Women under War and Patriarchy: Female Subjugation, Agency, and Resistance in Khaled Hosseini’s and The Mountains Echoed

Abstract

This paper examines how Khaled Hosseini represents female subjugation and resistance through the intersecting pressures of patriarchy, war, class, family, and memory in  and And the Mountains Echoed. Although the former predicts the domestic enslavement of Mariam and Laila under the patriarchal control of family and marital violence, the latter constructs a more diffused narrative of gendered vulnerability via Pari, Nila, Parwana, and Masooma and other women shaped by factors of poverty, migration, and emotionally violent family dynamics. The paper employs feminist literary analysis, close reading of the text and readings of Afghan social history to suggest that Hosseini does not simply dramatise the experiences of the Afghan women as powerless victims. Rather, he recounts limited expressions of agency: sisterhood, caregiving, silence, moral choice, bodily endurance, and memory. The paper concludes that the women of Hosseini are oppressed by frameworks bigger than the form of a single man, but their opposition is met with the moral ethics of relationships and survival instead of having the traditional heroic freedom