A Study Of The Construction Of Women's Subjectivity In A Thousand Splendid Suns In Light Of Gaze Theory

As a famous contemporary Afghan American writer,Khaled Hosseini was not productive and prolific,but his works have made great contributions to the development of American ethnic literature.His famous book The Kite Runner was a hit since it was published.It has received wide attention and praise from literature and critics,and brought Afghanistan back into the world's vision.A Thousand Splendid Suns is his second influential work after The Kite Runner.In this novel,he narrates the sufferings of three Afghan women and how they strive for freedom and happiness in the process of subjectivity reconstruction.Many scholars and critics at home and abroad have made profound and detailed interpretations of this novel,mainly from the perspectives of feminism,character image analysis,coming-of-age novels,traumatic interpretation,narrative interpretation and so on.This thesis attempts to analyze the gaze the three women received,Nana,Mariam and Laila,employing Sartre's gaze theory.This thesis conducts a detailed analysis of how these three women are gazed and how they overcome the crisis of subjectivity and reconstruct subjectivity in light of the gaze theory of Jean-Paul Sartre.In Sartre's view,people always feel the pressures from the outside world and the gaze from others is one of the pressures that lead to self-betrayal.The gazers are endowed with the power of “gaze” and establish their own subjectivity by “gaze”.The gazed become the objects of “gaze”,realize the pressure of the gazers,power and alienate themselves by internalizing the gazers' values.Sartre's gaze theory can well account for the thoughts and behaviors of the three women in A Thousand Splendid Suns.In A Thousand Splendid Suns,the Afghan women described by Hosseini seem to be subjected to the ubiquitous gaze from family and society every moment.As the “gazed”,their subjectivities are faced with crisis to the different extent,and they even gradually internalize the values of the outside world and gradually lose their own individuality.After experiencing the loss of subjectivity,women in Afghanistan gradually awakened their self-consciousness and reconstructed their subjectivity through mutual help.Through the analysis of the women's social context in Afghanistan in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns,this thesis reveals the living conditions and oppressions of Afghan females under the gaze.In Afghanistan,women are the gazed.Through the analysis of Mariam and Laila's struggle to obtain their subjectivity,the thesis insists that women should stand together and fight against the gaze to build up their subjectivity.Only when women in Afghanistan learn to unite to help each other and depend on themselves,can they change their situation of being gazed and finally achieve the liberation of both their spirits and bodies.