Khaled Hosseini and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Although the research on A Thousands Splendid Suns is rarely found, the research on feminist issue has been done by many people. One of them had been conducted in 2012 by Dedi Suhendi, student of Yogyakarta State University. The title of the research is “Hedda‟s Struggles in Fighting Patriarchal Ideology as Reflected in Ibsen‟s Hedda Gabler Radical Feminism Analysis”. In his research, Suhendi investigates the kinds of struggle of Hedda along with the obstacles she experienced during her struggle using the theory of feminism. Another research about gender discrimination has been conducted by Kardina Hadianti 2009 with the tittle “Gender Discrimination and Its Impact in Tan‟s The Joy Luck Club”. The research is an investigation about gender discrimination faced by Chinese mother in the US. The writer focuses on what kinds of discrimination the mothers face and how the discrimination influences the mothers in nurturing their daughters in the new country. Those three studies are different from this research. Kazemian‟s study uses the same novel, but the main problems which are analyzed in both researches are different. Kazemian focuses on the portrayal of women in the novel and in the western media, while the focus on this research is the women‟s attitudes towards gender discrimination in the novel. The second research is also different from this one because even though both use feminism, but the branch theories are different. The research uses a more specific branch of feminist theory, which is radical feminism, while this research uses feminist theory in general. It focuses only on the struggle of women to fight against the discrimination; meanwhile, this research focuses on the attitudes of women in facing the discrimination, which are different one another. The third research analyzes the same problem namely gender discrimination, but it is different from this research since both studies use different novels. The third research uses The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, while this research uses A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Since there are many differences between this research and those three previous studies, this study is not a follow up of those previous studies. This research is the first to investigate the problem about gender discrimination and the different attitudes of women in facing it in A Thousand Splendid Suns using feminist literary criticism.

D. Conceptual Framework

Gender discrimination in patriarchal society is a global phenomenon as old as human history. In a patriarchal society, women become the subject to physical and emotional brutality done by men that is allowed, enabled and endorsed. This practice is longstanding and acceptable to both genders because the patriarchal ideology has shaped the attitudes of people towards the discrimination. Many women accept the discrimination and many men keep discriminating them. That patriarchal ideology also leaves a little room for equitable thinking for struggling against the discrimination. Discrimination on the basis of gender takes many forms and they happen in many fields of life. A scholar named Fakih 2012:12-13 divides gender discrimination into five faces. They are marginalization, subordination, stereotype, violence and work load. Yet, although women face discrimination in a same patriarchal society, they have different attitudes in facing it. Some women show negative attitudes by accepting, being silent and not fighting against the discrimination and some others show positive attitudes by struggling against the discrimination. Due to the framework above, the researcher uses Hosseini‟s A Thousand Splendid Suns which portrays the different attitudes of women towards the discrimination they face. Concerning the idea of gender discrimination and the different attitudes of women towards it, the researcher employs feminist literary criticism to analyze A Thousand Splendid Suns. Feminist literary criticism has started to question the differences between women, including how race, class, ethnicity, and age intersect with gender in a patriarchal society. Thus, the theory can help the researcher to answer the research questions, i.e. 1 what kinds of gender discrimination are faced by women in Hosseini‟s A Thousand Splendid Suns and 2 what the attitudes of women towards gender discrimination they face.