Oppression on Women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi, in Persepolis writes about a memoir of a little girl growing in Iran. She refers to a secular pre-revolutionary time through contrast, the oppressive characteristics of the fundamentalist government upon women in specifics. In comparison, her work is very similar to Margaret Atwood’s, A Handmaid’s Tale, in which the central character, Offred, reflects upon her former life’s freedom, cherishing her former name and in doing so, emphasizes the isolated and enslaved live that she must now endure. Although Both Margaret Atwood and Marjane Satrapi show how a totalitarian state oppresses women in different ways by…show more content… Similarly Satrapi feels the same about the headscarf/ veil, which are the exact reason why she rebels against the veil and the ideology that it represents. Martha’s are made less by their clothes. When a woman is wearing the green “Martha’s dress” no one is interested in looking at her as a person. She is just a servant. Martha’s dress makes the woman serviceable not desirable, useful but undesirable.
Pride and dignity is taken away from women in Gilead. They are isolated from their families and are tortured by their memories. They are handed a dress code depending on the role they play and are forced to abide by that. After Satrapi designs a new uniform for her school, she says, “this is how I recovered my self-esteem and my dignity. For the first time in a long time, I was happy with myself” (298).
Undeniably this dress code in both the books make women no longer an individual but an object for specific use, stripping them of their identities and giving them no choice.
Oppression against women is evident when Satrapi points out during the lecture for “moral and religious conduct”, “why is it that I, as a women is expected to feel nothing when watching these men with their clothes sculpted on but they as men can get excited by two inches less of my head-scarf?”(297). Obviously, religious modesty was enforced only on women. In Haindmaid’s Tale, women are divided into a small range of social categories, each one signified by a
