In Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, storytelling is used to subvert oppression experienced by the characters within these works as well as the oppression of Western stereotype and misperception of Muslim men and women. By the use of careful historical contextualization, each story is told against a backdrop of Western colonialization and cultural tradition that are both shown to empower as well as disempower the key female characters analyzed. Through the use of Feminist Archetypal Theory, key female characters in these three literary works are analyzed as their Heroine's Journeys are shown to either occur or not. Key to the discussion of the Heroine's Journey is the concept that the freedom for a woman to make a complete journey is contingent upon membership in the elite class, and that the ability to choose to take this journey is critical to its successful completion.