A Thousand Splendid Suns tells a story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, who are of so many differences and hardly have any interactions in their early years but eventually share a common life with each other for almost half of their lives by fate. In the story, Mariam, an illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman and his servant, are forced to marry the 48-year-old Rasheed at her 15. Her marriage seems happy, until her repeated abortion angers him, which leads to her misery in the future. While Laila is a lovely girl living next to Mariam and Rasheed. She is well educated during her teenage time but loses all her relatives overnight during the war. On hearing the death of her boyfriend Tariq, she had to marry Rasheed for her unborn baby of Tariq and her. At first, the relationship between Mariam and Laila is stiff and frozen. While as time goes on, they develop a strong connection and help each other survive Rasheed’s tolerance. In the end, Mariam kills Rasheed and sacrifices herself to save Laila, and Laila marries Tariq, living a happy life.

In current study, scholars mainly focus on the cultural and historical significance of this book. Apart from these aspects, they also attach their importance to women images from the perspective of Rhetoric in A Thousand Splendid Suns. In addition, researchers also study the destruction of ecosystem in the book and dig into the internal relationships between not only male and female but also human and nature. 

A Thousand Splendid Suns provides us a world of suffering and oppression, while the causes are various. This thesis focuses mainly on the analysis of the awakening of female consciousness in A Thousand Splendid Suns—how they suffer, the progress of awakening and how they fight, mainly from the perspective of feminism. How feminism is defined comes from gender groups. In the Cambridge dictionary, the definition of ‘feminism’ is the belief that women should be allowed the same rights as men and be treated in the same way. In other words, feminism is to establish equal rights in politics, economy and all areas for women. So in this essay, feminism is used to reveal the predicament of Afghan women in patriarchal society and analyze in which ways women can achieve independence, equality and freedom. To be more detailed, in the first chapter, it will depict how Afghan women are oppressed by the patriarchal society and the war, taking Mariam and Laila as an example. The second chapter will study the process of changing from enduring to resisting, And the third chapter is about how Mariam and Laila rebel the current situation and fight bravely and independently for their freedom and future.