The Breadwinner

Ellis’s story explores the brutality of the Taliban regime, which dehumanizes and represses the female characters. Parvana’s mother is university-educated and worked as a successful writer for a radio station in the years before the story takes place. She is devastated at being forbidden to work or leave home freely after the Taliban take control of Kabul. Similarly, Nooria and Parvana are forbidden to attend school. Women are required to cover themselves with a burqa when they leave home. Even inside their homes, they cannot be visible to outsiders; women must have their windows blacked out to keep them from being seen by anyone in the outside world. Parvana’s mother’s immense frustration at her erasure from public life is evident in her fury at her daughters’ suggestion that a note from their father be forged to excuse her for being outside without a male escort; “I will not walk around my own city with a note pinned to my burqa as if I were a kindergarten child. I have a university degree!” (38).

The Taliban bans women from acting independently in the public sphere, but the organization is also responsible for the deaths and arrests of countless Afghan men. As a result, the regime’s actions force women to find a way to skirt the rules in order to survive, since many women find themselves with no male family member who can work to support the family. Ellis draws attention to this hypocrisy. Many Afghan women, such as Mrs. Weera, Homa, Parvana, and Shauzia, have no choice but to enter the world unaccompanied, as they have no living or present male escort. For example, Homa would be brutally punished for entering the public sphere without a male escort, but the  Taliban’s brutal murder of her father and her brother left her with no male relative to escort or provide for her.

Parvana and her mother are beaten by guards outside the jail when they try to visit her father, and Parvana is beaten by a Talib in the street when she tries to buy food for her family after her father’s arrest. This violence is condoned, and even mandated, by Taliban leaders, leaving women completely powerless. The extent of the Taliban’s wish to erase women from public life as much as possible is evident in the rule requiring silent walking: “The Taliban had made it a crime for women to make noise when they walked” (148).

Parvana’s father tells her that the city of Kabul used to be characterized by progress. This contrast between the thriving city of the past and the stifling rules of the present is evident in Mrs. Weera’s life: Formerly a champion runner whose country valued her body’s skill and speed, Mrs. Weera is now a grandmother whose government forces her to hide her body under a burqa and disappear from public life.

Women’s condition as objects in a transaction is evident in Shauzia’s situation at the end of the novel. Arranged marriages of very young girls are normalized as a cultural practice under the Taliban, and Shauzia learns that she will soon be married; her grandfather wants to receive the large bride-price that is customarily paid to young wives’ families. Neither she nor her mother has any voice in this decision. This anecdote reveals the way that women are dehumanized and disenfranchised by laws that treat them as property with no personal rights.