EXPLOITATION OF WOMEN IN A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS (NOVEL) BY KHALED HOSSEINI: FEMINIST DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This thesis explores the discursive construction of female exploitation, resistance, and subjectivity in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns through the perspective of Sara Mills’ Feminist Discourse Analysis (FDA). Situated within the intersecting frameworks of feminist literary criticism, postcolonial feminist theory, and critical discourse studies, the research interrogates how language operates as a site of both patriarchal domination and feminist subversion. While previous scholarship has largely focused on the novel’s thematic portrayals of domestic violence, motherhood, and war trauma, this study offers a micro-linguistic and discourse-analytic approach that foregrounds the grammatical, lexical, and narrative mechanisms through which gendered power is naturalized, challenged, or reconfigured. Drawing on Mills’ emphasis that power is embedded "right down at the clause level," the analysis investigates four primary discursive domains in the novel: patriarchal domesticity, state and religious authoritarianism, narrative silence and focalization, and the re-signification of female agency. Through close readings of character speech, modality, metaphor, and narrative structure, the research reveals how characters such as Mariam and Laila negotiate discursive subject positions shaped by intersecting forces of class, religion, legitimacy, and trauma. Their linguistic evolution from silence to assertion, from erasure to agency demonstrates how discourse can be both a mechanism of control and a tool of resistance. Moreover, the study critically engages with postcolonial debates around reader positioning, Orientalist gaze, and representation, acknowledging the ethical tensions in a male-authored Anglophone narrative about Pakistani women. This study adds to the relative novelty of feminist literary linguistics, by combining feminist discourse analysis with intersectional and postcolonial criticism, and provides an example that can be replicated to examine the issue of gendered discourse in literary fiction. Finally, it testifies that literature does not simply reflect the gendered realities but it is a place of discursive practice in and through which the realities are constructed, challenged, and occasionally changed.