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Ayushi Shah

Ms. Tenzin Dulal

ENG A Language and Literature

March 1, 2021

How do two of the works you have studied portray the struggle to be understood?

We all learn valuable lessons from the struggles we face and the problems we find

solutions to. This ability of human beings is what has abled us to be more developed than the rest

of life on Earth. As said by Edmond Mbiaka, “Nothing great comes easy, and nothing easy can

ever equate to greatness.” The various struggles that people face and how they manage to rise

again ‘like a phoenix’ can be seen in both Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi as well as The World’s

Wife by Carol Ann Duffy. Both the literary works are presented in different ways, Persepolis is

an autobiography of Satrapi written as a graphic novel whereas, The World’s Wife is a collection

of poems written by Duffy based on fictional and mythical characters.

In Persepolis, as we read along, we see how Marjane is growing up and the kind of

person she is becoming, from a child who doesn’t understand what was going around her to a

grown adult who has formed strong opinions and is not afraid to voice them. Similarly, as the

result of Carol Ann Duffy choosing characters that were originally silenced or non-existent and

providing them with a voice that is both loud and strong enough to change the way we analyze

the stories and myths, we can say that much like Marjane, the characters in this poem collection

are vocal.

Furthermore, as we move along with the novel, we get a somewhat clear picture of what

war was like and how it affected the people who were in the middle of it rather than hearing

and/or viewing it from a second-hand perspective like that of foreign media. Satrapi enables us to
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almost experience the war through a child’s perspective in the first part of the novel and through

the eyes of an adult in the second part. On the contrary, The World’s Wife mainly deals with

different themes in different poems such as one-sided love in Anne Hathaway, motherhood in

Demeter and Queen Herod, etc. Most of these poems portray the struggle in a way that it feels

like a dramatic monologue.

Throughout The World’s Wife, like mentioned previously, Carol Ann Duffy has

given a voice to the ‘unheard’ or ‘ignored’ women (mostly the ones from Greek Mythologies).

She has talked about issues such as coming of age in Little Red Cap, victim-blaming in Medusa,

and more, thus, providing a feminist view to those stories from a perspective that had not been

done before. Whereas Persepolis deals with other themes such as religion, children growing up in

war, and having to leave their loved ones. Marjane Satrapi’s autobiography gives us a new look

at Iran showing; both good and bad unlike how the western media had only focused on the bad,

broken, and damaged, therefore, breaking the many stereotypes that people have about the

country and its people. However, the one thing that these two literary works have in common is

feminism.

Both CAD and Satrapi have portrayed the struggle in a way that was comparatively more

simple to understand than the actual complexity of the situation. Satrapi has shown the political

views by saying how the school made them rip the pages of their textbooks, gender oppression

by showing how women including young girls were forced to wear veils without being given a

proper explanation as to why they had to and more that shows how she has used simple words to

shed more light on the things that we know or had heard of. On the other hand, CAD has

addressed the problems women face by showing how her chosen characters overcame their

problems over time such as how Mrs.Quasimodo finally started to love herself after getting out
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of an unhealthy marriage where she was treated unfairly by her husband, and Little Red Cap

finally getting out of a bad relationship, etc.

Moreover, as mentioned earlier, one of the main themes of Persepolis is war. To put it

another way, the novel is about a ten-year-old girl and how she grows up in the middle of a war,

and how she has to leave her loved ones behind to find a better life for herself. We see how

different things are for them like having to smuggle pop culture posters into the country because

it’s illegal and more. On the other hand, this ever-running theme in the novel isn’t something that

is talked about or covered in The World’s Wife. In fact, not all of the themes in The World’s Wife

are covered in Persepolis either such as, one-sided love, motherhood, etc. Therefore elucidating

the impression that although most if not some of the literary themes overlap, the rest have

remained as individual themes.

As I have already submitted, the most important theme that runs through both literary

texts is feminism. Carol Ann Duffy takes silenced women from the stories we heard growing up

and makes them and their struggles heard with the use of various literary devices such as

metaphors, allusions, personifications, and more. Whereas, Satrapi shows how she was and still

is an unapologetic human being who is not afraid to stand up for what is right and call out all that

is wrong. As described in Oxford Dictionary, feminism is “the advocacy of women’s rights on

the ground of the equality of the sexes”, which is exactly what Carol Ann Duffy and Marjane

Satrapi have done in their respective works no matter how they are represented; as poems or as a

graphic novel.

To sum it up, both the literary works i.e, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and The World’s

Wife by Carol Ann Duffy show the struggles to be understood in different ways. They tackle

both the same and different themes, the main and most significant one being feminism. Satrapi
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uses somewhat simplifies war as she uses simple words as well as a child’s perspective whereas,

CAD uses various literary devices to complicate the poem and give it a good flow although

simplifying the complexity of the actual situation.