Week 5 Prompt 1

The blog post I decided to expand and include in my formal paper is Wealth. I found this topic very interesting. In the book Persepolis, money was used for several things but most importantly money helped Marjanes family get away with many dangerous situations. I will mostly be writing about this topic and I will use the Read Response critical theory. I found this theory easier for me because I had many reactions to the events in the book. I also found very distinct opinions on what they were going through during the war and how they managed the situation. Money seemed to be very important for Marjanes family; however Marjane seemed to disagree with her parents social class beliefs. Marjane believed for equality this could have been one of the many reasons she changed into a rebellious young lady. An example is when Marjanes maid is writing a secret love letters to a neighbor’s son and is exposed by her jealous sister who tells Marjane’s uncle where later words get to Marjane’s dad. “Her jealousy was more than she could bear….That is how the story reached my father. Who decided to clarify the situation….Ok, I’ll get straight to the point: I know that Mehri pretends she is my daughter. In reality she is my maid…. Without Hesitation, Hossein gave all the letters he had received to my father(36,37)! This showed how Marjane’s father was disgusted by the idea of Mehri lying about being his daughter. He clarified the situation because he didn’t like the attribution Mehri had taken by saying that he was her father. In this case, he wanted to make people understand that she was only a maid. This proves how he was very strong opinionated about social classes and in this case, how dating had to be within their own social groups. Marjanes reaction proved patriarchy when she decides to demonstrate against the Shah, who her parents supported. Another important symbol that I found very significant towards wealth was the key. While being in war and the recruiting of young men from the lower class, Marjanes family was preoccupied in hairstyling and party planning among other things. Mrs. Nasrine was the maid which had been one of the unfortunate to receive the key. “It is a plastic key painted gold. They gave this to my son at school. They told the boys that if they went to war and were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into heaven(99).” I thought this was very humiliating because they compared a young life with a plastic colored key. No life as poor as it can be is unworthy. Being thrown into battle with no prior knowledge or a basic training is just inhumane. Marjane thought that because one of his cousins was in that specific age range he would have also been given the golden key. To her surprise, he didn’t know anything about it. In addition, her cousin Peyman was throwing a party. “Hey! Peyman? What?...Next week you’re having a party?.. I’ll ask my mom. Tell me, at school, did they give you the keys to paradise. Keys to what(100)?”