Persepolis Social Structure

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In the book The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003), the author tells her story about living in Iran through Iran’s revolutionary war. The graphic novel starts off with the main character Marjane at 10 years old, before the war begins. As Marjane grows up, more laws start taking place causing the social structure around her to start changing. When more laws start forming, Marjane and many other people start demonstrating deviance against the government and the social norms around them to make social reforms. Marjane also changes as she grows up, going from an innocent 10 year old to a not so innocent emo 18 year old when she’s away from her parents in Austria. The society established in Iran is completely different from Austria’s …show more content…

To start off, Satrapi gives the audience an insight of the social structure by some of Marjane’s actions. For instance, Marjane talks about how the appearance of men and women show their political view of the regime during the war. Based on society’s social structure in the story, if women cover all of their body in black clothing they were considered to be fundamentalists and women who did the same thing except did not cover their face and hands were considered to be progressive. On the other hand, men with beards and shirts hanging out were considered to be fundamentalists and men who had a clean shave or mustache with a tucked in shirt were considered to be progressive (Satrapi, 2003, p. 75). The fact Marjane can identify political beliefs just by the way a person appears shows how appearance plays a big role in her society’s social structure. During the war, schools in Iran started to make it a daily task to line kids up and have them mourn the dead at war twice a day. When kids did this they were required to perform funeral marches for every person that died. With kids doing this twice a day daily, it causes kids to become more aware of the amount of people dying in

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