Violence against women in Patriarchal Culture described in Khaled Hosseini’s a thousand splendid suns

ABSTRACT

Feminism is one of the thought that defend women all over the world. It prosecutes equality and justice for women from men’s discrimination and exploitation. Actually, most of women realize that they have been always placed in the second class and marginalized in any aspects of life. Therefore, there are many scientific discipliner applied in back up these phenomena. Also, there are some approaches in literary criticism applied to cover and analyze these phenomena.

Thus, this study is aimed to find what the kinds of women problem covered on the novel such as violence and struggle of women that happened to the main character. Than, to achieve the problem of the study, the researcher uses feminist literary criticism as one method of this research. Moreover, the data of this research are collected from Kholed Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. The researcher him self becomes the research instrument in the process of data collection and data analysis.

Based on the research’s analysis, the violence and struggle reflected on the main character of A Thousand Splendid Suns novel takes two main forms which have any derivation on each aspect. First, violence which is divided into four parts such as physical violence, psychological violence, economical violence and sexual violence. The second is women’s struggle that to be the end of the novel purposed.

All forms of violence happen because of the system of patriarchy which assumes that woman is always in second class. It states that superiority is a symbol of man. In other hand, a woman is a symbol of a weakness which is always inferior. From the result of analysis, woman is always subordinated, discriminated, marginalized and alienated in the society. By that problem, woman attempt to fight against the system which is authorized by patriarchal culture. Thus, the struggle of women is substantively to fight against the ideology of patriarchy which is symbolic in form of tradition rule.