Comparative Perspectives (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

Conceptual links

Persepolis

Born a Crime

Identity and belonging

• Marji's identity is contested from childhood by competing forces:

  • Family values and Western cultural influences

  • Revolutionary religious ideology

  • Political propaganda

• Identity formation becomes a form of resistance when conformity is demanded

• Trevor's mixed-race identity places him outside apartheid's racial categories

• His birth is legally criminalised under the Immorality Act

• Belonging must be actively negotiated, not passively inherited

Social norms as power

• The Islamic Republic extends authority through social norms:

  • Compulsory veil and enforced dress codes

  • Closure of bilingual schools

  • Rewritten ideological curricula

• Conformity is a tool through which regimes sustain power

• Apartheid operates through social expectation as much as legislation

• Trevor learns to read unwritten social codes, particularly through language, to survive a system designed to exclude him

Language and survival

• Literacy and intellectual engagement are forms of resistance:

  • Reading of forbidden texts

  • Parents' dinner-table political debates

  • The grandmother's moral wisdom

• Language is a practical survival tool

• By learning Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Afrikaans and English, Trevor crosses racial boundaries apartheid constructed

• Noah reflects that language 'brings with it an identity and a culture', and that apartheid used linguistic division deliberately

Resistance to oppression

• Resistance is personal and familial rather than openly political:

  • Mother's public protests and sunglasses

  • Father drinking wine at home

  • Grandmother's jasmine ritual

  • Uncle Anoosh's political commitment

• Resistance is quiet and adaptive:

  • Patricia defies apartheid through education, independence and faith

  • Trevor uses humour and linguistic fluency to navigate a hostile system

• Agency can exist even within oppressive structures

The role of the mother

• Marji's mother is a figure of moral and political courage:

  • Protests publicly; faces harassment and physical danger

  • Makes the painful decision to send Marji abroad

  • Prioritises her daughter's freedom over family unity

• Patricia Noah is the moral heart of the text:

  • Defies apartheid conventions; raises Trevor alone

  • Throws Trevor from a moving vehicle to save his life

  • Survives being shot by an abusive partner

Persepolis

Born a Crime

Themes and rich ideas: identity and belonging

• Marji forges selfhood against:

  • Religious indoctrination and political propaganda

  • Erasure of pre-revolutionary Iranian culture

• Identity becomes an act of resistance when regimes demand conformity

• Trevor's existence is a legal crime under apartheid

• Identity must be actively constructed through:

  • Social intelligence.

  • Cultural and linguistic fluency

  • Adaptation across racial communities

Authorial purpose

• Challenges simplified Western perceptions of Iran

• Shows how political systems attempt to control identity from childhood

• Documents the human cost of the Islamic Revolution through personal narrative

• Humanises the lived experience of apartheid through humour and personal narrative

• Shows how systemic racism shaped identity, opportunity and belonging

• Presents resilience and education as tools of empowerment

Impact on the audience 

• Well received in Europe; won international awards

• Faced censorship and criticism in Iran

• Debated as Westernised perspective vs. humanising account of a misrepresented population

• Widely praised for balancing humour with serious social critique

• Noah's comedic voice is debated:

  • Some argue humour softens apartheid's severity

  • Others see it as a deliberate structural choice mirroring Trevor's survival strategy

Textual features and authorial choices

Narrative perspective

• First-person autobiographical narration with visual medium

• Child focalisation contrasts Marji's innocence with political violence

• Adult retrospection provides critical awareness

• Retrospective first-person narration

• Adult comic voice frames childhood experiences

• Distance and insight allow analysis of apartheid's logic

Structural and formal choices

• Episodic graphic memoir form

• Bold black-and-white visual style strips events of sentimentality

• Juxtaposes childhood innocence with political violence

• Episodic memoir structure.

• Each chapter is self-contained yet contributes to a broader coming-of-age narrative

• Structure reflects identity as built through accumulated experience

Symbolism and motifs

• The veil: ideological control of female identity and public space

• Borders (national, cultural, personal): constrained selfhood

• Language: identity, survival and the crossing of racial boundaries

• Mixed-race appearance: the arbitrary and unstable nature of racial classification

Textual evidence

• “At the age of six I was already sure I was the last prophet”

• “We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends”

• “I wanted to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one”

• “Language brings with it an identity and a culture... A shared language says "We're the same". A language barrier says "We're different." The architects of apartheid understood this.!”

• “During apartheid, one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race. Needless to say, my parents committed that crime”

• “I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast: give you the program in your own tongue”

Conceptual links

Persepolis

The Handmaid’s Tale

Gender and the female body

• Women's bodies are politicised sites of state regulation:

  • Compulsory veil enforced in public

  • Dress code and conduct rules

  • Educational and employment restrictions

• Handmaids are reduced to reproductive function

• Identity is erased: Offred's name signals possession ('Of Fred').

• Religious justification is used to legitimise dehumanisation

Power, religion and ideology

• Religious ideology is weaponised to justify political authority

• Religion regulates both public and private life:

  • Islamic dress codes enforced by the state

  • School curricula rewritten to reflect regime ideology

• Gilead uses a distorted reading of biblical scripture to justify its hierarchy

• The Ceremony, the Wives, the Aunts all show religious language co-opted by power

• The most dangerous ideologies present oppression as divine will

Identity and erasure

• Marji's identity is progressively constrained:

  • Dress, speech, music and education are all regulated

• Interior life resists erasure: conversations with God, intellectual development, family bonds

• Offred's identity is systematically removed:

  • Name, job, daughter, reading rights and legal personhood

• Identity persists through memory and narrative: “I compose myself”

Resistance and survival

• Resistance is quiet and domestic:

  • Mother protesting publicly

  • Family listening to forbidden music

  • Marji wearing a Michael Jackson badge under her veil

• Resistance is interior and covert:

  • Offred's storytelling.

  • Relationship with Nick

  • The Mayday network

• The desire for selfhood, the impulse to tell one's story, cannot be entirely suppressed

Authorial context and purpose

• Satrapi writes as an Iranian woman in exile: insider knowledge with critical distance

• Purpose is partly testimonial (challenging Western stereotypes) and partly personal (exploring exile and displacement)

• Atwood wrote in 1985 during rising religious conservatism in North America

• Every element of Gilead is drawn from historical precedent

• Her purpose is to warn: theocratic patriarchy is not imaginary but historically documented

Persepolis

The Handmaid's Tale

Themes and rich ideas: gender and power

• The Islamic Republic targets women's bodies as a site of ideological control

• The veil is the central symbol of a system that restricts:

  • Education and employment

  • Freedom of movement

  • Self-expression

• Gilead reduces women to biological function

• The Handmaid's red uniform marks the body as state property

• Women are stripped of name, education, employment and legal status

Authorial purpose

• Challenges the stereotype of Iranian women as passive victims

• Presents women (Marji, her mother, her grandmother) as agents of resistance, moral authority and intellectual vitality

• The graphic memoir form gives women's experience visual as well as verbal power

• Warns against the conditions that make Gilead possible:

  • Complacency of those who believe it cannot happen

  • Gradual erosion of women's rights

• The Historical Notes epilogue frames Gilead as a past event, amplifying the warning

Narrative perspective

• First-person child narrator observes gender restrictions with growing clarity

• Visual medium shows, rather than describes, how dress codes and public restrictions are enforced

• First-person narration gives direct access to Offred's interior life: her memories, fears and observations

• Because Gilead has forbidden women from reading and writing, Offred's act of narration is itself resistance

Form and structure

• Visual counterpoint juxtaposes the domestic and the political

• Panels of Marji playing sit alongside panels of public execution and street violence

• Shows how the regime intrudes on childhood

• Structure alternates between Offred's present experience and memories of life before Gilead

• The contrast emphasises what has been lost and how rights are eroded

Symbolism and motifs

• The veil: ideological control of female identity and public space

• Keys and locked doors: restriction of women's movement

• Western music and clothing: cultural resistance to enforced conformity

• Red dress and white wings: female subjugation and reproductive function

• “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”: covert solidarity between women.

• The Commander's Scrabble game: the regime's contradictions and the danger of transgression

Textual evidence

• “We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends”

• Marji's mother (Ch. 5: The Veil): photographed at protest marches, receiving death threats

• Regime officials threatening Marji's mother for not wearing her veil correctly

• “We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important”

• “I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech”

• “There is more than one kind of freedom... Freedom to and freedom from”

Comparative angle

Persepolis

Text for comparison 

Possible similarities 

Possible differences

Individual versus society

Marji's identity is contested from childhood by revolutionary ideology. The Islamic Republic regulates selfhood through compulsory dress codes, rewritten curricula and the suppression of pre-revolutionary culture

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)

Both show the state attempting to control individual thought and identity. Both use a first-person narrator whose inner life is the last space of resistance. Both explore how language is weaponised by authoritarian regimes

Satrapi's account is autobiographical; Orwell's is speculative fiction. Marji ultimately escapes; Winston Smith is entirely destroyed by the system. Satrapi uses a visual medium; Orwell uses realist prose

Gender and power

The Islamic Republic uses gender as a tool of social control, regulating women's bodies through compulsory veiling, restrictions on education and employment, and public conduct laws enforced by the morality police

A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen (1879)

Both present women constrained by patriarchal or authoritarian systems, with female protagonists who develop growing awareness of their oppression. Both writers use their respective forms to make women's experience visible

Satrapi's oppression is state-enforced and political; Ibsen's is social and domestic. Marji is a child narrator; Nora is an adult making a conscious choice to leave. Persepolis is autobiographical; A Doll's House is realist drama

Authorial purpose

Satrapi uses the graphic memoir to bear witness to political trauma, challenging Western stereotypes of Iran, documenting the human cost of the Islamic Revolution and showing how political systems affect ordinary families

Maus, Art Spiegelman (1991)

Both use the graphic memoir form to present personal experience of political persecution. Both draw on family history to give political events a human scale, using visual storytelling to represent trauma that resists straightforward description

Persepolis focuses on theocratic oppression; Maus focuses on the Holocaust. Spiegelman uses animal allegory; Satrapi uses representational figures. Maus is partly told through interview with a survivor; Persepolis is direct memoir

Resistance and survival

Resistance in Persepolis is personal and familial rather than openly political: listening to Western music under the veil, maintaining intellectual and cultural life at home, and the grandmother's daily rituals and moral wisdom

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1958)

Both show individuals caught between colliding systems of power during rapid social change. Both explore how cultural identity becomes a site of political struggle and both writers challenge dominant political or colonial narratives through personal storytelling

Marji ultimately survives and escapes; Okonkwo is destroyed by his inability to adapt. Persepolis is autobiographical and contemporary; Things Fall Apart is fiction set in colonial Nigeria. Satrapi's resistance is interior and cultural; Okonkwo's is physical and ultimately fatal