’ll find you as guilty as me. Tariq too. I won’t have the two of you living on the run like fugitives.” … “Laila crawled to her and again put her head on Mariam’s lap. She remembered all the afternoons they’d spent together, braiding each other’s hair, Mariam listening patiently to her random thoughts and ordinary stories with an air of gratitude, with the expression of a person to whom a unique and coveted privilege had been extended” (358). The love Mariam has for
Mariam has built a mutual relationship with Jalil in her childhood, with weekly visits every Thursday. Mariam has hid behind a wall of innocence, and Jalil helped her get past the wall with the harsh realities of the world. Mariam was an innocent being at childhood: she was stuck indoors in Kolba. Mariam does not know what is going on around her home, because she has not experienced the outdoors as well as others. All she gets at is from Jalil’s stories, and Mullahs teaching. She does not understand that the world is not as as happy as it seems. In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini uses Jalil’s character to show development in Mariam's life, in order to emphasize how significant the impact of trust breaks Mariam’s innocent in the story.
In the book, Half The Sky, author’s Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn bring to light the oppression of women in the developing world. Anecdotal stories, filled with sadness, anger and hope, collected after years of reporting, depict just a few examples of this global struggle for women. At the end of their book organizations are listed, in alphabetical order, in hopes of creating a starting point for people to further support women in developing countries. With so many organization doing great work to empower women it becomes difficult to decide where money should be distributed. As a grant manager it is important to take a closer look at each of the organizations and their work to better assess where the money should go. However, the
Green, Keith, and Jill Lebihan. Critical Theory & Practice: A Coursebook. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Women are beaten, and it is culturally acceptable. Like routine, women are beaten in Afghanistan almost every day. When a person purposely inflicts sufferings on others with no feelings of concern, like the women of Afghanistan, he is cruel. Cruelty can manifest from anger, irritation, or defeat and is driven by self-interest. An idea that is explored in many works of literature, cruelty also appears in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns in the relationship between a husband and wife. In their case, the husband uses cruelties in the form of aggression are to force his wife to submit. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini’s use of cruelty elucidates the values of both Rasheed and Mariam as well as essential ideas about the nature of
Rasheed was the man in the relationship and Mariam was the typical wife that did her wifely duties and stayed home while he goes and works and provides money. He treats her as if she’s worthless and means nothing to the world. When he eats he doesn’t look at her or speak to her, he is demanding, and tells her how worthless and uneducated she is. This then leads to him becoming abusive punching her, slapping her, kicking her, speaking rudely to her, he did this to damage her. A lot of this occurs because Mariam can get have his son and she is also considered a harami. Everything she does infuriates him and blames all the issues on her. She constantly tried to avoid making mistakes and did everything to his liking, but he always found a way to abuse her and blame it on her. Rasheed did not care about anything but himself he abided by the patriarchal stereotype ,which is being the dominant one throughout society and making women inferior. Mariam felt powerless and fearful. She was a victim of abuse and oppression. She married a man that said everything he did was normal in a relationship. Even though Mariam was in a violent marriage she became a strong women and soon she overcomed these
Novels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. P138_157. From Gale Virtual Reference Library.
As her family is packing up to leave Kabul, a stray rocket hits her house, leaving her unconscious and her mother and father dead. Laila wakes up in Mariam and Rasheed’s house, and they take care of her as she heals from the explosion. While she’s staying in their home, Rasheed decides he wants to marry her. Mariam protests, but Rasheed doesn’t care what she thinks. Laila agrees to marry Rasheed because she is pregnant and can pass the baby off as his. When Laila tells Rasheed she is pregnant, he is overjoyed. He hopes for a boy, and during Laila’s pregnancy he treats her like a queen. When Laila delivers a baby girl, Rasheed is disgusted by the smells and sounds baby Aziza makes. Rasheed neglects Aziza and implies that the baby isn’t his. Laila decided that she was going to run away soon after baby Aziza was born. Laila, Mariam, and baby Aziza get to the train station and find a man that they think is willing to act as their relative but instead he tells the authorities. The women are taken to a police station, and then sent home. Rasheed punishes them by putting them in separate hot rooms without water or food for one day. He then threatens to kill them if they try to run away again. Laila gets pregnant again, and this time gives birth to the boy Rasheed has been hoping for. They name him Zalmai,
The biggest irony of this book is not that the women described here fail, or remain at the bottom--sex discrimination within societal structure has already been doing that since the beginning of time. The most
Critical theory consists of six components which include the following: historical context of the situation, power distribution, self- reflection, non-judgemental inquiry, acknowledgement of values and taking action (Salas et
This is the best way to continue the struggle for equality. Abbreviated Bibliography . Barnard, ed. (Virginia Durr), Outside the Magic Circle . Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power .
...action with others… especially men. This supplies final substantiation of the authors' argument, that women continue to be oppressed by their male-dominated societies. It is a bold undertaking for women to ally and promote a world movement to abandon sexist traditions. Although I have never lived in a third world or non-Westernized country, I have studied the conditions women suffer as "inferior" to men. In National Geographic and various courses I have taken, these terrible conditions are depicted in full color. Gender inequality is a terrible trait of our global society, and unfortunately, a trait that might not be ready to change. In America we see gender bias towards women in voters' unwillingness to elect more females into high office, and while this is not nearly as severe as the rest of the world, it indicates the lingering practice of gender inequality.
(P- 216)” Mariam was thirty three old, but that word still had a sting. She sees her husband taking care of Laila just the same way he did for her years back when she had his child. Laila gives birth to tariq’s child, whom Rashid thinks belongs to him. Its a girl, whom Rashid denies to even see but on the other side Laila rejoices the birth of tariq’s and her
Parker, Robert Dale. Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 . Print.