The Personal vs. the Political Theme Analysis

Persepolis is a story about Marjane Satrapi, her family, her friends, and the people she knows—and also about the nation of Iran. These two stories cannot be unspooled from each other—one cannot be told without the other, and no individual in the story can exist or be understood outside of the context of the historical change happening in Iran around him or her, no matter how much he or she might try. From the start, Marjane’s story is about how the individual engages with the political—as her parents demonstrate against the Shah during the Revolution—and how the political encroaches on the personal—as after the Revolution Marjane must suddenly wear the veil at school. Indeed, what Marjane at one point pinpoints as the source of the Revolution—class differences—she recognizes in her own family home: the family maid, Mehri, does not eat dinner at the table with them.

The question, then, becomes one of degrees: if one cannot escape the political in one’s life, how much should one participate in the political sphere, and does one actually have a choice in the matter? For the Satrapis, the question manifests itself in questions over how much risk they want to take to protect their rights—do they want to demonstrate and possibly be beaten, for example? The Satrapis' solution is to try to recede as much as they can, to appear like good citizens of the Islamic Republic even as they privately hold parties, make wine, and buy imported goods. Yet even these choices are political acts, as they are forbidden and might lead to arrest.

Though Marjane cannot outwardly rebel much beyond improperly covering her veil, she finds small ways to resist the oppressive rules imposed on her by the Islamic Republic. The personal and the political, then, become inexorably intertwined in Iran. To assert one’s individuality in clothing or spoken opinion becomes a political act. Furthermore, Marjane expresses that government policies really affect people’s behaviors: “It wasn’t only the government that changed. Ordinary people changed too.” Under such a repressive regime, what once felt like an enormous separation between the public sphere and the private one considerably narrows. By the end of the graphic novel, Marjane’s mother is both covering the windows to protect against flying glass—a consequence of the ongoing warfare, indiscriminate in its destructiveness—and from the eyes of prying neighbors, who might inform the authorities about the family’s Western ways, which would be an individually targeted and motivated act.