PROSE - POWER
THESIS
- In ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Hardy and ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ by Hosseini, both
authors present power as a force predominantly controlled by men, and often abused by the
institutions of religion and lawful, to control women, as well as in marriage and family life. Whilst
power is presented as controlled by Rasheed and the Taliban in ‘Suns’, similarly by the christian
church, Alec and Angel in ‘Tess’, both Hosseini and Hardy present power as regained by the
female protagonists.
1. The authors present power as dominated and controlled by the male society;
power is patriarchal.
- TESS - Alec ‘insists’ on feeding Tess strawberries - imperative verb ‘insists’ highlights Alec’s
assiduous determination to dominate Tess till she ‘parted her lips’ and ‘took’ the strawberries
in an ‘abstracted half-hypnotised state’.
- Sleeping motif - (with quasi-sexual imagery), foreshadows Alec raping Tess whilst she is in a
semi-lucid state, with Tess’ semi-conscious disposition emphasising Alec’s passive violence.
- Dark imagery - signi es Tess’ gurative fall from grace as a result of Alec’s cruelty.
- Verb ‘doomed’ in tandem with Hardy’s description of Tess as ‘moonlit’ suggests that it is fate
for Tess to endure Alec’s sexual cruelty
- Celestial imagery - implies the inevitable and inescapable loss of innocence for Tess
- SUNS LINK - fate for Mariam to endure Rasheed - ‘looks at the frozen stars in the sky’ after
she is raped, celestial imagery antithetically echoes title of the book, suggests its fated and
immortalised pain.
- both Hosseini and Hardy suggest fate is perhaps cruel to the predetermined debasement
and objecti cation that both female protagonists experience.
- contemporary negative Victorian attitudes towards female sexuality, meaning that Hardy had to
have censored and euphamised this scene in order for it to be eligible for serialised publication.
- since Hardy’s negative depiction of male cruelty causing female su ering was seen as socially
unacceptable as, like in 20th century Afghanistan, male dominance was considered normal in
patriarchal Victorian society.
- SUNS - Rasheed had ‘no problem forcing’ the ‘little tight’ wedding band over her knuckles -
harsh dynamic verb ‘forcing’ in the in nitive present tense foreshadows the continual sexual
dominance Mariam receives as the object of his cruel sexual desires
- Sexual image of ‘little tight’ - euphemism for Maria’s virginal innocence that Rasheed corrupts
- Rasheed ‘squeezing’ and ‘stroking’ Mariam’s breast whilst he ‘slid under the blanket’ and
rapes her - sibilance used heightens intensity and emotional severity of his actions.
- ‘Stroking’ - perhaps term of endearment for an animal, animalistic verb with bestial
connotations illustrates Rasheed’s Cruel ownership of Mariam.
- Hosseini more broadly re ects the perhaps ubiquitous domestic violence endured by many
women in 20th century Afghanistan, with one in three Afghan women experience martial
violence, like Mariam.
- ‘normalised’ violent culture of behaviour in Afghanistan deeming it socially acceptable for men
to cruelly exert their superior socio-economic power over women in the domestic space of the
home, since martial rape was legal in 1970’s Afghanistan.
- Male power is presented as so strongly dominating that they have the ability to take the
childhood of a woman, which they expect her to willingly give.
- These images of women as transitionary and sexual objects shows the lack of power women
are illustrated as having, and the presentation of power as patriarchal and exploitative.
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, 2. Though power is presented as absent in the lives of most women, both authors
present power as being regained by strong women, and empowering them as
heroes.
- SUNS - Mariam decisively ‘steadied her feet and tightened her grip’, ‘raised the shovel
high’, and ‘turned it so the sharp edge was vertical’.
- Here, Hosseini’s expansion of time within the detailed and structurally drawn out description of
Rasheed’s death further underlines the idea that Mariam gains liberation from Rasheed’s death,
due to the sentence structure placing ‘her’ as the active agent, despite being the object
pronoun, which implies a subversion of the power dynamic that allowed Rasheed to
systematically abuse Mariam.
- In addition, Hosseini’s image of Mariam raising the shovel ‘as high as she could’ symbolises
how, in Rasheed’s death, Mariam nally occupies a higher socio-domestic status over him.
- Hosseini suggests this is extremely rare for Afghan women, due to the normalised culture of
domestic violence that pervades Afghan society that deems it socially permissible for men to
exert their higher status over women within the home, thus it could be suggested that only with
the death of men at the hands of women can women be ultimately liberated from their domestic
entrapment.
- Moreover, the verb ‘turned’ in conjunction with the adjective ‘sharp’ create a lexis eld of
precision, which perhaps suggests that Mariam enacts Rasheed’s death in a calculated and
objective manner.
- SIMILARLY - TESS plunges the knife into the ‘heart of the victim’.
- TESS - Hardy solidi es Alec’s death is an act of revenge through the intimate imagery of the
heart, which indicates the emotionally driven nature of Alec’s death.
- However, Hardy creates an objective sense of distance with Alec’s death, unlike Hosseini who
depicts Rasheed’s death from directly from Mariam’s narrative point of view.
- This is structurally reinforced through Hardy’s use of Mrs Brooks as a focaliser who describes
the ‘oblong white ceiling’ as having a ‘scarlet blot’ in the shape of a ‘gigantic ace of hearts’
in its midst.
- structurally signi cant as the ‘scarlet blood’ is foreshadowing the ‘scarlet blot’ that appears
on the ‘white ceiling’ after Tess kills Alec, which is the ultimate act of female power in the
novel.
- Hardy’s heart imagery and red colour symbolism perhaps suggest that Tess’ main motivation
for Alec’s death is as a result of her subconscious, amorous and unwavering devotion to Angel.
- ‘I have killed him!’.. For the trap he set me in my simple youth’ - metaphor illustrates how all
her life, she has been a hunted animal, until now when she has become empowered,
demonstrating how power is not always presented by the authors as patriarchal, but that
sometimes the female protagonists can become empowered
- violent deaths of both Rasheed and Alec can also be interpreted as a display of the
female protagonists’ pinnacles of strength.
- SUNS - Mariam ‘gave it everything she had.’, whereby the metaphor heightens and arouses a
sense of poignancy surrounding Rasheed’s death, since it is perhaps a culmination of the
su ering Mariam ‘endures’ within her relationship with him.
- TESS - Hardy similarly presents Alec’s death as resulting from an emotional outburst when
Tess emphatically states ‘my sin will kill him and not kill me!’, which suggests that Alec’s
death is retribution for his moral transgressions against her, and with Tess’ reclamation of
religious language previously used to condemn her, suggesting that Alec’s death brings about
the climax of Tess’ female socio-religious liberation.
3. Power is presented by both of the authors as institutionalised; the Victorian
church and Taliban hold immense power over society.
- Religious attitudes infused within society facilitate isolation for both protagonists - no
power.
- TESS - parson of Tess’ parish stating he ‘must not’ give Sorrow a traditional Christian burial.
- Hardy’s negated modal verb illustrates the Parson’s strict adherence to the typical and idealised
Victorian religious attitudes - 19th Century Anglican England, a person could only be buried on
consecrated ground, thereby allowing that person to go to heaven, if they were baptised.
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