Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

“People say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Truth is, you knew what you had, you just never thought you’d lose it – Anonymous” (Quotes). Marjane Satrapi was born to a wealthy family and had parents who adored her. She seemed to have everything, and even as the war raged on, her family still managed to have something more than the next family. In spite of their good fortune, the war was taking a toll on the family and it was decided that Marjane would be sent to Austria. Thus leaving everything Marjane loved behind, leaving her to fend in the darkness of the unknown. In Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Marjane starts off as a rebel, though naïve at the same time, to an attentive but scared girl in order to show how the war has triggered Marjane's reality to crash down, clarifying the world around her.

The book, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, was written by Marjane Satrapi; it is the story of her life in Iran from birth to fourteen years old. The perspective of Marjane, in her novel, affects the overall presentation of revolution, religion, and social classes. Consequently, with no background knowledge, we only have her perspective which affects our own opinion about the events of the book.

Western culture has often misperceived the east and the way that their society functions. In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Satrapi uses graphic novels as a way to demonstrate to the western culture how the east has been misrepresented. The use of media helps to depict to the west how their views of the east may have been unfairly formed in the past. The media has only revealed limited knowledge that only shows partial perspectives because it is difficult to get perspectives of the minorities although they are the ones who hold the most truth. In other words the use of graphic novels and a child’s perspective give the west a new idea on how it is that society in the east functions. This style of writing brings the connection between the two

On page 5, Marjane’s mother is introduced. The picture I chose to look at and examine was the second one on the page and in the middle. I feel that this picture represents this topic well because it shows

The top floor is more so that only few with power and authority can fit. The middle and bottom floor is where the rest stay respective to their economic situations. The upper class and lower class in American society have the largest gap in terms of wealth, prestige, power and authority. Literature specifically can heighten our perception of social class structures to a great extent. Society is a complex system portrayed in various different contexts focused

In the graphic memoir Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, the citizens of Iran are divided into three separate classes; the lower, middle, and upper class. These distinct social classes determine the citizen’s life opportunities and freedoms. For instance, Iranians are advised to stay within their social classes and not interact with the lower class. The story takes place while Iran is engulfed in a war with Iraq and also facing a national rebellion. In times of war, it is important that a country must remain unified and fight for the greater cause; however, social classes divide the country which causes a break in society.

xFrench novelist Gustave Flaubert advised writers to be “regular and orderly in your life like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” In Marjane Satrapi’s memoir, Persepolis, Satrapi takes an original approach to creating a graphic novel to write about her life experiences. In her memoir her mother, Taji is violent and original. As an Iranian women, she is different from most women and her parenting style is not necessarily conventional. Marji admires her mother, yet she sees her mother overbearing at times.

In the graphic novel Persepolis the author Marjane Satrapi writes about her as a child living in a torn country. Throughout the graphic novel she mentions different ways in which the country is having trouble. When the Iranian revolution began several new regimes came about and affected everybody's way of life. Whether it was in the way they dressed or what they believed no one was left unaffected. With her use of imagery she brought to life in an artistic way how her story unfolded.

Persepolis is a Greek name for the ancient city of Persia which existed in the Persian empire, before the rise of the Iranian government. As the country shifts in power, Iran has become a fundamentalist society that restricts the cultural and intellectual rights of the people. Marjane Satrapi’s, autobiographical memoir, Persepolis, reveals a firsthand experience of the author’s childhood and life within the Islamic Revolution. Satrapi exposes the restrictive government’s method of regulating women and feminism, freedom and confinement, and the restrictive politics of the country. Satrapi grew up exactly in the era when the new Islamic government set up rules that harshly restrained the rights of the women in the country.

In Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel and memoir Persepolis, she describes life in Iran under the Islamic revolution. The novel focuses on her formation identity amid the authoritarian and oppressive regime. She creates her identity through self-education and personal rebellion and expression regardless of the risk she faces. The novel follows the way she seeks to control her life within a system that is trying to remove that autonomy from her control. Marjane fights the personal oppression through small acts of rebellion and through self-education even as she faces risks from the Iranian regime.

Did you know that only 7% of the world's population are expressed as high income, 13% of people are weighted as middle class, 56% are low income, and 15% live in squalor. The rest are considered high-middle income workers. This shows how the 3 social classes are built. Nevertheless, this is just one of the topics that will be talked about in this essay. Nationalism, Revolution, and Social Class are just three of the topics talked about in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

In Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis, there is one principle shown to remedy the wide variety of personal conflicts that Satrapi faces throughout the book: to stay true to oneself and one’s origin. Having much of her adult family tell her this, often as heavy hearted parting words, it is understandable for Satrapi to take this advice to heart and write her graphic autobiography to portray a true and realistic Iran as an extension of herself.

Persepolis is compelling in that Marjane Satrapi uses a visual medium to physically develop her story by altering the art style of her illustrations as she grew older. I was intrigued by the transformation of a Roald Dahl-esque childhood comic to a mature Maus-like graphic novel. In the first half of the book, Satrapi represents her childhood with expressive and exaggerated art, as if she drew it as a child herself. As the book continued, however, I noticed her art became more grounded, as she used reasonable facial expressions and body proportions to give the story a sense of realism. I thoroughly enjoyed Satrapi’s use of illustrations to subvert expectations and build a contrast between different sentiments.

Taking a Freudian approach to the text, she asserts, “Central to much feminist theory is the return of the mother…as the primary, if inadvertent, enforcer of patriarchal values as well as their victims.” (Murphy 574). Murphy, with a combination of psychoanalysis and queer theory, argues that Marmee’s loving presence is meant to subversively counteract the appeal of heterosexual eroticism. She states, “Thus while, homoeroticism is never permitted direct expression, it dominates the actions and feelings of the female characters.” (Murphy 576).

The historical synopsis of Persepolis shows the depiction of Iranians and of the battles they encountered, and are still experiencing, in post-revolutionary Iran. Persepolis makes essential pace toward transforming how Western audience discerns Iranians. Persepolis gives readers a glance at how life is like in Iran, however, people base their impression of different countries on what the media reports. Sadly, the notion of Iranians is usually adverse and associated with fundamentalism, terrorism, and fanaticism. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis recounts her childhood days in Iran as an innocent child, striving to comprehend the changes happening in her homeland due to consequences of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.