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Lisette LeMerise

Tim Newell

IB English 11

3 January 2016

Accelerated Maturation in Persepolis

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, revolves around the description of Marji Satrapi as

she ages from around age ten to fourteen. Her childhood takes place amidst the turmoil of 1980

Iran as she progressively deals with one development of violence in her everyday life after

another. From rebellion to death to invasion, both Marji and Iran experience episodes of brutality

to a vast extent. In fact, one might presume the events would have a profound effect on Marji’s

development, especially considering childhood’s usual innocence and slow maturation process.

As if to answer, Marjane Satrapi suggests, through her detailed and dynamic characterization of

Marji, that experiencing childhood during 1980 Iran accelerates the process of maturation due to

the traumatic experiences it produces.

In order to describe her character development, Satrapi has Marji start and then develop

throughout her childhood as the memoir’s title implies. Similar to any child, as Marji ages, she

also matures. The process of maturation tends to be defined by the loss of common childhood

traits, including innocence and ignorance, and replacing those with independence and the ability

to live on one’s own.

Therefore, in order to prove that Marji does mature, Satrapi utilizes juxtaposition in the

type of settings she depicts at the beginning and end of the memoir. Toward the beginning, Marji
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is depicted as being inside and merely talking to adults in the safety of her home. Even when she

does go outside, she is still in close proximity to her home: “We demonstrated in the garden of

our house” (10). The fact that she is inside so often during the early ages of her youth indicates

Satrapi’s visual and symbolic representation of a sheltered lifestyle. Sheltered lifestyles are

common for children and tend to be what causes much of the ignorance and innocence they have.

Satrapi confirms this with Marji’s early characterization as “a child who repeats what she hears”

(62) after repeating a statistic she learned from the television. As is the case for most children,

Marji lacks the experience from being outside to come up with anything other than what she

hears, again confirming her childish ignorance and therefore her lack of maturation.

However, toward the end of the memoir, her characterization is juxtaposed with that of

the beginning due to a setting change. She is depicted as leaving her home more often, skipping

class to go to “Jordan Avenue… where the teenagers… hung out” (112), or visiting the “black

market” to buy “Kim Wilde and Camel” (132) tapes. In combination with the juxtaposition of

setting as it goes from dominantly sheltered to outside, Satrapi now describes Marji as being

more independent, a trait of maturation and thus implying her shift to it. In fact, even at the age

of thirteen, an age most readers would still consider young, her mother surprisingly lets her go

out alone: “I only knew two or three other girls who could go out alone at thirteen” (131).

Finally, in order to fully indicate Marji’s transition from childhood to adulthood, Satrapi

employs a fairly universal metaphor to convince most readers. Satrapi visually depicts Marji as

smoking a cigarette as an “act of rebellion against [her] mother’s dictatorship” (117). Rebellion

against one’s parents is a common indication of development to adolescence since it is an act

most teenagers express. However, the fact that Satrapi uses the cigarette as a metaphor for the

loss of innocence indicates maturation because of that loss. Smoking a cigarette, especially as a
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form of rebellion, is a fairly cliché way to depict this. However, because it is used so often for

this purpose, the metaphor has become practically universal and understood to mean the

transition from one’s childhood to adulthood and maturation by most readers. The cigarette itself

symbolically represents an item for adults, so when a child like Marji smokes one, she is

committing an act of adulthood and suggesting she is an adult. Satrapi confirms this by, in

juxtaposition with earlier characterization, characterizing Marji as a grown-up: “With this first

cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye” (117). Therefore, Satrapi successfully and effectively

indicates Marji’s maturation. Her abundant use of various literary devices, even those not

expressed here, give readers multiple chances throughout the memoir to watch her character

develop from an ignorant child to a teenager behaving like a grown-up. This universal metaphor

aids in the effectiveness. Its frequent use throughout much literature has made its meaning well-

known, especially in this circumstance, and therefore easy to understand by many audiences.

Satrapi, however, takes Marji’s maturation a step further by suggesting that it is

accelerated for Marji through her use of a symbolic event. At the very end of the memoir, the last

significant event for Marji occurs when her parents decide “to send [her] to Austria” (147). The

catch, however, is that she is going alone. This event is used to symbolically represent Marji’s

maturation because her parents feel she is no longer dependent on them and thus can live without

them. Leaving home is usually the event that occurs when one is an adult, and this tends to be

around the age of eighteen when most feel their child is mature. Nevertheless, Marji’s parents

ironically feel she has adult qualities at the age of fourteen. Satrapi even suggests that this is

strangely young by characterizing Marji as surprised to hear she is leaving because of her age:

“But I’m only fourteen!” (147). In turn, this causes readers to also feel surprised. It feels too

young. The character development of Marji itself indicates her maturation is quick. The memoir
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starts with a dependent ten year-old girl and ends with a fourteen year-old girl leaving home,

another indicator of maturation because she is capable of being on her own. The ironic part is,

only four years account for her transition, and the juxtaposition of her characterization from

beginning to end enhances how quickly and thoroughly she develops.

That being said, Satrapi then indicates to readers that this accelerated maturation occurs

to Marji because she lives in Iran in the 1980s through her depiction of numerous scenes of

violence to symbolically represent the way Marji sees the world. At the start of the memoir,

when Marji is innocent, Marji views brutality unrealistically. On page fifty-two, panel one

illustrates Ahmadi being tortured as he was “cut to pieces”. Because this memoir is based on the

thoughts of Marji who has never seen death at this point, Satrapi chooses to stylistically draw

this specific scene in an unrealistic and simple manner to symbolically represent the way Marji

views the world. In this case, instead of seeing the reality of being cut to pieces, which would be

filled with blood and gore, young Marji sees a cut person. However, as time progresses, Marji is

forced to deal with more violence, including the execution of her Uncle Anoosh, the harassment

of her father with a gun after driving home from an illegal party, and witnessing the dead body of

her neighbor’s daughter, whom she personally knew, after a bombing. Panels one and two on

page one hundred and forty-two again portray the violence involved in the bombing of the

neighbor’s house, “the Baba-Levy’s house, which was completely destroyed”. This time,

however, this scene is depicted as real. Satrapi uses shading rather than plain black and white,

creating a more three-dimensional image. This scene is juxtaposed with the simplistic torture

scene, indicating that, after seeing death, Marji now sees the world as it really is. Due to the high

quantity of violent scenes illustrated by Satrapi, she seems to indicate that traumatic experience
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is what causes accelerated maturation, and because these experiences are a result of living in

1980 Iran, this idea lacks universality.

It may be argued that Satrapi’s purpose of her memoir is to indicate to readers the effects

traumatic experiences have on children in general, and not just those in 1980 Iran. This may be

true, especially because the memoir is about childhood. However, Satrapi does not utilize enough

tactics to indicate universality. Satrapi does depict other children growing up quickly due to bad

experiences, such as the three children who had jobs at young ages in “Ashraf Darvishian[‘s]”

(33) book, but there is not enough examples or enough focus on them to imply that Satrapi’s

purpose is on all children. Yes, traumatic experiences may happen to all people, but Satrapi’s

focus is not on this fact.

Therefore, Satrapi effectively expresses that specifically living in Iran in the 1980s

accelerates maturation because of the traumatic experiences it creates. She stays focused on the

effects that occur to Marji and even includes an example of another child dealing with similar

effects named Pardisse whose “fighter pilot” (82) father died. Satrapi also employs numerous

literary devices that show Marji’s characterization change throughout the novel, causing her

characterization to be thorough and expressed with variety. Satrapi’s large quantity thus aids

effectiveness and her variety gives her multiple chances to develop one of her purposes.

(Word Count: 1,496)

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Works Cited

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Paris: L’Association, 2000. Print.