¶ … Thousand Splendid Suns
Character's Physical Traits
The main character of the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns is a woman named Mariam. She is a harami, or illegitimate child and thus has very little rights in her society. The very first description the reader gets of Mariam is when she is five years old, the first lines of the book. "Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami" (Hosseini 1). Very little information is given about her physically and this is also important. She is described as a weed, something ugly and undesired (329). The reason is that in her society, Mariam is highly unimportant as a single person. She is a woman and that means she is powerless. She is illegitimate which means that any power she may have had as a respectable woman is robbed her by the circumstances of her birth. Mariam's father abandons her and marries her off to a man who is very much older than her and because of the circumstances of her birth, she has no course but to accept the marriage and all the physical abuse that accompanies it. Mariam believes all the terrible things that...
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