Women In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Register to read the introduction… In this book women are forced to marry people they don’t want to and also obey the men in however the men see fit. Mariam is one of the main characters in the story and she is forced into marrying Rasheed, who is a man she didn’t even know. She did not want to marry him at all, but found not get out of it; during the marriage ceremony when they asked her if she wanted to marry him, she couldn’t even answer and other women had to answer for her (). This is one of the many great examples of how women didn’t have any control over their own bodies, and also don’t have much say as to what they want to do with their own bodies. Another really good example is when Rasheed comes home and wants to have sex with Mariam and she doesn’t want too and she starts crying (). When this happens, he tells her he doesn’t like the crying and she needed to stop and then they end up having sex anyways. This really shows that Mariam doesn’t have any “property rights” over her own body at all. The events that happen in both these stories can be connected just through the fact that women aren’t treated equally throughout each of these novels and the differences go hand and hand with the decade that each novel was written …show more content…
The differences are though that in Hamlet the women chose to go to the men and let them control their lives. In A Thousand Splendid Suns the women don’t have much of a choice, other than to go and marry the men that want them. The women in Hamlet don’t know any other way of living than to depend on a man for everything. Another difference is you can tell that in Hamlet the women aren’t really main characters, but in A Thousand Splendid Suns they are the main characters and are discussed way more than the men are. Also in Hamlet the women are very dependent on the men in every way, but in A Thousand Splendid Suns the women have to listen to the men, but they have other women to depend on, they aren’t looking for the man to tell them their every move. An example of this would be in Hamlet, Ophelia always goes to her father or brothers before doing anything and Gertrude loses her husband and doesn’t know what to do, so she immediately remarries her deceased husband’s brother. In A Thousand Splendid Suns the women have each other to kind of talk to and they also try and help one another out. Laila and Mariam form a bond over the fact that they are married to the same man. They most likely would of never found each other, but by them being married to the same man, they are going through the same dealings together so they help one other through