Essay for Persepolis

- Prompt #4 Satrapi’s book deals with many issues from the Iranian Revolution to the process of growing up during political turmoil. Among the many issues, two important political issues that are raised in the book are the division of society by class differences and the influences of Western culture. These two political issues are of particular importance because they greatly affected Satrapi’s childhood as well as her pathway to maturity. Persepolis deals with issues of class disparities and Satrapi displays a conflicted feeling towards the subject. One of the reasons the subject remains contradictory is that Satrapi shows her parents as very warm-hearted, but flawed and hypocritical people. For example, her family supports the Marxist theory and communism, both of which argue for the disintegration of social class and privilege. However, her parents uphold strict class barriers even within their own household with their maid Mehri and maintain a more privileged lifestyle than that of the lower classes. In addition, we know that Satrapi suddenly begins to feel embarrassed about sitting in her father’s Cadillac. The war does not quite show the outcomes that Satrapi’s parents believed it would show and as Satrapi grows up, she begins to have more conflicts with her parents. In addition, in the chapters “The Letter” and “The Key”, we learn a great deal about how Satrapi feels about the social class division. Although this may be even more so because of Satrapi’s young age at the time, Satrapi does not pay attention to social class because she doesn’t find it important. In “The Letter”, her father learns that the family maid likes the boy in the neighboring house and that Satrapi had known about it the whole time. Her father tries to

communicate to her that “their love is impossible…because in this country you must stay within your own social class.” We know that Satrapi is confused about her father’s stance as she states that it wasn’t Mehri’s fault that she was