Resilience, Alienation and Female Friendship: Resilient Women in Toni Morrison's 'Paradise' and Khaled Hosseini's 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'

Abstract

This study explores the resilience of women, their alienation (spiritual or physical detachment from others), and the use of female bonding as a tool of resilience in Toni Morrison's Paradise and Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. The theoretical framework includes the Alienation Theory by Charles Reitz (2000), the Resilience Theory by Luthans et al. (2006) and the concept of Female Friendship by Elizabeth Abel (1981). The wearisome experience of the women in both of these novels is such a situation that they form mutual connections to compensate for the loss of mother/father love, face harsh social circumstances, and fight against the challenges created by gender differences. Female friendship becomes a powerful tool that helps women in combatting patriarchal oppression and a weapon of struggle to be free from societal pressures which give them a sense that they are objects. Toni Morrison's Paradise, by portraying the failure of women's relationships, exposes the ubiquitous power of patriarchy and relevant challenges. Even then, there is a spiritual kind of optimism that the death of women is in fact a future prediction of women's freedom from patriarchy. Similarly, Khaled Hosseini ends A Thousand Splendid Suns on an optimistic note that a woman builds a home for abandoned and deserted women. Thus the women show resilience in hard times by making mutual bonds and then struggling for liberation. It signifies that both of these writers have affiliations with feministic ideals of women's liberation. This study lays the foundation for further research in resilience studies in combination with alienation and female friendship in these novelists.