A Foucaultian Reading Of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini is a contemporary Afghan-American novelist.Despite the fact that he is not prolific,he has made a significant contribution to the development of American ethnic literature.His road to fame is marked by the publication of The Kite Runner.Since the book was published,Hosseini has received attention and popularity from both professional critics and ordinary readers.This book makes the world have a new understanding of his country.A Thousand Splendid Suns is another successful novel written by Hosseini,which explores the oppression to women in Afghanistan.With a delicate narration,Hosseini depicts the suffering of two Afghan women and how they struggle to pursue freedom and happiness.This thesis is a tentative attempt at an analysis of the repression on the main characters Mariam and Laila in A Thousand Splendid Suns from the perspective of Michel Foucault's power theory.It conducts a detailed analysis of how Mariam and Laila are repressed from the following three dimensions: power is repressive,power is productive,and power and subjectivity.The main body of this thesis can be divided into three chapters.Chapter One devotes to the repression of power.Under the oppression of patriarchal ideology,Mariam and Laila are confined in home and lose their voice.Chapter Two,on the basis of the productive power theory,analyzes the knowledge,docile body produced by power.Under such circumstances,knowledge serves power;individuals are disciplined to be docile bodies.The koran and Taliban Law are the symbols of knowledge and make the repression on Mariam and Laila rationalized.Meanwhile,power makes Mariam and Laila become docile through the discipline techniques.On the grounds of Foucault's early and late subject theory,Chapter Three centers on Mariam and Laila's subjectivity.Under the repression of power,the change of Mariam and Laila's subjectivity undergoes three stages: the crisis of subjectivity,the loss of subjectivity and the fight for subjectivity.Based on the previous chapters,the last part comes to a conclusion for the entire thesis.Having adopted Foucault's concepts of power and subjectivity,the thesisreveals that not only power is itself repressive to the powerless,but knowledge,docile body produced by it are its extension and infiltration.Power also produces subject.Subject and subjectivity which is closely linked with the former are under the sway of power.Although power is everywhere and challenges the subjectivity of subject,subject can retain its subjectivity by self-constructing positively.Foucault's self-constructing theory also provides a view for Afghan women's exploring their subjectivity.