The Plight of Marginalized Women in Khaled Hosseini’s a Thousand Splendid Suns in ‘The Third World Feminism’

Abstract

Third World Feminism’ investigates into the resistance and portrayal of women in literature in the oppressive and marginalizing territories. Postcolonial feminism highlights a tendency towards universalizing women by focusing on the involvement of women in the Western lifestyle in the war-stricken lands where they have been, on the one hand, segregated as inferior; yet, on the other hand, upheld as the instigators of resistance towards the betterment of societies in which the full impact of a misguided patriarchal rule breaks the women down emotionally, who are abused, deceived and controlled. Thus, this paper aims at displaying the observations considering local culture, gender discrimination and female passive resistance as far as collected from Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. The novel depicts the conflicts of identification of the women which pave the way for the degradation applied on the characters. Subsequently, from a postcolonial feministic perspective, the paper attempts to investigate the plights of women, which are enforced on them through the patriarchal components and standards of culture.