Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran 9780804778183

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Burying the Beloved

Burying the Beloved MARRIAGE, RE ALISM, AND REFORM IN MODERN IRAN

Amy Motlagh

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S S TA N F O R D, C A L I F O R N I A

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Motlagh, Amy, 1976– author.   Burying the beloved : marriage, realism, and reform in modern Iran / Amy Motlagh.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8047-7589-2 (cloth : alk. paper)  1.  Persian fiction—20th century—History and criticism.  2. Persian literature—Social aspects—Iran.  3.  Literature and society—Iran—History—20th century.  4.  Law and literature—Iran—History—20th century.  5.  Realism in literature.  6.  Marriage in literature.  7.  Women in literature.  8.  Women's rights— Iran.  9.  Women—Iran—Social conditions.  I.  Title.  PK6423.M68  2011  891'.5509003—dc22                                                             2011007416

For my grandmothers, Katherine D. Geiger and Faroghlagah Zarrinkelk: two courageous women who each in her way helped me to better understand the complexities of language and memory.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix A Note on Transliteration and Translation

xi



Introduction: Burying the Past: Iranian Modernity’s



Marriage to Realism

1

Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved:



How the Civil Code Remade Marriage and



Marriage Remade Love

2

Wedding or Funeral? The Family Protection Law



and the Bride’s Consent

41

3 4

Ain’t I a Woman? Domesticity’s Other

59



Lawlessness, Postmodernism, and Heterotopia

1

21

Exhuming the Beloved, Revising the Past:

5

A Metaphor for Civil Society? Marriage and



“Rights Talk” in the Khātam ī Period



Conclusion: A Severed Head? Iranian Literary



Modernity in Transnational Context

94

112

129

Notes

137

Bibliography

157

Index

175

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks are owed first and foremost to Negin Nabavi, who has been a steadfast supporter of this project since its inception. I also wish to remember gratefully the late Jerry Clinton, who was a generous and patient mentor, if only too briefly. Hanan Kholoussy deserves a special note of thanks for the many kinds of help she has offered along the way, but especially for reading the full text of this book and offering incisive comments. Many other friends and colleagues kindly read (or listened to) portions of this manuscript at various stages of its progress and shared valuable feedback, including Lena Amanti, Michael Beard, Toni Clark, Robert Finn, Andras Hamori, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Zayn Kassam, Kelli Moore, Nasrin Rahimieh, Marta Simidchieva, Larry Thornton, and Michael Wood. I also appreciate the guidance and comments offered by Kate Wahl and the anonymous readers at Stanford University Press. Any errors that remain in the manuscript are, of course, my own. Other friends, colleagues, and family members supported this project in different ways and I offer thanks to Prateeti Ballal, Orit Bashkin, the Kamyabs, Alison Potter, the Salehians, and the Shahrokhis. Mrs. Azar Ashraf at Firestone Library assisted me at many turns, and often anticipated what I needed before I knew myself. I am grateful to Manuchehr Hassanzadeh and Majid Roshangar for help in acquiring an out-of-print book. Mahdokht Sana‘ti literally took me by the hand in Tehran and introduced me to the richness of the contemporary Iranian women’s movement and to the intellectual heritage of her distinguished aunt Sadīqeh Dowlatābādī, and I cannot express thanks enough for this rare gift. Special thanks are due as well to my extended family in the United States and ix

x

Acknowledgments

Iran for helping me first to imagine Iran, and then to learn to see it. I’m especially thankful that my family has helped me retain Persian as a part of my life in America, and that they continue to show me the richness and beauty of that language in so many ways. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo (AUC)— especially Ferial Ghazoul and William Melaney—for their encouragement and support. An AUC pretenure leave and summer research grant allowed me the time and resources necessary to complete this manuscript. I also wish to thank the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, particularly Mark Cohen, for early support of this project. I gratefully acknowledge the kindness of authors Golī Taraqqī and Zoya Pīrzād, both of whom answered questions about their work. When I wrote to Sara Dolatabadi to ask if she knew someone who might be willing to create an image for the cover, she graciously offered to do so herself and created the beautiful image that adorns the cover of this book. Many thanks, Sara. My parents, Rebecca Geiger Motlagh and Hossein Arbab Motlagh, have been wonderful supporters of this project and I thank both of them for their love and encouragement. My sincere thanks are also owed to my brother, David Motlagh, who is both my most encouraging reader and a tireless supporter of all of my creative endeavors. Lennart Sundelin was not only a sang-e sabūr throughout the researching, writing, and revising of this project, but also a loving partner and friend.

A Note on Transliteration and Translation

I have adhered to the IJMES (International Journal for Middle Eastern Studies) system of transliteration from Persian to English with the following exceptions: the kesra is marked by an e (not an i) and the damma becomes an o (not a u). I believe this more closely approximates pronunciation of the dialect of modern Persian recognized as the standard in Iran. I have also elided the markers of difference for consonants that are not phonetically distinguished in Persian. Proper names of figures of living persons or Iranian authors writing in English (e.g., Karimi-Hakkak, Najmabadi) have been transliterated according to their recorded preferences. Persian words and names which are commonly used in English (Reza Shah, Pahlavi, Tehran, etc.) have been rendered according to their common usage in English rather than strictly transliterated. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

xi



Introduction

B U R Y I N G T H E PA S T: I R A N I A N MODERNIT Y’S MARRIAGE TO RE ALISM

Constellations of meaning accrue around powerful cadavers. —Jean Franco, Rise and Fall of the Lettered City

In the political and cultural upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Iranian intellectuals began to suspect that the fate of any modernist was premature death.1 They were strengthened in this belief through the execution of early reformists at the court of Nāsser al-Dīn Shāh Qājār, such as Mīrzā Abū al-Qāsem Qāʾem-maqām Farāhānī (d. 1835) and Mīrzā Taqī Khān (Amīr Kabīr; d. 1852); by the murder of poet and iconoclast Fātemeh Barāghānī (more commonly known as Tāhereh Qorrat al-ʿAyn; d. 1852);2 and through the mortal illness of young poet Parvīn Eʿtessāmī (d. 1940) and the suicide of Iran’s premiere writer of fiction, Sādeq Hedāyat (d. 1951).3 Modernity, it seemed, could be deadly. To be on the wrong side of it at any given moment—and the right side was always changing—was to find oneself on the wrong side of fate. What happened to these modernizing bodies after their deaths is sometimes as violent and as telling as the manner of the death itself. From Tāhereh, strangled in a garden and thrown into a well, to Hedāyat, who traveled to Paris in order to gas himself, Iran’s modernity has been the graveyard of its advocates, making it a modernity preoccupied with where the bodies are buried.4 In her study of Latin-American literature during the Cold War, Jean Franco recounts the astonishing and curious travels of Argentinean First Lady Eva (Evita) Perón’s corpse, which was stolen from its grave after her husband’s fall from power. Subsequently, Evita’s corpse traveled all over South America before making its way to Italy and being reinterred under the name María Maggi. Finally returned to Argentina in 1971, Evita now reposes in the Duarte family tomb in Bue1

2

Introduction

nos Aires’s Recoleta Necropolis (Franco, 121–22). “The dead,” Franco reminds us, “however deeply buried, can never be entirely discounted for they continue to act upon the living” (136). In Iran, too, the movement of bodies over the past two centuries has assumed a hypercultural importance, and been a defining aspect of its modernity. Though no one knows for sure where Tāhereh finally rests, Hedāyat was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where, so far as we know, his corpse has presumably remained, having never been repatriated to Iran or otherwise relocated. For Iranian artists and authors, his grave is a place of literal and imaginative pilgrimage. Like Evita’s tomb, Hedāyat’s resting place is the site of “all kinds of ideal projects of nationhood”—perhaps more than the grave of any given political leader (Franco, 122).5 Yet, perhaps fittingly, it is not the bodies of Iran’s cultural icons but the corpses of the Pahlavi monarchs, so reviled by most of Iran’s intelligentsia as the enforcers of a brutal vision of modernity, that have suffered the least serene of fates. Upon the death in exile in 1943 of the recently deposed Reza Pahlavi, the “great father,” his body was initially not permitted burial in Iran, and was instead embalmed and kept at the al-Refāʿī Mosque in Cairo. After a suitable interval, his son and successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ordered his father’s corpse returned to Iran, purged of the embalming liquid, and reinterred in a mausoleum in Rayy, just outside of Tehran (and, ironically, the site where much of Hedāyat’s Būf-e kūr [The Blind Owl; 1937] takes place). After being driven out of Iran in 1979 by the revolutionary forces that deposed him, a cancer-riddled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would wander the globe seeking refuge, finally coming to rest and die in Cairo under the protection of his friend Anwar Sadat. And so it came to be that Mohammad Reza, too, was interred at the al-Refāʿī Mosque after his death in 1980, in the company of Egypt’s last king (and Mohammad Reza’s former brother-in-law), Farūq. Shortly thereafter, Reza Pahlavi’s mausoleum at Rayy would be torn down by revolutionary protesters to make way for the mausoleum of the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who is buried there now.

Introduction

3

What to make of these troubled movements of Iranian bodies across time and space? And what relationship do these material bodies bear to the restive corpse of the beloved in Hedāyat’s masterpiece, which is revivified, dismembered, and persistently sentient in portions of part I—only to be rearticulated as the narrator’s wife in part II, then killed again? Or the body of Yūsef, the hero-martyr of Sīmīn Dāneshvar’s Savūshūn (1969), which is paraded through Shiraz before being abandoned at the side of the road? In Shahrnūsh Pārsīpūr’s Tūbā va maʿnā-ye shab (Tūbā and the Meaning of Night [1989]), when the ghost of Setāreh, the girl who is raped, impregnated, and murdered, haunts the courtyard in which she has been buried, the reader acknowledges this event with a sense of uncanny recognition. The bodies of these beloveds trouble the narrative of Iranian fiction as surely as the Pahlavis continue to haunt and vex the imagination of modernity in Iran. Franco reminds us that “the despotic modern state allows the past to lament in order to confirm that it was worse than the present” (127). In other words, this process of mourning the past is what allows the project of modernization to proceed. Recent historiography of Iran has begun to observe the way in which this project was deeply involved with disowning Iran’s immediate past even as it preserved that past as a phantom in modernist discourses—especially the forms of love that the past had condoned.6 The Pahlavi state’s vision of modernity—stolen, disfigured, and clumsily cobbled together—was enchained to a vision of heterosexual love and a heterosocial public sphere. In seeking to realize this ideal, it had to dismember and remake the beloved of the poetic tradition.7 The beloved of the Iranian lyrical tradition symbolizes, perhaps above any other literary trope, the ambiguity of love on which that tradition is founded. Overdetermined, the beloved evokes many ideas at once: the refuge of the garden; physical passion; a sacred ideal. The celebration of marriage and the ideal of the companionate wife in legal discourse and in fiction depended on the burial of this ambiguity in and of the past. In order to become consonant with modernity, the beloved of classical poetry would have to be translated into the wife of modern fictional realism. The state sought to do this through legal and political instruments like

4

Introduction

the civil code; literature imagined this transition through fiction. The fate and fortune of the beloved in prose fiction make literal a process of social disfigurement. Consequently, in the prose fiction of the twentieth century, dismemberment and marriage become structuring figures that are opposed and yet complementary in important ways: they are figures of separation and reunion that echo the fundamental notion of farāgh o vasāl (separation and [re]union) in classical Persian lyric poetry. Read in the context of the twentieth century and its dominant narratives of nation and modernity—as well as within the context of the two emerging genres on which this study focuses (civil law and prose fiction)—this becomes a story of destruction and renewal, of the will to simultaneously destroy and transcend the past. Yet agendas of reform are always beset by the ghosts of that which must be reformed, and the ways in which that object of reform has been (mis)recognized by the reformer. This repressed object is the love that is portrayed through the beloved of the classical tradition, and which modernity judges aberrant and other. In prose fiction, the dismemberment of this beloved is closely followed by an act of marriage. I view marriage as a metaphor for the social and legal reforms of the period and as an actual site of reform itself. Well before the Civil Code (qānūn-e madanī) of 1928 and the Marriage Law (qānūn rājʿeh beh ezdevāj) of 1931, marriage had been a subject of much debate.8 As early as the nineteenth century, marriage was a topic of conversation among male reformist writers like Mīrzā Fath ʿAlī Ākhūndzādeh (1812–78) and Mīrzā Āghā Khān Kermānī (ca. 1853–96), who argued not only for literary reform but at the same time, for the right of women to choose their husbands and to be educated in a manner comparable, if not equal, to their partners.9 Yet, as historian Afsaneh Najmabadi observes, the idea of companionate marriage did not take off until the beginning of the twentieth century, with the era of constitutionalism (ca. 1890–1921) (Najmabadi 2005, 156). Its eventual popularity is less a coincidence than a convergence of a number of goals shared by competing groups who were making their demands known in this period. Companionate marriage offered modernists and

Introduction

5

reformists a way of discussing women’s status and equal rights within existing discursive boundaries since the idea of defining women’s rights in a marriage contract was already a highly codified and well-established area of Islamic legal discourse. For the newly centralized and rapidly growing state in the postconstitutional period, marriage suggested a specific type of gender relationship (heterosexual, monogamous, reproductive) that could be regulated by civil law, and could also provide a means to restructure the family, and to shift the focus from the extended kin and tribal networks that had prevailed in premodern Iran to the nuclear family that consisted of husband, wife, and children. As such, regulation of marriage permitted and even encouraged regulation of a variety of other issues related to personal status. Thus marriage was not only an increasingly important metaphor for relations between a feminized Iran and her citizens (i.e., Iran was the wife-mother, and her citizens loyal husbandsons), but also an important site upon which the new state could exert its influence.10 Marriage therefore became a platform—albeit a contested one—for discussing social reform.11 Although civil law and prose fiction comprise two types of modernizing discourses that scholarship has long held far apart from one another in the context of modern Iran,12 historians of twentieth-century Iran are beginning to see the dominant role that cultural documents (especially the press) have assumed in normalizing laws related to gender and personal status, and in turn the role that marriage plays in “modernizing” Iran.13 However, they have attended only in passing to literature’s importance in this process. Yet the imagination of legal reforms in literary texts and the emphasis on the idea of realism in the law was in fact part of a much longer dialogue between fictional and legal discourses—one that has been taking place since the inception of prose fiction in Iran. By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both legal and literary texts read gender in twentieth-century Iran, I critically engage the ways in which these two discourses were joined. I do so by examining the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of gender-related legal

6

Introduction

reform, and argue that marriage is a shared topos that demonstrates the extent to which these discourses are related.

The Pahlavis and the Narrative of Modernization The lively activity of elite women during the constitutional period (ca. 1890–1921) and their role in helping to articulate and promote the goals of the revolution not only helped to achieve the Constitutional Revolution’s “success”—insofar as it was a success—but also to establish women’s newspapers and societies (anjomans) that helped to keep the attention of reformers and lawmakers on women and their role in the new, constitutional Iran. While difficult to characterize as a “movement” in the sense of a unified group or groups with specified objectives, the disparate parties and parts of this discourse did share some common interests and goals. When Reza Pahlavi seized the helm of Iran as monarch in 1925, he quickly understood the power and the threat of women’s rights and the actors involved in promoting it. Although he and his son-successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would promulgate a narrative in which they not only initiated but consistently advanced the cause of women’s rights, historians have questioned that rosy view. It is more widely agreed that Reza Pahlavi moved to co-opt and control the incipient women’s rights movement, hoping to contain any power of dissent it possessed and to consolidate it under his control.14 An early aspect of the Pahlavi state’s co-optation of the women’s movement was the Mandatory Unveiling Act of 1936. Though narrativized in national(ist) discourse by the Pahlavis as their great gift to Iranian womanhood, the act was controversial from the point of view of both reformists and conservatives. Part of the Iranian Civil Code created at the behest of Reza Pahlavi in the 1920s, the act put a forceful interpretation on an issue which had been debated throughout the constitutional period and which had continued into the early national period. Camron Amin observes that the act was a controversial reading of the call to reform the veil that had been going on for almost a century: there was in fact no real agreement over what “unveiling” would look like, even among its proponents (C. Amin,

Introduction

7

79). The Egyptian reformist Qasim Amin’s Tahrīr al-marāʾ (The Liberation of Women; 1899) had been translated into Persian by Eʿtessām al-Molk in 1900 under the amended title Tarbīyat-e nesvān (The Education of Women) and Amin’s ideas about the status of women and its relationship to modernity in Islamic countries found resonance among Iranian reformists.15 Yet Camron Amin points out that Qasim Amin and those who adopted his ideas concerning woman-related reforms were most likely in favor of the removal of the face veil, or neqāb, only, not of the total unveiling that Reza Shah’s agents enforced in the wake of the act (C. Amin, 79). While some lauded the state’s creation of such laws, which were seen as engines that would modernize Iranian society, many perceived them as invasive and premature. In focusing on women’s bodies as a signifier of modernity, this reform abruptly forced to the fore issues which had begun to enter the discourses of national and social reform as early as the nineteenth century: questions concerning women, their position in society, gender relations as governed by familial and marital conventions, and the relationship of these to modernity.16 Yet the answers offered by the codification into law of debated personal status reforms challenged the boundaries between public and private space that were so rigorously preserved in Iranian society, and forced issues of heterosociality and public heterosexuality in a culture that had long favored homosociality, rigid divisions of public and private space, and celebrated in its literary tradition (albeit ambiguously) male homoeroticism. Entailed in the enforcement of these particular sections of the code, therefore, was the question of what it meant to suddenly “see” women, both literally and metaphorically, in public space.17 Whereas such exposure would previously have been read as a violation of social and religious mores, this practice was now to be understood as progressive and positive. Whereas women had heretofore been members of the private realm of the home, and marked as such by the complementary practices of architectural separation of homes into interior (andarūnī) and exterior (bīrūnī) spaces, and of veiling (hejāb), the idea of “woman” was recalibrated by new laws like these and the social practices they stipulated.18

8

Introduction

The laws that governed the literary imagination, too, were under reform. By 1921, when Reza Khan assumed power, the novel was no longer an innovative form in Iran, but neither was it fully assimilated and/or indigenized. In that same year, Mohammad Jamālzādeh (1892–1997)—often called the “father of Persian fiction”—expressed forceful ideas about the purposes and needs of an indigenous prose fiction, which he saw as innately connected to the project of nationalism insofar as it offered the potential to linguistically unify an ethnically and linguistically diverse Iranian nation under the banner of a purified Persian. In his oft-quoted introduction to the collection Yekī būd o yekī nabūd (Once upon a Time; 1921), Jamālzādeh suggests that learning—which is the key to civilization (tamaddon) and progress (taraqqī)—can be clothed in the “gown of the story” (lebās-e hekāyat) and more specifically, “the gown of the novel” (lebās-e romān), in order to reach the common people.19 At the same time, its standardizing use of language would help ameliorate ethnic differences among the inhabitants of the homeland, or vatan, and acquaint Iranians with the habits and practices of their unseen and unknown fellow citizens.20 Jamālzādeh, like the reformists of the nineteenth century, was convinced that language reform and genre reform went hand in hand. Though the state never weighed in formally on the conflict among new and old genres, many of the state’s new bureaucrats agreed with Jamālzādeh that the language of social and national discourse ought to be reformed, and their views would later be adopted by Reza Shah in his nationalization drive. In 1936, the shah created the Farhangestān, a language academy devoted to purging the Persian language of foreign loan words, especially Arabic loan words.21 The Farhangestān would continue to develop language purification work implemented in the 1920s to root out and replace Arabic vocabulary with Persian synonyms, many of which were neologisms. However, another method of word substitution came from combing earlier Persian texts, such as the eleventh-century epic poem Shāhnāmeh (Book of Kings), by Abū al-Qāsem Ferdawsī, for words of “pure” Persian.22

Introduction

9

Prior even to the institution of the Farhangestān and the formal bids to purge Persian of loan words, however, the vocabulary being used to discuss women and their national status was changing. Women had commonly been referred to both colloquially and in texts by words indicative of their status in society and in private life: manzel (house), ʿayāl (burden), sīyāh-bakht (unlucky), madkhūl (that which is entered). In fact, to call a woman by her proper name was considered a gross violation of boundaries (M. R. Khosravī, 10). But in constitutional newspapers, there is evidence that this pattern had begun to change. Though women writing to the papers as readers continued to follow Iranian conventions of selfeffacement in social discourse and to call themselves “this weak person” (īn za‘īfeh), male authors writing about reforms for women used the more neutral nesvān (pl. of woman, Arabic) or zanān (pl. of woman, Persian) in place of the traditional, obfuscating synonyms they might have chosen.23 The 1911 parliamentary debate over women’s eligibility for suffrage offers additional evidence that language pertaining to women and their roles was changing. The representative who argued the case for women’s electoral rights before the parliament, Hājj Vakīl al-Ruʿāyā (Hājjī Shaykh Taqī Īrānī), used language intended to elicit sympathy for women as the counterparts of men. Averring that women (nesvān) were also “God’s creatures” (makhlūq-e khodāvand), he asked, “based on what logical reasons [dalāʾel-e manteqī] are we able to deprive [mahrūm kardan] them [of the vote]?” (Mozākarāt-e majles-e shūrā-ye mellī; 1531). His sincere bid was gently rebuffed by another representative, Zokāʾ al-Molk (Mohammad

ʿAlī Forūghī), who asserted that the time was not right to discuss such a matter. Subsequently, the cleric Ayatollah Modārres, who was attending this session of the parliament particularly for the purpose of rebuffing Vakīl al-Ru‘āyā’s statement, told him explicitly that women had no right to vote under Islamic law. In fact, he went on, the entire discussion of such a proposition was so unnatural that it made his “body shake” (Mozākarāt-e majles).24 Though this effectively quashed the debate in the parliament for several decades, it was not the final word on the subject: discussion of women’s status and rights would continue to rage in the

10

Introduction

newly constitutional society, especially in the press.25 Importantly, the words used to describe women were the relatively uninflected zanān and nesvān (the Persian and Arabic nouns for woman, respectively) rather than any of the other, more colorful terms commonly applied to women in earlier texts. The nonstarter of the parliamentary debate about women’s rights notwithstanding, debate over gender in the public sphere continued. Many reformist writers of fiction and of the new political verse appearing in newspapers would also go on to become statesmen, demonstrating the extent to which writings on literature and reform were a continuous spectrum rather than discrete spheres or genres in which meaning was produced.26 Among the ways in which this preoccupation revealed itself in fiction was through a fixation on heterosexual union and marriage. Whereas, historically, the beloved had been a gender-ambiguous figure in Persian poetry, the beloved of fiction was now coded as explicitly feminine; so, too, did the figured love become unambiguously romantic (against more complex significations of love in classical poetry), and had to lead toward marriage or be considered deviant. The creation of wives from the figure of the beloved entailed an examination of the appropriate role for women in society; wives created by such marriages had to be faithful helpmeets and loving mothers or else be considered abnormal.27 Furthermore, the establishment of wives as “managers of the household” (modabber-e manzel) rather than the “house” (manzel) itself, entailed a rearrangement of the relationship between kin and nonkin members of that household. It went without saying that this ideal companionate wife had to be Persophone.28

Introduction

11

Nodes of Legal and Literary Reform: Realism as Ideal and Cultural Practice Realist fictions labor under the burden of the accusation that they are lies that don’t know it, lies that naively or mendaciously claim to believe they are truths. —Peter Brooks, Realist Vision What is the purpose of writing novels? . . . If the purpose of writing stories is for readers to learn a moral lesson [then we assume that] a person will, from hearing or reading wondrous and moral stories, also become moral [himself], especially if the story contains [examples of] courage and selfsacrifice and goodness, and [at the same time] his heart will be moved if he believes that the story is true. Yet [what] if the reader learns that a story is a complete lie? What effect will this have on the reader? —Ahmad Kasravī, Dar pīrāmūn-e romān (About the Novel)

Though much attention has been given to other aspects of elite and popular culture in twentieth-century Iran, the critical discourse on Persian literature has been comparatively limited. Burying the Beloved offers an examination of literature that takes into consideration not simply the development of feminism in women’s literature over time, or the reworking of Iran’s oldest literary form, poetry; it also attempts to trace how and why the novel and prose fiction persisted in the twentieth century in spite of limited readership and the perception that prose fiction—especially the novel—was a nonindigenous form.29 It also endeavors to understand literature within a frame of reference typically dissociated from the study of literature in the context of the Middle East: the law. Yet one could ask why an emphasis on the context of legal history for reading fiction, leaving aside conventional frames of reference and criticism, is particularly valuable for understanding the development of realism and narrative in modern Iran. In this regard, the work of anthropologists like Erika Friedl (2003), Ziba Mir-Hosseini (1999), and most

12

Introduction

recently, Arzoo Osanloo (2009), have opened up the study of culture to the concomitant study of laws. These scholars have argued that law, as a discourse, is prescriptive rather than normative. This in turn has opened the way to reading literature in a similar light, and in doing so, questioning the widely held assumption where scholarship on Iran is concerned: that is, that literature reflects reality. A major goal of this study is to problematize the invisibility of realism in Iranian fiction and assume that the purpose of literary production in Iran was inherently reformist. In contrast, although the law may disguise itself as a standardization of existing norms, laws are more frequently recognized as instruments of social reform, and their claim to realism questioned. By reading literary production within the context of legal reform, this study makes visible the common assumptions of these two discourses. Intellectuals of the early modern state like Ahmad Kasravī (1890– 1946) opined forcibly against poetry’s suitability as a national form, and like other proponents of both rule of law and of genre reform,30 assumed that Iran could be modernized by changing its relationships of desire. The romanticization of heterosexual love and companionate marriage in both discourses amply testifies to this belief. An opinionated and ardent nationalist known for the anticlericalism that occasioned his assassination, Kasravī spoke out vigorously against the Iranian poetic tradition and all the vices he associated with it: drinking, homosexuality, pederasty, and— worst of all—figurative language.31 (It is hard to know which of these Kasravī finds most offensive—all of them seem to bother him deeply.) Above all things, language must be straightforward and simple. Classical lyrical poetry was not.32 Though his critique of poetry is oddly vituperative and at times erratic, Kasravī did not have much patience for the novel, either. He criticized the genre as a dangerous import from the West that blurred the boundaries between the real and the unreal (Kasravī 1960–61, 7); he criticized the fools writing and reading them, and warned fathers, husbands, and brothers to keep their daughters, wives, and sisters far from them, threatening that novels would instill “ugly, shameful thoughts

Introduction

13

and behaviors in a child” (i). Should they come across novels, he encouraged his fellow countrymen to tear them apart and burn them (i). Kasravī expresses what seems on the surface to be contradictory preferences: on the one hand, he seems intent on reforming the poetic tradition; yet on the other, he seems equally opposed to what reformists like Jamālzādeh saw as the perfect method of reform: prose fiction. Examining Kasravī’s irritable judgment of novels not only gives us insight into the conflicts that persisted over how best to reform literature and society during the period of the early modern state, but also anticipates in an interesting way the critiques of realism that were waged outside of Iran for the latter half of the twentieth century. Many of the later reevaluations seem either to indict realism as a conscious effort to mislead, or else to chide the reader for having been duped in the first place. One way in which critics have responded to such realizations is with anger: to aver that there is something in fact “mendacious” in the way that realistic novels affect to reflect a reality that does not, and never did, exist.33 Entailed in this critique is an examination of the tradition of novel writing itself, and of its latter-day manifestations in the various forms of postmodernism. Over the past decades, nationalism and the coeval development of the novel have been argued as unavoidable facts of history; indeed, it is by now a truism to suggest that nationalism and the novel are forms that support, reflect, and mutually constitute one another. Ian Watt famously observed that the novel’s rise in England was deeply tied to the increase in literacy among the bourgeoisie that was coterminous with their emergence as a discrete class and source of political power. Almost thirty years later, Benedict Anderson would develop this argument further, connecting the novel to the rise of print culture and crediting print culture, in turn, with being the major disseminator of modern notions of nation. A generation of critics, including K. Anthony Appiah, Timothy Brennan, Homi Bhabha, Franco Moretti, Katie Trumpener, and others has continued to challenge and refine this thesis as they applied to different contexts and took into consideration such factors as colonialism, antico-

14

Introduction

lonialism, and postcolonialism; nonetheless, there remains general agreement that it is, more or less, a difficult thesis to refute. The novel seems, in almost every case, to be closely tied to the modern nation-state, however tortured their mutual birth. Yet the inevitability of the novel and its course of development from realism to modernism to postmodernism is one that has been challenged by critics as well. Appiah, reflecting on the difficulties involved in using this term precisely in critical inquiries, posits the term postrealism as an alternative to the postmodernism of Western critics like Francois Lyotard or Frederic Jameson. Appiah argues that in contexts like Africa, where the idea of the novel itself—including the notions of realism and modernism within the practice of fiction—has been from the first imbricated and tainted in colonial discourses and ongoing power struggles between the local and the transnational, care must be taken to attend to the specificity of these contexts’ literary traditions, and not to subsume them into metropolitan categorizations. Critic Hassan Mīr-ʿAbedīnī sees Iran’s prose tradition developing along similar lines to those delineated by Watt and Anderson, though he also attributes Iran’s changing literary preferences to the encounter of Iranian intellectuals with European thought and literature. However, he believes that their understanding of the Enlightenment tradition was incomplete, which meant that their implementation of a European-style modernity was imperfect.34 While there can be no question that Iran was influenced by its contact with Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and vice-versa, Mīr-ʿAbedīnī ’s argument seems to problematically suggest that prose fiction in Iran is primarily imitative. More promising in Mīr-ʿAbedīnī’s discussion is his identification of the connection between genre reform and social reform. He asserts that intellectuals like

ʿAbd al-Rahīm Tālebāf (best remembered for his Ketāb-e Ahmad [Book of Ahmad; ca. 1894], which is modeled loosely on Rousseau’s Emile), and Zayn al-ʿAbedīn Marāgheʾī (author of the Sīyāhatnāmeh-ye Ebrāhīm Bayg [The Travelogue of Ibrahim Bayg; ca. 1891]) were optimists who believed that by changing the contexts of literature and moving away from lyrical poetry to political debates, you could change the way people think and

Introduction

15

arrest the deterioration of character.35 Although his view reflects to some extent the broader postmodern view that realism was a kind of hopeful naïveté practiced unwittingly by intellectuals and writers, it identifies the connection between reformer and writer that would dominate the twentieth century in Iran. Against the metaphorical world of lyrical poetry, then, authors of prose fiction in Iran embraced a realism that was already highly politicized. Because many shared the belief that it was their duty to deploy the Persian language pedagogically, the fiction they published was devoted to representing the world not simply as it was but as they wanted it to be: in their practice of realistic fiction, with its claims to mimetic representation, they in fact sought to reverse the terms of that mimesis. In other words, they hoped that rather than imitating life, their modeling of linguistic usage and interpersonal relations in fictional discourse would change the way in which readers thought about themselves and their relationship to the new idea of the Iranian nation. Again, this view corresponds with later critiques of realism that hold it to be “an essentially pragmatic mode whose predication of character as something enacted, partially but inevitably, within environmental restrictions is designed to reveal an imperiled ecological system of soul and society” (Kearns, 1). What these later critics of realism—and even Mīr-

ʿAbedīnī, Anderson, and Watt (albeit implicitly)—seem to assert is the idea that realism is not simply a style of writing but a worldview and a cultural practice. In other words, “realists do more than passively record the world outside; they actively create and criticize the meanings, representations, and ideologies of their own changing culture” (Kaplan, 7). However, this is not the view that is widely held by critics of Persian literature to date, who see the development of prose fiction in Iran as a kind of inevitable consequence of modernity rather than a facilitator of that modernity. Michael Hillmann understands the realism of Iranian prose fiction less as a cultural practice than as a transformation of individual psyches, which in turn was stymied by the delayed development of other individual consciousnesses; in other words, a kind of delayed transformation of mentalité:

16

Introduction

“The new fiction put a premium on realistic portrayal and the personal vision of the individual artist. Naturally, it was difficult for some readers to cope with this development. It forced them out of complacency and demanded individual responses for which acquaintance with the conventions of the traditional literature offered no bases or vocabulary” (Hillmann 1988, 294). Against this conflation of the Iranian writer and reformer whose “personal vision” becomes the template of the future society, and the suggestion that “traditional literature” was inherently opposed in its way of being to prose fiction, I propose that we must recognize that writers, as artisans of language, are implicated in semiological change whether or not they believe themselves (or are widely judged) to be reformers of language, and that prose fiction in Iran could not have developed without a dialogue with the “traditional literature” that Hillmann suggests left Iranians radically unprepared for their encounter with the “modern.” The ability to follow texts as they pass through time and are invoked (implicitly or explicitly) in the works of generations of authors is an important part of understanding the changing relationship of text and context, of text and the world(s) of its readership. I therefore take a diachronic approach, examining how these texts were understood both at the moment of their historical moments of enunciation as well as at later moments when their importance was challenged or affirmed through reinvocation and/or by critical response. The five periods I have chosen to concentrate on are those conventionally recognized as periods of significance by women’s rights activists and historians of the movement, yet seldom understood as explicitly connected to coeval literary phenomena. Chapter 1 works to make visible the way in which two canonical novels mediate the reforms of the 1931 Marriage Law and the 1936 Mandatory Unveiling Act by making a distinction between two types of marriage— hierogamy and wedlock—and by reimagining the figure of the beloved in literally spectacular ways. These novels, Sādeq Hedāyat’s novel Būf-e kūr (The Blind Owl; 1937) and Bozorg ʿAlavī’s Cheshmhāyash (Her Eyes; 1952), are two of the most widely read Iranian works of the twentieth century. Though the two men were friends and collaborators on several

Introduction

17

literary projects, the two novels are rarely read comparatively; nor has any existing study sought to understand them within the social reforms of the period in which one was written and the other set: The Blind Owl is viewed as the odd fountainhead of Persian prose modernism, while Her Eyes is understood as a straightforward political and social critique of the Reza Shah period. Yet they share a remarkably similar interest in revising marriage as a plot element that can dramatically rewrite reality. In Chapter 1, I argue that the novels share a common preoccupation with the fraught transformation of the figure of the beloved of classical poetry into a public, heterosexual partner and precursor to the role of wife. In the 1960s, two reforms to women’s status seemed to suggest that women’s liberation was at hand: the 1963 “White Revolution” granted women the suffrage they had long sought, while the 1967 Family Protection Law granted them improved access to divorce and custody, thus fulfilling some of the longstanding demands of women’s rights activists. In Chapter 2, I attempt to nuance this view by examining the difficulties that arise when confronting women writers’ treatment of marriage. This chapter focuses on Sīmīn Dāneshvar’s Savūshūn (1969), the first novel written by a woman, reading it within the context of the legal reforms of its era, as well as three important woman-authored, marriageoriented texts that mark moments of change within the Iranian cultural and literary landscape: Sadīqeh Dawlatābādī’s “Dāstān-e reqqat angīz” (A Pitiful Tale; 1918), Zahrā Khānlarī’s “Gawhar” (1945), Badr al-Molūk Bāmdād’s Zan-e Īrānī: Az Enqelāb-e Mashrūtīyat tā Enqelāb-e Sefīd (The Iranian Woman: From the Constitutional Revolution to the White Revolution; 1968). Daneshvar’s successful introduction of a female protagonist complicated cultural understandings of companionate marriage. To examine the scaffolding on which the companionate wife of legal discourse is constructed demands examination of the literary trope through which the companionate wife’s subjectivity and humanity—her very ability to exist—are represented. In the 1960s and 1970s, a period which witnessed significant improvements in the legal status of women in Iran, fiction increasingly scrutinized those figures that were left out of

18

Introduction

the law; women whose lower class or rural origins seemed to exclude them from full status as the number of woman-citizens increased. Chapter 3 examines two stories published within this period by Sīmīn Dāneshvar, “Shahrī chawn behesht” (A City Like Paradise) and “Anīs,” in comparison with two stories by Golī Taraqqī (“Khedmatkār” [The Servant] and “Safar-e bozorg-e Amīneh” [Amineh’s Long Journey]) that look back to this period and which express anxieties about this excluded type of female subjectivity in the form of the female domestic servant (kolfat). In this chapter, I examine the topos of the domestic servant as a symptom of middle-class female subjectivity through a comparative analysis of these short stories by Dāneshvar and Taraqqī. In the former’s work, female characters are most often the objects of narration, but the narration—largely in the third person—remains ambiguously gendered and therefore open to conflation with the historical author and with a dominant male narrative voice in realistic fiction. Although many aspects of Dāneshvar’s oeuvre may be considered transgressive in a landscape dominated by masculine voices (narrative and real), these stories work within conceptions of class and social position that were characteristic of this period. Thus it becomes possible to see Dāneshvar’s short fiction as simultaneously questioning and reinforcing the dominant narrative modes of the period and the ideologies of gender and class such modes promote. Chapter 4 examines the period following the revolution, when a sense of disorientation occasioned by rapid change ensues. This feeling permeates the literature of the early postrevolutionary period and continues into the 1990s. The eschewal of a straightforward realism in the work of writers like Shahrnūsh Pārsīpūr and Monīrū Ravānīpūr allows them to utilize this sense of lawlessness to reexamine the conventions and ideals of the social realism that dominated prose fiction before the revolution. Foregrounding the conventions of both fiction and marriage as objects of scrutiny, these authors appropriate the figure of the (dismembered) beloved and the ideal of the companionate wife in order to comment ironically on the role that historiography and fiction have played in imagining the modern Iranian woman.

Introduction

19

In 2004, Fatāneh Hājj Sayyed Javādī’s Bāmdād-e khomār (The Morning After; 1995), a novel relating the controversial story of a woman who had chosen a love match and later rejected it in favor of the arranged marriage her parents had initially intended for her, went into a record thirtieth reprinting. This novel explicitly challenges the ideal of romantic marriage, an ideal that has defined the goals of modernity in Iran, and so caused an uproar in the debate over civil society that came to a head during the Khātamī period. It so incensed readers that one woman rewrote the novel from the point-of-view of a different character, and a feminist publisher called it an “insult to civil society” (Najmabadi 2004, 373). In contrast, a literary novel published during the same period and treating similar themes, Zoyā Pīrzād’s Cherāgh-hā rā man khāmūsh mīkonam (I’ll Turn Out the Lights; 2001–2), was celebrated by critics and popular readers alike as a novel which was consonant with feminists’ positions on the civil society debate. Why did the response to two novels coming to similar conclusions about the role of marriage in a woman’s life differ so dramatically? Chapter 5 examines these two novels in the context of “rights talk” vis-àvis women’s rights within marriage and civil society debates. The final chapter of this book turns to the circulation of Iranian literary and cinematic texts in global networks, to examine the way in which the practice of postrevolutionary filmmaking has renewed realism as a cultural practice in Iran and, in the process, eclipsed the novel in terms of cultural importance. I briefly trace the historical relationship between literature and cinema in Iran in order to examine the validity of these claims and to contrast the state-imposed vision of realism promulgated through cultural policy with the way in which cinema has utilized these imposed restrictions to transcend the artistic vision of the state and the limits of censorship. I suggest that the preoccupation with an explicitly ideological realism that expresses itself predominantly in visual media offers an important critique of realism as a social and cultural practice in Iran and provides a challenge to the way in which dissident authors have attempted to dismember that realism in their postmodern creations.

1

Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved HOW THE CIVIL CODE REMADE MARRIAGE AND MARRIAGE REMADE LOVE

The Blind Owl ultimately is posed as a puzzle, both an intellectual puzzle for the reader to pick apart and a moral puzzle. (Think of the grotesque old man [in the novel] as Hedayat himself laughing at those of us enthralled with his story, at our struggles to define the beauty we cannot quite possess, and at how our frustrations lead us to the verge of dismissing/destroying his novella as perverse, meaningless, or destructive.) —Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges Fantastical literature points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems. The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made “absent”. —José Monleon, A Specter Is Haunting Europe All these strange things that we dream about when we sleep—what influence do such things have on our hearts? Would someone fall in love with a woman he saw in his sleep? —Ahmad Kasravī, About the Novel

At the moment of its appearance (and even now, more than seventy years after its first publication), Sādeq Hedāyat’s novel The Blind Owl seemed idiosyncratic in Iran’s prose tradition, posing, as Michael Fischer affirms, “a moral puzzle” for generations of readers, who have compared it to works ranging from Dante’s Vita nuova to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Its strangeness 21

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Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved

and analytical elusiveness have made it seem literally foreign—a pastiche of story fragments from other traditions.1 Perhaps because of this, criticism of the novel has been primarily focused on where it comes from—for example, Western antecedents ranging from Dante to Rilke to Nerval (Katouzian 2008; Beard 1990; Johnson 1978); Buddhism (Bashiri 1974; Williams 1978) or models closer to home, such as Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (Bogle 1978); the wine ritual poems of Manūchehrī (Simidchieva 2003); or even Hedāyat’s own earlier stories (Katouzian 2008). Some have sought to place it in a more direct response to history, positing that the novel reflected Hedāyat’s disappointment in the Reza Pahlavi regime (Tabarī 1947). Others still have taken a more sweeping attitude that seems to affirm the novel’s final indeterminability, positing a critical response equivalent to “all of the above” (Āl-e Ahmad 1951). If a text, as Yuri Lotman proposes, relies on a “common memory” among readers and author to make it sensible, the range of responses to The Blind Owl suggests a huge disjuncture in the memory worlds of even its most immediate audience of contemporary Iranian readers: the initial critical responses to the novel were so wildly divergent that they seem almost to refer to different novels. Yet in spite of this, The Blind Owl is perhaps the most-quoted novel in Iranian history—the novel most frequently invoked, and thought to be most representative of Iranian modernity in fiction, even as it departs from virtually every literary tradition in storytelling known to modern (or premodern) Iran. An aspect of the novel that has proved to be one of the most puzzling is its deployment of the feminine. It is hard to reconcile, for example, the narrator’s enjoyment in describing in minute and repetitive detail the features of his elusive beloved in part 1 with his grim glee in loathing and desiring what is seemingly the very same woman in part 2. Most of all, critics have shied away from looking too closely at the literal dismemberment of this beloved in part 1, or her inadvertent (if we take the narrator’s word for it) murder in part 2: But what was I to do with the corpse? A corpse whose flesh was already beginning to rot! At first I thought of burying it in my room, then of taking it away

Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved

23

and throwing it down some well surrounded by morning glories—but these all seemed like they would take so much thinking, so much trouble to ensure that I not be seen! At the same time, I didn’t want any stranger to look at her. . . . Finally a thought came to me: what if I were to cut her up into pieces, place them in my old case, and take them away, far, very far, from the eyes of men, and bury her? This time, I did not hesitate; I took a bone-handled knife I had in the closet of my room and very carefully began to cut away the thin black dress that had covered her like a spider’s web. . . . Then I cut off her head, and drops of cold blood poured out of her neck, and then I cut off her hands and feet and arranged them in my suitcase. (BK, 24–25)2

Given critics’ willingness to consider the novel from almost every available vantage point—from approaches that emphasize the novel’s intertextuality to its Freudian overtones—why ignore this rich vein?3 Why look away from this act of violence, which exemplifies the complex figuration of the feminine in The Blind Owl? No scene in the novel more clearly presents the impulse to protect and destroy that the narrator evinces for his beloved, yet it is perhaps this very conflation of two different kinds of impulse that makes this act so hard to critically engage. If we adopt Michael Beard’s approach in Hedayat’s “Blind Owl” as a Western Novel (1990), we might argue that the adventures of the beloved’s corpse are part of the novel’s extensive system of borrowing from Western sources—from Edgar Allen Poe to Oscar Wilde. Alternatively, if we agree with Marta Simidchieva’s contextualization of the novel (2003), we can see it more comfortably as a reworking of the topos of the “daughter of the vine” found in classical Persian poetry. But what if we read it instead in the linguistic-historical context of 1930s Iran, where the civil code created at the behest of Reza Pahlavi was just being enacted? While the civil code sought to regulate everything, from last names to taxation, some of its most controversial laws were those that addressed public gender behaviors. In 1936, the Mandatory Unveiling Act forced urban women to re-

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Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved

move their veils in public; in 1937, the controversial Marriage Act of 1931 was revised.4 In 1940, a section of the Penal Law passed by the Assembly sanctioned the murder of wife, mother, or sister caught in circumstances of adultery or leading up to adultery (Paidar, 111). Historians have endeavored to understand these reforms in different ways, focusing primarily on whether or not they may be seen as genuine efforts to “liberate” women and/or to respond to feminists’ demands for greater rights for women. The arguments in this vein revolve mostly around whether or not the women’s rights movement was fully co-opted by Reza Pahlavi, and if so, what the outcome of that co-optation was. Recent scholarship has harshly criticized this move, seeing it as a derailing of the nascent women’s rights movement. In this vein, Hamideh Sedghi proposes that under the Pahlavis “women’s emancipation meant state exploitation of gender as a measure to combat and contain religious forces and their bazaar supporters” (67). Minoo Moallem goes further, suggesting that not only did the legalization of forcible unveiling by the state enable the regime’s suppression of the clergy via the instrument of female bodies, but it also interpellated all males as citizens of the nation-state by enabling their authority over women (69–73).5 At the same time, these reforms were accompanied by messages in the press and state propaganda endorsing and valorizing companionate marriage, which was seen as the “modernizing” type of marriage. As recent studies by C. Amin (2002), Najmabadi (2005), and Afary (2009) have observed, the ideology of marriage was part of what had to be remade in order for the institution to serve as an engine of the state’s modernization project. Though the romanticization of marriage as an institution that could promote women’s rights and lead to the improvement of children-citizens is by now an old story, the ambivalent role that literature played in this process has not been adequately examined.6 The dismemberment in The Blind Owl (and the critical aversion to addressing it) is a clue—possibly the first, but certainly not the last—that there were problems with the assumption (or perhaps the hope) that romantic love would culminate in marriage and that such marriages would be the cornerstone of a modern society.

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25

To an extent, we may see The Blind Owl, which is divided into two major parts, as the before-and-after of these reforms. In part 1, the narrator, a reclusive artisan who paints pen boxes, becomes obsessed with the “ethereal,” otherworldly woman he first perceives when his uncle visits. He has never before seen this uncle (and notes that it is odd that he must accept the man’s word that he is who he says he is), but feels he must offer him a special kind of hospitality in the form of a special wine he keeps in his closet. As he reaches for the bottle, he spies, from an aperture in the wall, the scene that will recur repeatedly throughout the novel—the scene that is, in fact, the subject of the narrator’s signature painting on his pen boxes (which are sold in India by this same uncle). The eyes of the woman he sees in this scene haunt him: “It was then that I first beheld those frightening, magic eyes, those eyes which seemed to express a bitter reproach to mankind, with their look of anxiety and wonder, of menace and promise—and the current of my existence was drawn toward those shining eyes charged with manifold significance” (TBO, 9). But when the narrator turns away, the aperture and its scene disappear. Some unspecified time later, the woman suddenly reappears at his door, enters his room, and promptly lies down on his bed and dies. However, the narrator only realizes that she is dead after he has recorded his observations and placed his hand on her hair: “For some reason unknown to me I raised my trembling hand. . . . Then I thrust (forū bordam) my fingers into her hair. It was cold and damp . . . It was as though she had been dead for days” (TBO, 20). He undertakes to sketch her portrait—a kind of death mask to preserve her forever: I don’t know how many times I drew and redrew her face before dawn, but none of the sketches satisfied me; I tore them up as soon as I drew them—but I neither tired nor was I aware of the passage of time. Near dawn . . . I was busy with a version that seemed better than all the rest, but the eyes? Those eyes, with their expression of reproach as though they had seen me commit some unpardonable sin—I was incapable of depicting them on paper. The image of those eyes seemed suddenly to have been effaced from my memory. (BK, 23)

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Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved

His effort to produce a drawing that suits him is frustrated by his inability to see her eyes. But the corpse is briefly revivified (in a moment that echoes Poe’s “Ligeia”) so that she can open her eyes and allow the narrator to draw them. Now he can complete the portrait. Having done so, he exclaims triumphantly: “Now I had her eyes, I had the spirit of her eyes down on paper and now her body was of no use to me” (BK, 24). The remainder of part 1 is devoted to the disposal of the body, but the portrait the narrator produces haunts him. It can be recognized as a central image in the novella, re-created repetitively in the description of the pen cases that the narrator produces, in the portrait on the jar that the narrator finds while burying the woman, and in part 2, on the curtain hanging in the narrator’s childhood home. Part 2 concerns a story that strikes the reader as uncanny in light of part 1; many of the characters are subtly different but seem to have been transposed from part 1 into a different setting set of circumstances in part 2. Moreover, in part 2, the seemingly same “ethereal girl” has become a woman, and his wife: roles which seem to deform her. These differences transform her from silence to speech, from chastity to promiscuity, from fidelity to conjugal treachery. She will not allow the narrator to consummate their marriage, and he finally contrives to do so in the guise of one of her lovers, the old odd-and-ends peddler—another recasting of a character from part 1: the uncle, the shaykh of the portrait, and the hearse driver. In part 2, the narrator’s ongoing uncanny sense of his relationship to this old man figure is finally realized after he murders his wife. The sense of his likeness to this old man foreshadows their collapse into one figure: “I went over and stood before the mirror. Overcome with horror, I covered my face with my hands. What I had seen in the mirror was the likeness, no, the exact image of the old odds-and-ends man. My hair and beard were completely white, like those of a man who had come out alive from a room in which he has been shut up with a cobra” (TBO, 127). The narrator is (we presume) the same, and the same code is used to describe the woman, but she is transformed: now his cousin and wife, this woman is figured as cruel and the detachment that spurred his desire when she was his beloved is portrayed as malicious indifference. Additionally, she

Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved

27

is promiscuous: the anxiety in part 1 that she was the lover of the old man is realized here. The narrator knows for certain that she is the lover not only of the old man but of many other undesirable rivals. Where their marriage might be expected, within the conventional logic of narrative (both social and literary) that views marriage as the logical conclusion to romance, to stabilize the narrator’s attitudes toward the woman, the opposite transpires. Desperate to consummate their marriage, the narrator disguises himself as the old man and is accepted as his wife’s lover. In the ecstasy—or rage—of the moment, the narrator murders her, plunging the knife (a recurring object and image) into her in a replication of the act of penetration.7 Here again, critics have been loath to address this murder, tending to skirt the subject—like that of the dismemberment—altogether; its linking of ecstasy and violence against the female object of that violent desire is perhaps too uncomfortable to confront. To the extent that he addresses them, Beard proposes that the key to understanding these strange moments of signification in The Blind Owl is to identify its complex relationship with the Western tradition of the novel, which Beard sees as developing separately from Eastern and Islamic literary forms. Seeing the novel as fundamentally a “love story,” Beard views its drama of violence in terms of the personal and individual libidinal impulse rather than social ones: The situation of the domestic triangle [between narrator, wife, and lover] and the speaker’s consequent rage at his wife are two delusions he cannot break through. Once he has translated his disgust towards his own sexuality into personal rage at his wife, the dilemma remains which side of the imagined triangle to remove. He could kill the lover, but the wife’s lover is secretly himself. The other answer, killing the wife, achieves only the retranslation of the problem into its original terms, because once she is gone his jealous rage is left without an object and turns back into guilt. (Beard, 90)

Beard perceptively identifies the “triangle” that exists between the narrator, his wife, and her lover, and points out that the old man lover is the

28

Dismembering and Re-membering the Beloved

narrator’s double, into whom he transforms after he consummates his marriage and murders his wife. As he endeavors to move the novel away from purely historical and/ or personal-biographical readings, Beard seeks to restore it to what he feels is its full aesthetic value—not merely as an Iranian novel but as a novel. Yet in doing so, he implicitly seems to take sides in an argument he criticizes—namely, whether or not the novel has indigenous roots in Iran. Nonetheless, Beard devotes his study to elaborating Hedāyat’s relationship to the European tradition of romance vis-à-vis Dante’s Vita nuova; the Gothic and its inheritors, including Poe; as well as Hedāyat’s demonstrated interests in psychoanalysis and the writings of Freud.8 Yet, while Beard’s study of Hedāyat’s European and American influences illuminates many of the dark corners of The Blind Owl, it does not answer the question of what the dismemberment and violence may mean, or link this violence to its opposite in the recuperative impulse of the portraiture.9 Marta Simidchieva is the only critic who makes productive use of the dismemberment in her analysis of The Blind Owl. In a compelling contrapuntal reading of the eleventh-century Persian poet Manūchehrī’s wine ritual poems, Simidchieva joins those interested in recuperating The Blind Owl as a novel drawn from Persian influences rather than simply from a pastiche of Western fragments. Drawing parallels between the murder of the “daughter of the vine” in Manūchehrī’s poems and the dismemberment of the beloved in part 1, Simidchieva proposes that Hedāyat was interested in drawing attention to the relationship of the classical Persian literary tradition to a modernist one. Along these same lines, Simidchieva posits that the novel’s mysterious title, which does not have a clear relationship to the text, is Hedāyat’s playful way of invoking the classical trope of the contrast between the nightingale and the owl: whereas the song of the nightingale, which here stands for the classical tradition in literature, is melodious, that of the owl is discordant.10 Simidchieva reads, therefore, this reference to the owl in the title as Hedāyat’s self-referential gesture toward the modernist writer, who, in comparison to the classical poet, is rendered atonal—incomprehensible—by his separation from the traditions of the past (221).

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29

This approach reads The Blind Owl as a meditation on the relationship between the classical and modern literary traditions in Iran, and suggests the idea that the scene that the narrator obsessively reproduces and its disintegration in the development of the novel’s plot, may be suggestive of the disintegration of those literary traditions in the modern recasting of it. Yet, while Simidchieva sees the body of the beloved (the “ethereal girl”) as the bearer of the classical tradition, which the narrator dismembers without remorse—much as Manūchehrī’s dehqān (provincial noble) does his duty by dismembering the daughter of the vine—she stops short of bringing the discussion into the realm of coeval historical, social, and political narrative, where women’s bodies were also the bearers of overdetermined meanings, and where a similar process of recasting was taking place.

Reforming Codes Though it is often called the foundational novel of Iranian literary modernism—and even the “first ‘real’ Persian novel”—The Blind Owl did not have immediate successors.11 Most of the fiction published in Iran up until the 1980s were interpretations of what is broadly referred to as “social realism”—and indeed, the majority of Hedāyat’s own work published after The Blind Owl was in this vein, too. Most critics would agree that Bozorg

ʿAlavī, Hedāyat’s friend and fellow novelist, falls firmly in the category of social realist—even socialist realist. An ardent socialist, and one of the “Fifty-Three” arrested because of their association with the Tūdeh Party,

ʿAlavī cannot be characterized as Hedāyat’s heir, from a stylistic view.12 Yet ʿAlavī was intimately familiar with Hedāyat’s oeuvre; in fact, in 1930 the two collaborated with Shīrāzpūr “Shīn” Partow on a collection of short prose pieces entitled Anīrān (Non-Iranian; 1931).13 Later, from his self-imposed exile in Berlin, ʿAlavī would write a history of Persian literature whose treatment of the novel closely attends to Hedāyat’s place in the Persian canon, in particular with regard to The Blind Owl. These writers were the heirs to a profound ambivalence in the Iranian context about the nature of prose fiction and its place in Persian lit-

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erature. Both Hedāyat and ʿAlavī knew the reformist writer Mohammad Jamālzādeh personally, and both participated in the First Congress of Iranian Writers in 1946 (1325 h.s.). Like most of the writers who attended that now (in)famous meeting, Hedāyat and ʿAlavī both declared a commitment to the kind of literary reform Jamālzādeh called for, and both men, especially Hedāyat, produced prose focused on the use of “Persian” words to tell “Persian” stories against a perception of an earlier contamination by Arab and Muslim influences. But the changes that Jamālzādeh sought in 1921 and reiterated at the congress could not be immediately effected.14 Writers had to rely on the known conventions of earlier genres to make meaning even as they experimented in fictional modes, and at the same time many prose stylists—including Hedāyat and ʿAlavī—remained admirers of lyric poetry. Indeed, many early novels feature elements of poetic style: they are episodic rather than linear, and oftentimes take a line or topos from a poem as their epigraph. In some cases—especially in works like Zayn al-ʿAbedīn Marāgheh’i’s Sīyāhatnāmeh-ye Ebrāhīm Bayg (The Travelogue of Ibrahim Bayg) or the Persian translation of Morier’s Hājjī Bābā Īspāhānī—such novels in fact feature extended portions written in verse. This is perhaps not surprising in a culture where other genres, especially poetry, had been preferred for hundreds of years. The Persian tradition of poetry was highly elaborated and disseminated throughout the world of Persian cultural influence, and knowledge of it was considered a condition of erudition; at the same time, the verse of classical poets like Hafez and Rumi had long been a recognizable attribute of idiomatic Persian. Thus, poetry had the unusual quality of being, in a sense, a genre that had permeated both “high” and “low” registers of speech. Though poetry was itself at the moment of the 1905 Constitutional Revolution and for some decades before a tradition in flux as it sought to answer, first, the formal demands of the bāz gasht (return) movement and later the demands to be socially and politically engaged, in its traditional forms it continued to have the upper hand over prose in commanding the attention of learned audiences.15

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Given these conditions, we may speak, therefore, of there existing a system of poetic topoi (or perhaps, in a semiological sense, “codes”) that would be well known to the reader of the classical Persian tradition as well as to the speaker of an idiomatic Persian. Among the best-known codes of this tradition was the beloved (maʿshūq), whose symbolic import has been understood in a multitude of ways. It has been variously argued that the beloved is a metaphor for the union with God sought by Sufis, demonstrating that the physical passion depicted in such poetry is part of the elaborate Sufi metaphorical system for union with God; that the beloved is a young male beloved, since homosexuality was an important aspect of Perso-Islamic elite culture in premodern Iran; or, alternatively, that the beloved is properly read as a female, and this body of poetry is therefore related to the courtly tradition of poetry in Europe, which finds its origins in the verse of the troubadours.16 Yet attempting to argue any one of these theories at the exclusion of the others seems to force a question where there may not have been one, or where ambiguity functioned as a feature of this literary trope. As visual art began to be produced to evoke or represent the major scenes of love between ʿāsheq (lover) and maʿshūq (beloved), one might expect that the issue would be settled definitively. Yet, as Najmabadi (2005) observes, the gender attributes of both lover and beloved in the period directly preceding the rise of the novel suggests a society that valued beauty in both young males and females, and such portraiture, in celebrating beauty in this way, maintained the gender ambiguity of the trope.17 The heterosexualization of the relationship between ʿāsheq and maʿshūq, as much as the heterosocialization of public space entailed in the civil code reforms, becomes, therefore, a task of dismemberment and re-memberment. By deploying this neologism as an operative term, I want to evoke simultaneously the act of imaginative and collective remembering that was intrinsic to the nationalist project and which plays a key role in both novels,18 as well as the act of what we might call “memberment”—in other words, that act which is, in these novels, the opposite of dismemberment: the figurative painting of the female beloveds.19 The complica-

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tions of decoupling the relationship between ʿāsheq and maʿshūq from its historical ambiguity and recoupling it to the program of a mandatory heterosexualization partnered with public heterosociality that would allow the fraternal modernism of the nation-state to develop are elaborated in both novels. In Kristevan terms, this is a process of “transposition,” which, Kristeva suggests, “specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of enunciative and denotative positionality” (111).20 In other words, when a system of meaning is borrowed from one context (here, the classical tradition of Persian verse, both lyrical and narrative) and pasted onto another (here, the new genre of prose fiction), the transition is a fraught one. The tension involved in such a transposition is marked in the text itself by the repetition of the codes that both narrators use to signify the female beloved, which are caught up, too, in the language of unveiling—itself a borrowed discourse, or transposition, from contemporary political discourse. In both The Blind Owl and ʿAlavī's Cheshmhāyash (Her Eyes, 1952), the repetition and irritation of the descriptive chains used to “code” the feminine signal that the process of interpellation that Moallem believes was successfully undertaken through the Mandatory Unveiling Act may not have gone as smoothly as she suggests.21 Instead, the uneven reiteration of such codes in these novels suggests the failure of a particular chain of iterations to properly signify their subject and object, and, I would argue, the failure of heteronormative authority to either unilaterally define the feminine or fully appropriate love relations. If we read these laws as instruments—successful or not—of mandatory public heterosexualization, the allusive and cryptic social vision The Blind Owl conveys becomes more easily understood. The narrator’s simultaneously violent and tender impulses toward the female beloved, whose essence must be preserved through portraiture and protection that will keep her (even her corpse) “far from the eyes of men” reads, in this historical context, as a narrative deeply involved in concerns about the ethics and dangers of a rapidly heterosocialized and heterosexualized public sphere. Typically viewed as a novel conceived in a register dramatically dissonant with the literary preferences of its time, and

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believed simultaneously to express a misogyny that characterized Iranian society of the period, reading The Blind Owl against these gender-oriented legal reforms may dislodge it from this commonly accepted understanding. Instead, I want to argue that this “misogyny” can be reclaimed (rather than unilaterally disowned) by a practice of scholarship that not only uses gender as an analytical tool but uses the linguistic coding of gender strategically. In other words, by noting the way in which linguistic gender identification remains an unsolidified practice within the novels, we may read the stagings of frustrated romantic pursuits and the interpolation of these into a nationalist poetics as illuminations of an area of the Iranian literary imagination and its relationship to the project of nationalism. Hedāyat’s masterwork demonstrates the difficulty with which a heterosexual aesthetic was transposed onto the poetics of Persian literary practice, and the role played by the figure of the woman in this process. To say that misogyny can be a productive site of inquiry is not to say that this work is protofeminist, or that in its opposition to the social coding of heterosexuality it imagines women as partners in an alternative, utopian vision of nation. Rather, The Blind Owl demonstrates the degree to which the idea of women in public space was deeply problematic. The imagination of female characters in The Blind Owl is, as countless critics have noted, sketchy, angry, negative: women are not the protagonists. Yet, to repeat Michael Beard’s observation about the female characters in The Blind Owl: though they may be “attenuated,” nevertheless, those dense absences are the “nonbeing” around which story is shaped (Beard, 197). What makes these novels—and their respective engagements of gender—most difficult to understand is not simply the dense web of influence Beard describes, nor the ideological outlook that seems to render ʿAlavī’s text a relict of the Reza Shah period, but the novels’ contrary ethics. For even if we read these acts of violence within the confines of the texts, what the narrators offer as the justification for the dismemberment (and murder) is not contempt or anger but the desire to preserve the beloved from the sight of others. The desire for preservation that expresses itself in The Blind Owl’s narrator’s concern with making a death mask of the woman

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further complicates the act of dismemberment. In both The Blind Owl and Her Eyes, the physical manifestation of the woman herself may be needed to be sacrificed, but the woman’s representation in the form of a portrait is talismanic, a source of power: the power to represent is the power to possess and control the female figure and her gaze.22 This conception of the feminine is fundamental to the narrative logic of the novels. At the same time, these irregularly repeated codes suggest not only the problems of legal-social reform but also the imperfect assimilation of the new practice of novel writing into the Iranian social imagination. The Blind Owl and Her Eyes are both widely considered moments at which this developing genre grew a little bit more into being itself. To read them together here, within the context of the reforms taking place during their periods of authorship and publication, is to seek out the ways in which the literary conventions of a developing genre were in dialogue with a society whose social conventions were in flux. These novels express, through their reimagination of the figure of the beloved, profound anxieties about women in the public sphere, and of the newly public nature of the formerly private union of marriage, suggesting the ambivalence with which the civil code reforms were received. Their differences notwithstanding, these novels are characterized by many of the same preoccupations: not only a similar structuring of the vectors of desire among the three parties described above, but also the use of marriage as a scaffold of their narrative logic. This scaffold has two aspects. As Evelyn J. Hinz argues, although marriage is a motif long associated with the novel, marriage does not achieve the same effect or outcome in every narrative in which it is employed. She identifies two types of marriage used in prose fiction: wedlock (the word she thinks best “suggests the legal and moral conventions usually associated with marriage”), and hierogamy (“sacred marriage”—a term she borrows from anthropological approaches to the study of myth). While Hinz makes an argument that these types may allow us to distinguish more clearly between the romance (which she associates with hierogamy) and the novel (which she pairs with wedlock), I bring her point up here

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35

somewhat against the grain, to suggest that both are at work in The Blind Owl and Her Eyes, two novels which embrace or represent markedly different aspects of the emerging Persian prose tradition. In part 1 of The Blind Owl, the union that occurs between lover and beloved is spontaneous, ordained by higher powers that bring the woman to the narrator’s chambers unbidden; in part 2, however, their union is contrived, earthly, mundane, and beset by problems of the flesh: sexual incompatibility, adultery, pregnancy. Similarly, the union between Farangīs and Ostād Makān in Her Eyes needs no legal basis—indeed, it draws its power from existing outside of the law and the conventions of traditional marriage as the couple work together in the resistance movement to undermine the regime in power. Yet, in order to preserve her lover, Farangīs must betray him by contracting herself in wedlock: she saves Makān from the regime’s revenge by agreeing to wed her powerful suitor, Colonel Ārām, who in turn spares Makān from torture and execution. At the same time, this ambiguous use of marriage in these works demonstrates that the genre of the novel becomes a special medium for culturally sanctioning heterosexual desire even as it pushes back against legal marriage. For the novel, even in its elaboration of heterosexual desire, retains language and codes whose adaptation to the representation of women—and particularly, women as objects not exclusively of lust but also of social desire—was still imperfect. I will be more specific and suggest that what Beard calls the “nonbeing” of the woman is nonetheless a very dense absence, surrounded by codes—clusters of metaphors and chains of description—that recur repetitively, almost obsessively, when the narrator attempts to engage with the woman designated as beloved. These codes aggregate and are most obvious when the women and their portraits are invoked: in The Blind Owl one of the most-repeated passages is the following: “She had slanting, Turkoman eyes . . . lips that had just been kissed” (BK, 13). This description is sometimes accompanied by the additional “the index finger of his/her left hand was held to his/her lips in an expression of surprise” (BK, 13). One or both parts of these descriptions are affixed at times onto the beloved (in both her incarnations), the

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Indian dancer Bugam Dasi (who is also the narrator’s mother), the old man (in his various manifestations), and the narrator’s young brother-inlaw; he in fact kisses the latter on the mouth after describing him in these terms, suggesting that it is the chain of description itself—and the object it attaches to, regardless of gender—that arouses the desire. Though this unusual event has been noted by at least one critic, this is another area of the novel so central yet so frequently overlooked as to suggest a discomfort with addressing it; critics simply do not seem to know how to parse this phenomenon or to reconcile it with other interpretations of the novel.23 Like the dismemberment, this inappropriate direction of desire is a puzzle to be brushed aside—an accident of the narration rather than its object. But I want to put the matter differently, to suggest that the narrator’s “mistake” in attributing common (sexualized) descriptions, or in passionately kissing his young brother-in-law, are neither accidents nor involuntary admissions of the narrator’s homosexuality, but rather a revelation of profound insecurities concerning gender during the consolidation of nationalism under Reza Shah. In Her Eyes, a similar irritation of codes is demonstrated through the repetition of descriptions and questions pertaining to the painting’s indeterminability (and Farangīs’s). At no time does the narrator feel sure of the woman, either in the painting or as he apprehends her in person: This woman was skilled in the arts of imitation and affectation. From that first minute I felt that I was not dealing with any ordinary woman. Suddenly, though the feeling only lasted for a moment or two, I was convinced that this was she herself. For a few moments, I stared at her eyes. There was no resemblance between these eyes and the eyes in the painting. But the forehead, lips, and mouth; the long black tresses and nose drawn as though with a pen were similar. Moreover, it was clear that the passing of time had aged these lips and mouth. (ʿAlavī 2001–2, 52)

The narrator goes in on this way for several more sentences, noting in minute

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37

detail the appearance of the woman’s legs, her wardrobe, her handbag. His attention returns to the details of her body and person compulsively, rivaled only by his obsessive attention to the painting itself. In deciding which one is “real”—the woman herself or Ostād’s depiction of her, the narrator struggles with an ethical question about the responsibilities of representation. This ethical question is raised again when Farangīs, the subject of the portrait Her Eyes, comes to visit the gallery, strolling among Makān’s paintings accompanied by the anxious narrator. When she reaches a work entitled The Unveiling Celebration, she pauses. This painting depicts a man and woman preparing to leave their home to attend, presumably, the first social event they have been invited to after the kashf-e hejāb (the Mandatory Unveiling Act). Both figures in the painting wear European attire, but while the man seems nonchalant about this mode of dress, the woman appears to be ill at ease. She has draped under her European-style hat a scarf that covers her hair and neck. The narrator assumes that Farangīs pauses in silence because she is remembering the occasion of the painting and experiencing anew the pain that she, as a woman, felt on the same occasion; or else, perhaps, the sympathy the narrator himself feels for the older woman in the picture. In a narratorial aside, he observes that the perspective of the painting is masterful, allowing the viewer to understand that the husband appears unconcerned only because he has not yet seen his wife and therefore does not yet understand the extent of her humiliation; she, on the other hand, anticipates it, and is loath to show herself to him or to the world in this way (ʿAlavī 2001–2, 67). But there is nothing to be done about it: “the order had been given, and one must obey it” (67). Yet Farangīs does not read the painting in the same way, and in fact asks why the woman is in pain. The narrator replies sharply: “Don’t you remember? They had given the order that women must attend parties wearing European-style hats, but this woman can’t bear to show her white hair to strangers. Look! She’s tied one of those old yashmak shawls over her head. At least that way she can cover her neck and her white hair” (ʿAlavī 2001–2, 68). Farangīs leaves the question—“Don’t you remember?”—unanswered, and simply moves on to the next painting. She will not say whether

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or not she recalls what for the narrator comprised an historic moment, and her ignorance of this reform—feigned or real—is a moment of important ambiguity in the novel—itself preoccupied with the idea of veiling on both a literal and a metaphorical level. Though he raises objections to the kashfe hejāb and puts himself in a position of sympathy with women forcibly unveiled (“the end of the hejāb would never happen this way,” he avers) and in opposition to Reza Shah’s controversial reform, the narrator himself assumes the authority to veil and unveil. The narrator sees it as his responsibility to unmask (neqāb dar āvordan) Farangīs as the subject of the painting Her Eyes (ʿAlavī 2001–2, 70) so that he may bring to the project of nationalist reform a fuller understanding of “his” Ostād Makān and the misfortunes Makān suffered at the hands of a woman : I wanted to show him that with the revelation of the subject that Her Eyes expressed, it would be possible to discover an essential point that was hidden in Ostād’s life and which was important for the people of today. . . . I wanted to convince Āghā that if we could know who the unknown woman was who in Ostad’s last aghamat days in Tehran had been with him and had for a time sat as his model, we might be able to understand why Ostād had been exiled. Maybe it would even be possible to see that he had been murdered in Kalāt. Above all, it was important for people—especially the dissidents of today—to benefit from this knowledge. (ʿAlavī 2001–2, 43)

It is he who will decide, in his capacity as the director of Makān’s museum and a selfless devotee to the cause of the people (mardom), what knowledge belongs to the public, and what may remain private. Yet ʿAlavī’s narrator, the embodiment of the engagé intellectual par excellence, thoroughly misunderstands the way in which his own efforts replicate those of the monarch he reviles. The irony of this position suggests an important node of friction in this novel as well as the complicated negotiations that Iranian intellectuals—particularly modernist, secular intellectuals—were undertaking, especially vis-à-vis their conceptualization of women, during Reza Shah’s drive for modernization in the 1920s and 1930s.24

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Narrating Women Where The Blind Owl culminates in a moment of anarchy in which the feminine is destroyed, Her Eyes beckons toward the possible recuperation of the divide within the body politic through the speaking role of Farangīs. The “ethereal girl” of Hedāyat’s novel is gone, and the narrator of Her Eyes allows Farangīs to narrate the story as she sees fit. Her Eyes develops the figure of the woman in greater detail, causing one critic to note that this is the major difference between The Blind Owl and Her Eyes (Dastghayb, 49). The beauty that makes Farangīs powerful and monstrous does not lead to her death or dismemberment, as in The Blind Owl, but perhaps to her recuperation. The novel’s closing words belong to Farangīs. In a moment that simultaneously reminds us of Peter Brooks’s injunction that “realism tends to deal in ‘first impressions’ of all sorts, and they are impressions on the retina first of all—the way things look,” and attempts to disrupt the false connection between Farangīs and the portrait that purports to be her likeness, she cries out, “Those are not my eyes!” Although Farangīs has sought throughout the novel to claim ownership of the portrait and fought for control over the portrait’s story, explaining carefully to the narrator the history that led to its creation, she finally disowns it as a representation of what Makān wanted to see, rather than what was really there. Farangīs’s rejection of the painting may be read as an indictment of the realistic tradition altogether, wherein the realist artist’s attempt to portray what-is-there is forever conflated with his desire. In spite of his status as a visionary virtuoso, Makān finally has only been able to see the version of Farangīs he desired. Farangīs not only has the last words in the novel, but much of the novel is given over to her act of narration. Although we might object that this “feminine” narration is still controlled by the masculine perspective of the narrator in Her Eyes (and by a male author), nonetheless it suggests the possibility of a female voice in the realistic narration of nationalism: the opportunity for feminine participation in this key institution. Her Eyes and The Blind Owl eerily mirror the extent to which the civil code’s project of recodifying femininity in terms of state nationalism required dismem-

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berment of the existing codes. In their distorted mirrors we find a critique of the codes of mandatory heterosexuality and sociality that the civil code enforced. One of the major discourses that would be appropriated by the Pahlavi regime was the ideology of companionate marriage; the next chapter will address the effects of this ideology on the genre of fiction.

2

Wedding or Funeral? T H E FA M I LY P ROT E C T I O N L AW A N D THE BRIDE’S CONSENT

In 1968, noted women’s rights activist Badr al-Molūk Bāmdād published Zan-e īrānī: az enqelāb-e mashrūtīyat tā enqelāb-e sefīd (The Iranian Woman: From the Constitutional Revolution to the White Revolution), her memoir of the Iranian women’s rights movement. In a testament to the debt that elite women’s rights activists like Bāmdād—who had been the earliest targets and beneficiaries of Reza Pahlavi’s reforms—felt toward Reza Pahlavi, she proclaims: Far from overlooking the hitherto-forgotten partners of Iranian men, he [Reza Pahlavi] was always aware that women would be an essential factor in the upbringing of an efficient new generation. He also knew that with their intelligence and perception they could provide valuable help in getting the creaky wheels of Iranian society on the move and in modifying obstructive and selfseeking attitudes prevalent among the men. From the start he showed sympathy for the women’s cause in practical ways, but it was only after ten years on the throne that he judged the time ripe for the bold steps . . . which were to lay the foundation of women’s rights and freedom in Iran. (Bāmdād 1977, 55)

Along with her unquestioning acceptance of the state’s narrative of women’s progress and Reza Shah as the “great father” of the nation,1 Bāmdād also ad41

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monishes young Iranian men and women against forgetting how wretched marital arrangements were in the not-too-distant past: “Iranians of the present generation must not be left in ignorance . . . they ought to know how a young suitor had to choose his lifelong partner and companion without seeing or knowing her” (Bāmdād 1977, 11). To illustrate the point, Bāmdād offers an anecdote of the double wedding of two brothers who discover just before consummating their unions that they have taken the wrong brides to the hejleh, or bridal chamber. Happily, the brides are restored to their rightful husbands in time. But what would have happened had they not been? Bāmdād cautions that had the mistake not been caught, this might have had “disastrous results for the happiness of both families” (12). This could have been avoided, suggests Bāmdād, had these couples lived after and not before the advent of Reza Pahlavi’s civil code reforms and his taking in hand the situation of Iranian women. The Marriage Laws passed as part of the Iranian Civil Code between 1931 and 1937 had created wives in the eyes of the law primarily along existing lines of Islamic practices concerning marriage; however, it had also made some significant revisions. Even critics of these laws grudgingly admit that at the very least, the Marriage Laws insisted on a woman giving her consent, and reinforced this principle by changing the minimum legal age of marriage for women from nine to fifteen. In addition to making obligatory the personal consent of the girl, this change meant that marriage ought not to prevent her from obtaining an education. In this way, the law worked not only to enforce or prevent certain acts (the forcible marriage of sexually and/or emotionally immature girls), but also to enjoin certain behaviors (education for girls, the idea of women as consenting individuals); the law became an important factor in how ideals related to marriage and gender were shaped. Bāmdād’s anecdote reads the brides’ anonymity as a metonym for the traditional marriage, which in turn is made equivalent to backwardness. In her estimation, a bride’s individuality is essential to the success of the marriage because it determines the security of the couple’s mari-

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tal identity and precludes the danger of illegitimacy. Had these brides been required to give their consent, the near-cuckolding of brother by brother—the ultimate danger—might never have happened. Although Reza Pahlavi’s civil code reforms were instrumental in changing certain aspects of marriage in Iran, many eyewitnesses and historians would contest calling him a champion of women’s rights.2 In contrast to Bāmdād’s glowing account of Reza Pahlavi’s support of women’s rights, several recent critical reevaluations have demonstrated that the relationship between women’s rights activists and the Pahlavi state was a strained one, and the Pahlavis’ adoption of women’s rights as a major arena of their modernization campaign seems to have been strategically rather than ideologically motivated.3 Therefore, although Reza Pahlavi’s son and successor Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would continue his father’s program of legal reforms related to personal status, granting women suffrage as part of his “White Revolution” reforms in 1963, and offering further marriage and child custody reforms in the 1967 Family Protection Law, such concessions were seen as instrumental to the Pahlavi project of modernization (which understood women’s national participation as a cosmetic, but necessary, aspect of the process), rather than arising from a sincere belief in women’s equality. Indeed, as historian Parvin Paidar observes, Despite the pretense that these laws [the 1963 White Revolution reforms and the 1967 Family Protection Law] were aimed at liberating women and revolutionizing their position, there were other motives behind them, such as population control, and they had a much more limited aim than was pretended. In reality, far from being part of a coherent gender policy, this legislation responded to immediate and conflicting pressures. On the one hand, the rapid population growth of the population with its explosive economic and political implications put enormous pressure on the state to devise policies to control it. (155–56)

In spite of these problems and a general wariness on the part of intellectuals

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to the Pahlavi program of “reform,” the Family Protection Law (FPL) of 1967 did introduce significant improvements to the existing civil code provisions concerning marriage.4 The FPL revised section 1133 of the civil code to both curtail the unilateral right of the husband to divorce and to allow women to initiate divorce under certain circumstances, such as absence or incarceration of the husband for a period of five or more years; harmful substance addiction that would threaten family life; the taking of a second wife without the first wife’s consent; and conviction of a crime that brings shame or disrepute to the family. Spouses could also separate by mutual agreement.5 At the same time, the FPL reinforced the idea that marriage was primarily a civil institution rather than a religious one by mandating that all divorce petitions (including those initiated by men) had to be subjected to court arbitration (Paidar, 153–54). Bāmdād’s memoir, published soon after the FPL, views the anonymity of the bride in traditionally arranged, clerically contracted marriages as the horror to be defeated by love and individual choice in marriage. In other words, the veiled identity of young brides was the evil, and companionate marriage was the antidote. Her work builds on a canon of literary and legal writing that views traditional, family-arranged unions as the bête noire of modernity: a backward and despotic practice that promoted the marriage of young girls to lecherous old men, sanctioned the objectification of women through promotion of their anonymity, and prevented girls and women from acquiring educations.6 In modernizing narratives, companionate marriage is portrayed as an ideal that would provide young women a choice in their marriage partner as well as an opportunity to be educated to a degree commensurate with their responsibilities as companions and helpmeets to educated, modern men. On the other hand, girls who are subjected to traditional marriages literally wither, sicken, and die. As Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi observes in her analysis of reaction to the civil code’s marriage laws in the women’s press (ca. 1930s), authors thematized the girl prematurely married to an older, lascivious man as doomed: such brides would be stricken with sexually transmitted diseases passed onto them by their lewd and promiscuous

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husbands, rendered barren by such illnesses, and forced to work at backbreaking, low-paying jobs (or worse, prostitution) to earn their keep. This narrative was so popular that it recurred (with variations) in almost every issue of the women’s magazine ʿĀlam-e nesvān (Women’s World).7 If Hedāyat’s The Blind Owl and ʿAlavī’s Her Eyes demonstrate the extent to which the difficulties of transposing the beloved of the poetic tradition onto prose narrative are rightly considered part of a larger conversation about heteronormativity and the public sphere, the works discussed in this chapter suggest the difficulties that authors—especially women authors—encountered when dealing with the increasingly pernicious ideal of the companionate wife. The twentieth century witnessed the struggle of Iranian lawmakers and authors, male and female, to come to terms with the position of women in society and in the family. As Camron Amin observes, “Communist, royalist, Islamic revivalist, and renewalist men might talk past each other on many issues, but they were in agreement on the notion of the educated housewife—the cuttingedge idea of late nineteenth-century Iranian feminism and certainly an assumption of Women’s Awakening propaganda and policies” (245). Many male reformers were convinced that the “educated housewife” (what I am calling the “companionate wife”) was the ideal state for a modern woman, and although women activists took up this call, the application of this ideal elicited mixed results. At three important junctures in Iranian history, woman authors reflected on the existing conditions for women vis-à-vis marriage as it was imagined in each period by the state, and projected some different possible outcomes. Sadīqeh Dawlatābādī’s “Dāstān reqqat angīz” (A Pitiful Tale; 1918), Zahrā Khānlarī’s “Gawhar” (1945), and Sīmīn Dāneshvar’s Savūshūn (1969) demonstrate that their authors drew upon a common cultural ideal in very different periods of legal reform. Dawlatābādī’s imagining of the fate of girls in 1918, during the period of restored constitutional government between the conclusion of Iran’s civil war and the rise of Reza Pahlavi (then Reza Khan, a Cossack soldier of humble origins), offers a view of marriage that is consonant with understanding women’s rights as part of a larger struggle to achieve

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the goals of nationalism, including modernity and sovereignty. Similarly, Khānlarī published “Gawhar” in Sokhan (Logos), the journal edited by her husband, Pārvīz Nātel Khānlarī, in another moment of relative freedom for authors (after Reza Pahlavi’s abdication in 1943, but before Mohammad Reza Pahlavi consolidated his power following the Mossadeq coup of 1953), but reveals a pessimistic view on the relationship between modernity and marriage where rural girls are concerned. Dāneshvar was writing more than twenty years later, in the wake of the White Revolution and the Family Protection Law, two occasions of reform of personal status laws that allegedly revolutionized women’s status in Iranian society. What becomes clear in examining these three nodes of publication is that whatever else changed over the fifty years that these works measure, the accepted way of discussing women’s position in society and women’s rights was by representing them vis-à-vis marriage. As such, the use of the tropes of wedding ceremonies and their associated rituals became a standard practice that can be observed changing over time, much as the legal reforms and norms for marriage changed over time. The bride’s ability to give her consent became an important site for understanding the way in which marriage was viewed as an institution that, above any other formative process overseen by the state, would not only determine a woman’s social or material status but would also create her as an individual and partner in the process of modernization, in the form of a companionate wife; or, alternatively, it relegated her to the obsolete role of being a tool for domestic service in the form of the traditional wife.

Companionate Marriage as Modernity In Dawlatābādī’s “A Pitiful Tale”, the absence of the bride’s consent becomes the axis on which the story turns. The story focuses on its protagonist, Hūshang, as he eavesdrops on the conversation of two young women, Nosrat and Talʿat, at a shrine (emāmzādeh) outside of Tehran. Thirteen-year-old Talʿat is anxious to discuss her miserable circumstances: her mother is trying to remove her from school and force her into an arranged marriage. Talʿat sees the marriage as a “disaster” (mosībat) and

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Nosrat, now sixteen and married for seven years, agrees with this view (Dawlatābādī, 1998, 477). Nosrat relates her own story in order to warn thirteen-year-old Talʿat to resist the marriage. Nosrat herself was prevented from further schooling and sent to a “living grave” (gūr-e zendegānī) by her mother, who married her without her consent at age nine to a man forty-six years her senior (479). Nosrat sadly tells Talʿat how she was taken crying into a crowded room for the contracting of the marriage (ʿaqd), and when she refused to reply “yes” to the request for the bride’s consent stipulated by Islamic law, the crowd of women attending the ʿaqd convinced another girl to call out the “yes” of assent in her place. Because the presiding cleric was male and could not, in accordance with Islamic law and custom, be admitted into a room full of women he was unrelated to, he did not understand that Nosrat’s consent had not been given, and pronounced the marriage valid.8 It was in fact common practice for girls not to give their consent. For a bride to speak was thought forward and unbecoming, and it was frequently the case that someone else would give it for them—or that they would forced to give it against their will (Friedl, 155–57). However, in “A Pitiful Tale,” this social practice is emphasized as an act of cruelty against the girl; as an assault against her freedom of choice in choosing a partner. As Nosrat recounts her story, she does not realize that she is being overheard by Hūshang, in whose home she stayed briefly because her aunt was in the family’s service. Hūshang, seeing her native intelligence and potential, wished to educate her and marry her himself. But in the logic of the story, Nosrat is sentenced by her mother’s ignorance to her death in a miserable marriage to a man who marries her out of lust, who already has children who are themselves old enough to be Nosrat’s parents, and will never value her as a companion—a fate she might have avoided had her mother allowed her to stay in the city with Hūshang’s family and been educated to become his companionate wife. Zahrā Khānlarī’s “Gawhar” also places the marriage scene and consent at the center of its narrative. Published thirty years after “A Pitiful

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Tale,” “Gawhar” is invested in a somewhat different set of reformative and investigative energies but nonetheless is focused on the tragedy of a young girl being given without her consent in traditional marriage. Like Nosrat, Gawhar is a village girl who has been taught to read and write through her parents’ wish, out of a religious impulse, that at least one of their children should be literate—so that this child could “recite the shahādeh for them and call out the fatīheh” (Khānlarī 1945, 296). Gawhar’s only brother, who would more typically have been the one child to become literate, is still a baby; thus Gawhar becomes the family’s candidate for education. Her literacy is thus not intended to benefit her but is to ensure the salvation of her parents’ souls. Yet Gawhar’s schooling is cut short when her family’s poverty and her mother’s “one desire” (tanhā ārәzū) to marry her daughters off and relieve the family of surplus daughters (nān khawr; literally, “bread eaters”) make it impossible for Gawhar to continue to study at the village school (297). One might say that the narrator of this story is an anthropologist, where the narrator of “A Pitiful Tale” was a social reformer: the careful preservation of the details related to Gawhar’s village life seems as important as the critique of traditional marriage. And whereas Nosrat’s mother in “A Pitiful Tale” is depicted as straightforwardly selfish and cruel, while her dead father is figured as a potential savior who would have rescued her had he lived, “Gawhar” does not place blame for her premature marriage squarely at the door of her mother. Rather, the opening paragraphs of the story invite us to sympathize with Gawhar’s mother, Havā, who is herself a victim of the vicious cycle of traditional marriage and rural poverty. Married at a young age, Havā gives birth every year for eight years to a daughter, except in the case of her last child, who is a boy. During each of her labors, her husband waits outside the door: not to inquire after her well-being or safety but to know whether it is a girl (nān khawr) or a boy (nān āvar, “bread winner”). Upon hearing the child is a girl, he walks away irritably without bothering to see his newborn daughter, and Havā, who has “still not recovered from the pain of the birth, [is] seized again by grief” (296).

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Like her mother, Gawhar is promised in marriage while she is still a child and will not be permitted to see her husband until their marriage. Not knowing what it means to be a wife beyond the travails of her everpregnant mother, Gawhar has all manner of fantasies about what this condition will entail: opportunities for bliss, religious piety, or abuse. Her friends, also anonymously engaged to men they do not know, complain about their matches but reassure Gawhar that her betrothed is poor but also “young . . . handsome . . . [and] it will all turn out right” (298). When the day of her marriage arrives, Gawhar is prepared by the women of her family for the wedding by trips to the public bath, the hennaing of her hands, and the singing of songs concerning the bride and the marriage. This description of the wedding festivities occupies two pages of the story’s eight, comprising the longest description in the text. Related partly through description of what each day of the wedding ceremonies entails, and partly through verse in the form of the songs that are sung by the wedding party to and for the bride, this scene, like the wedding of Nosrat, suggests a ceremony in which the bride’s consent is of only nominal importance.9 Though the story does not explicitly note the absence of her consent, Gawhar never speaks a word during the preparations for the wedding or at the wedding itself. The absence of consent is overwritten by Khānlari’s ambiguously nostalgic evocation of rural life as both a site of needed reform as well as the repository of indigenous culture. Within the contemporary logic of narratives concerning traditional marriage, Gawhar’s arranged marriage cannot come out well, as indeed it does not. Because her husband is poor and so cannot feed her properly, Gawhar, who has not yet reached puberty, grows thinner and thinner. Though “not unhappy” with her married life, and fairly certain that her husband likes her, she wonders, “What use was a good husband if you had a bad mother-in-law?” reminding the reader of yet another difficulty of traditional marriage, particularly among the lower classes and among rural populations: namely, the custom of a bride moving into the home of her in-laws, rather than a home of the couple’s own (Khānlari 1945, 300). Upon achieving puberty, Gawhar quickly becomes pregnant,

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but owing, the narrator insinuates, to poverty and the early age at which she was married, Gawhar’s children are sickly and small. Her husband is called away soon after to complete his military service; when he returns, he is accompanied by two strangers, an older woman and her tenyear-old daughter. Confused by these guests, Gawhar at first attempts to offer them hospitality, but when she visits the bazaar to do her marketing, she learns that her husband has in fact married this woman; she is Gawhar’s havū, or rival wife. Shocked into a faint, Gawhar seeks refuge in her mother’s house (interestingly, it is her mother, not her father, that she seeks out for help), but must eventually return to her own. From here, the story reaches a denouement quickly: because she complains about her situation, Gawhar is ignored by her husband in favor of his new wife, and consequently, both Gawhar and her children suffer. The story concludes by telling us how Gawhar is literally driven mad by the circumstances of her marriage, even though “the poor thing had just turned twenty” (303). The tragic dimensions of this story must be understood not only within a tradition of pro-companionate marriage narratives like “A Pitiful Tale,” wherein a child-marriage is depicted as the death knell for the girl, and contrasted to the (unfulfilled) possibility of a companionate marriage to an educated man who is either a member of her own generation or at least closer to her in age; but also as part of the discourse of the rural constructed for an urban audience. Like Nosrat, Gawhar is a village girl, but the city functions more ambiguously in contrast to the village of Damāvand, the site of Khānlarī’s story. Whereas in “A Pitiful Tale,” the city is literally a site of urbanity, where girls can be saved from the backwardness of tradition that resides in the village, “Gawhar” renders the city a corrupting place, from which men bring back rival wives and children. As in so many works of the period, the village here becomes the culturally rich site where indigenous Iranian traditions may still be found, but upon which reforms must also be wrought.10 Gawhar could have been educated in the village, had other circumstances (her family’s poverty, their understanding of why education was important for girls) been different.11

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Fulfilling and Exceeding the Ideal: The Companionate Wife-Protagonist While earlier incarnations of the romance of marriage like “Gawhar” and “A Pitiful Tale” show us only what might have been, Dāneshvar ’s Savūshūn is the first instance of a novel in which a companionate marriage has been accomplished, and the companionate wife has herself become not only the subject of narration but the protagonist and focalizing consciousness of the story. In other words, whereas in earlier texts companionate marriage is precluded, suggesting a stillborn modernity, Savūshūn assumes such modernity as an already-realized status. The novel is set in Shiraz during the Allied occupation of Iran, and focuses on the experiences of Zarī, a young wife and mother. Zarī is married to Yūsef, an idealistic young Shirazi landowner (khān) who opposes the local governor’s collaboration with the Allies, and attempts to organize other notables and members of the local tribes to keep the Allies from commandeering the city’s grain supplies. Zarī protests against Yūsef’s activism, urging him to remain silent for the sake of their young children and the safety of the family, but Yūsef persists and is killed by Allied agents. It should come as no surprise that Savūshūn opens with a wedding. However, it is not Zarī and Yūsef’s wedding; rather, it is the wedding of the governor’s daughter. In the very first scene of the novel, we find Yūsef openly disparaging the extravagance of the decorated loaf of bread sent in tribute by the bakers’ guild at a time when grain is in short supply, while Zarī, attempting to protect Yūsef and their children from harm, urges him to be silent. She herself observes the lavish ceremony inwardly with a mixture of hilarity and despair. Because the extradiegetical narration is focalized through Zarī, the reader is privy to her thoughts; through her, we know that the sycophantic, collaborationist governor has put on a show to please the foreign officers in attendance, making farcical the elements of the wedding ceremony that mark it as indigenously Iranian. The room, to Zarī’s eye, is full of artifice: “The show was all for them [the foreign officers], but for Zarī it was like a taʿzīyeh play. . . .  [Shīʿī passion

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play] Zarī thought, ‘Everyone [all the characters of the taʿziyeh] is here. Marhab and Shemr and Yazīd and Farangī and Zeynab and Zīyādeh and Hind the Liver-Eater and ʿAysheh and finally, Fezzeh, too.’ And suddenly she thought, ‘I sound just like Yūsef.’ The room was so crowded and hot and full of the smell of the rue and the freesias . . . [that] Zarī didn’t know when the bride said yes” (8–9).12 It is tempting, given the dominant idiom of literary commitment in this period, to read Zarī’s inability to discern the moment of consent in nationalist terms—when, after all, did Iran consent to be occupied?—and surely this anti-imperialist sentiment is a salient one in the novel.13 Yet when we understand the wedding scene as part of a larger code related to marriage and women’s status—and fully assimilated into Persian literature by the time of Savūshūn’s authorship— we may also read this lack of consent as a protest against women’s continuing relegation to the lesser, complementary role of wife, rather than that of citizen and equal.14 Yet as Zarī watches the bride being escorted into the room where her marriage contract will be formalized, what she sees is notably different from what people saw at weddings at the time of the publication of “A Pitiful Tale” and of “Gawhar”: in contrast to the homosocial setting of Nosrat’s wedding, this wedding is fully heterosocialized; according to the logic of “A Pitiful Tale,” this ought to make it safe: with men present, and with the cleric able to look the bride in the face, it should be easy to know for sure that the bride has given her consent. Yet Zarī sees it as a farce: a ritual enacted for the pleasure of the occupiers not for the joy of the bride or groom. This scene shares with Nosrat’s and Gawhar’s weddings the absence of the bride’s consent, creating a link among the scenes that bridges the five intervening decades that their publications span: all three are shaped by a lack of autonomy on the part of a bride. Nosrat is unable to withhold her consent successfully; when she attempts to do so, a stranger gives it in her place, as though one girl’s consent is the same as another’s. Gawhar has no idea that she has the right to give her consent. In Savūshūn, this outright lack of consent is supplanted by an ambiguity that lies at the intersection of several levels of meaning in

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the text: still stinging over being overpowered by ʿEzzat al-Dawleh—the “bad” mother figure of the novel (who very much resembles the type represented by Nosrat’s mother in “A Pitiful Tale”) and forced to “lend” her emerald earrings to the bride, Zarī cannot know for sure, with all the noise in the room, whether the bride indeed said “yes,” and this echoes her own sense that her earrings had been taken without her consent. At the same time, we know that the citizens of Iran have not given their consent to be occupied by the Allied forces, and the bride’s silence—or Zarī’s inability to hear her consent in the din of the room crowded with foreigners and spies—echoes this feeling of a forced arrangement. The earrings are also tied to Zarī’s memory of her own marriage: they were a gift from her mother-in-law, and as Yūsef struggled to fasten them to her ears, the women in the bridal party joked about “finding the hole” (a pun about the consummation of the marriage). Yūsef is doomed from the moment that Zarī lets her earrings go: she has placed conciliation with power over and above loyalty to her husband’s idealism. The author’s use of free indirect discourse to focalize the narration through Zarī realizes her as something quite different: a protagonist. This makes Savūshūn perhaps the first novel in Iran to introduce a female protagonist and at the same time, one of the all-time most popular novels in Iran. Yet, although she is clearly the novel’s protagonist, Zarī is in competition with the novel’s hero for the reader’s attention. This hero, the Sīyāvash to whom the title alludes, is a peerless youth figure in Iranian tradition whom we identify immediately in Zarī’s husband, Yūsef (whose own name refers to the peerless youth of the Qurʾanic tradition; yet another peerless youth is invoked through repeated reference to the martyrdom of Hossein). Savūshūn revises the traditional identifications the epic invites with heroes and kings: the world of the epic poem Shāhnāmeh (Book of Kings) was one in which kings ruled divinely and heroes acquiesced to their will (no matter how unreasonable that will proved to be). The modern, constitutional nation of Iran in which Savūshūn is set, however, was not, in theory, governed exclusively by a monarch, but by the will of its people, and women—primarily silent in the Shāhnāmeh15—are often central in the genre of the novel.16

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Savūshūn reframes the epic story in the form of the novel, destabilizing the role of the hero as the focal point of narration. Yūsef is obviously the hero of the Sīyāvash story, but at the same time Zarī is clearly the protagonist of the novel. Therefore, though Yūsef perishes—as he must as the doomed hero—in this epic plot trajectory, the novel posits a parallel plot trajectory in which the protagonist, Zarī, lives on. Because Zarī and Yūsef act as protagonist and hero and thus compete not only for the reader’s sympathies but also for authority within their marriage, marriage is again inscribed as the site on which this struggle for (nationalist) individuality takes place. Farzaneh Milani rightly identifies marriage as a site of conflict in Dāneshvar’s “fictive world” and observes that “a ceaseless search for real love . . . is one of the central issues and a manifestation of critical concerns women bring to Iranian fiction” (F. Milani 1999, 194–95). But in this analysis Zarī’s struggle within her marriage is misunderstood as a “ceaseless search for real love” instead of as an investigation of the ideology of marriage. Savūshūn questions the way in which companionate marriage has simultaneously mobilized Zarī and kept her in a golden cage. While Yūsef acts on his conscience, distinguishing him as an individual, and will be rewarded for his courage through the celebration of his martyrdom, Zarī struggles to achieve an identity outside of the family. For much of the novel Zarī is hindered in her attempt to understand herself as an individual by thinking of herself as a mother and wife—roles that are constructed through marital relationships. Yet at the same time, Zarī finds it difficult to imagine any other way of being. The women around her do not offer models of emancipation, and even where the women she expresses admiration for are concerned, she cannot imagine emulating their behavior; they are foreign to her, however fond of them she may be. Miss Fotūhī, the women’s rights activist, is shut up in a madhouse where Zarī fulfills her charity vow (nazr) by delivering food weekly. ʿAmeh, Yūsef’s elder sister, whom Zarī loves and respects, is a widow and lives as a dependent in their household; she longs to escape the reality of her life through opium and the dream of dying in the Shīʿī holy city of Karbala. Mehrī, Zarī’s childhood friend,

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is an Islamist, and alludes to the growing popularity of Islam as an ideology of resistance in Pahlavi Iran. To the extent that these women offer models, they are models of suffering and sacrifice. Zarī’s own mother is dead, but she remembers how she put her duties of wife ahead of those as daughter, leaving her alone on her deathbed so that she could be a good hostess to her husband’s guests. If anything, the novel seems to work not to establish collectivities among women but rather for the enfranchisement of women as what Gayatari Spivak calls “honorary brothers” in the collectivity of the nation (Spivak 2003, 32). This is clearest at the novel’s conclusion, when Zarī reads McMahon’s letter promising her that “the tree that must be watered with blood” will not only live but will flourish across Iran:17 “Don’t cry, my sister. A tree will grow in your home, and more in your city, and many more throughout your country. / And the wind will carry the message from one tree to the next and the trees will ask the wind, ‘Didn’t you see the dawn as you came!’ ” (Dāneshvar 2001b, 304). The novel’s conclusion heightens our concern for Zarī even as it ostensibly transcends these doubts for nationalist fervor. Zarī ends the novel a widow—perhaps the worst state for a young woman to find herself in. Having lost in Yūsef’s death the protection of a husband, we see her fending off the renewed suit of Hamīd, ʿEzzat alDawleh’s profligate son, from whose pursuit of her she had been freed by Yūsef’s marriage proposal. We also remember her brother-in-law’s avariciousness as well as his hunger for what his brother has. Although we understand from witnessing Zarī’s thoughts that she has come to see herself, finally, not through her own subject position but to see and desire with her husband and son, who view her as the object of potential reform, we cannot help but see that this makes her doubly vulnerable to the surrounding world. In the reader’s act of sympathizing with Zarī, she must share her doubts about marriage, wondering whether “marriage was wrong at its very core” (Dāneshvar 2001b, 131). Indeed, as a widow, she is about to discover that widows occupied one of the most vulnerable positions vis-à-vis the law, and the Family Protection Law did nothing to change

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this: under the law, childless widows stood to inherit only a small portion of their husband’s estate, determined as one-quarter of the property (i.e., land) owned by the husband. Naqvi points out that in this regard, the civil code was harsher than the religious laws on which it was modeled, as it precluded even those widows who had borne children by their deceased husbands from receiving a larger inheritance share; indeed, Naqvi asserts that the broadly held judgment among Shīʿī jurists is that widows with children by the deceased should inherit a portion based on the estate in total, not simply a percentage of land holdings (Naqvi, pt. 4, 339).

Crossing Over: From Beloved to Lover Zarī and Yūsef’s own union is, as the earlier narratives of companionate marriage promote, contracted both against class lines and in terms of romantic love and companionate partnership. The novel’s multivocality, however, makes it difficult to read as a straightforward defense of companionate marriage; though Savūshūn engages many of the same pro-companionate marriage and antitraditional marriage themes promoted in stories like “Gawhar,” “A Pitiful Tale,” and From Darkness into Light, and it continues to read the libidinal in national terms, it makes an essential revision to the role of female partner in the union.18 Whereas previous stories offer a denouement through the death of the female partner, in this story Zarī survives while Yūsef perishes. In the logic of Najmabadi’s argument, Zarī lives to be a “figure of identification” and Yūsef drops out of the narrative.19 Najmabadi reads the death of Nosrat in “A Pitiful Tale” as frustrating “the reader’s desire to ‘see’ the consummation” thus “produc[ing] the desire to ‘see’ the obstacle [to a mixed class, romantic marriage] removed, to democratize the state” (Najmabadi 2005, 169).20 She argues that a successful companionate marriage would have made the female vatan embodied in Nosrat available to the male reader, who has moved into a position of identification with Hūshang (in both stories) and desires with him. But surely Zarī’s marriage can be read both ways: her class-crossing

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marriage and its explicit sexual component represent this nationally sought-after consummation literally, suggesting a unified Iran; yet the union has not yet produced harmony or a sovereign Iran. Najmabadi wonders of early nationalist stories like “Mehrangiz’s Wedding,” “But what of the female reader?” and posits “A Pitiful Tale” as a story that begins to allow a female reader to identify with a quasi protagonist like Nosrat (Najmabadi 2005, 169). But such a question may be posed in the wrong way. The female reader, like the male reader, desires with the character who focalizes the narration. If we assume that females must identify with females, and males with males, we miss the point that the practice of reading permits gender crossing in important ways. Savūshūn was, from its first publication, wildly popular. Though many critics have sought to dismiss this popularity as a symptom of nostalgia for Dāneshvar’s deceased husband Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, whom many argue is the model for Yūsef, later critics have understood this popularity as confirmation of the novel’s merits as well as its resonance with contemporary readers’ sentiments.21 Surely some of its appeal also derives from the fact that even through a woman protagonist would have been a new phenomenon in Persian literature, in another way Zarī is already familiar to the reader: she is, ironically, both the embodiment of the ideal wife-woman imagined by so many earlier constitutional-era texts (an educated, refined, virtuous partner to her self-chosen husband), as well as the sentient, questioning engagé protagonist that was typically male in the fiction of the period.22 As such, this protagonist struggles to occupy a characteristically masculine space—that of protagonist and of patriotic citizen—while still fulfilling her obligations as companionate wife.23 Significantly, it is Zarī who buries her beloved at the novel’s end, and this revision should not be overlooked. When mourners attempt to parade it through the streets in an act of protest, Yūsef’s corpse is made a symbol of nationalist resistance; when they fail, the body has to be laid down in the street, too heavy to carry. When Yūsef’s corpse is finally buried in the earth, those claiming to be his partisans and friends are gone, and only the family remains. While Yūsef’s sister weeps, Zarī finds that

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she cannot and wishes instead for a safe place where she can go “to cry for all of the strangers and exiles of the world. For all those who had been killed unjustly and consigned to the earth in darkness like thieves” (Dāneshvar 2001b, 304). Finally, it is Yūsef’s body that will be absorbed into the soil of Iran, an interment that forces us to return to earlier descriptions of Yūsef through Zarī’s eyes, where she admires his “emerald eyes” and the “teeth that had once been so white.” Although Zarī has been portrayed throughout as a paragon of Persian beauty, leading us to conflate her with descriptions of the classical beloved, we understand by the novel’s end that Yūsef is Zarī’s beloved, and Zarī is the lover, the

ʿāsheq. Savūshūn reverses the terms of the heterosexualized lover-beloved dyad which in the modern period assigns the active role of lover exclusively to the male; at the same time (one hesitates to say consequently), it creates a thinking, doubting protagonist who is not only a woman and a companionate wife, but a lover and not simply a beloved.

3

Ain’t I a Woman? DOMESTICIT Y’S OTHER

Who was it who had said that servants were merely tools that spoke?” —Hājjī Adīb, in Shahrnūsh Pārsīpūr, Tūbā va maʿnā-ye shab (Tūbā and the Meaning of Night)

The 1970s witnessed the continuation of the existing legal reform program for women’s rights. In 1975, the Family Protection Law of 1967 was amended, raising the marriage age for women to twenty, specifying conditions under which courts would permit men to take second wives to include the permission of first wives, and allowing either a wife or husband to petition the court to stop her or his spouse from taking work that would degrade or endanger the family. Ostensibly, things were improving for women—at least for some of them. More urban women were entering the workforce, and women of the upper and middle classes increasingly entered professions that had hitherto been closed to them, including law, medicine, and the university. How did they do it? And what became of the women whose concerns were not addressed by these laws, whose lot was not directly improved by these reforms?1 In an article entitled “Age, Gender, and Slavery in and out of the Persian Harem: A Different Story,” Iran scholar Haleh Afshar helps us begin to see what may have happened to some of the women excluded from such reforms. In this curious personal history, Afshar recounts her memories of a woman named Sonbol Baji, who “might have been called the housekeeper in an equivalent Western household . . . [or she] could be described as a nanny” (Afshar 2000, 912). Because of Sonbol, Afshar 59

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writes proudly, her mother “was able to pursue her passionate campaign for equality without ever being any less of a mother to us” (912). What Sonbol was, in fact, was a slave—an African woman who had been purchased in her girlhood by the royal family during the reign of Mozaffar al-Dīn Shāh Qājār (1896–1907). In the harem, writes Afshar, Sonbol had managed to get an “education” in all things feminine, from the best beauty rituals and methods for keeping away the evil eye to how to dress and “present a good table” (911). (Afshar passes over the fact that in spite of the fact that many members of the royal harem would have been literate and trained in “philosophy, languages, political discourses and even music,” no one bothered to try to teach a black slave girl how to read, resulting in Sonbol’s illiteracy—perhaps the reason why Afshar is telling this story and not Sonbol herself [911].) With the advent of the Constitutional Revolution and the consequent breakup of the royal household and its harem, Sonbol was displaced. When the harem disintegrated, Sonbol was “taken in” by Afshar’s grandfather, a minor courtier, and, since there was no role in a bourgeois household for the talents of a harem slave girl, Sonbol was married off to the family coachman and put to work as the household’s manager, acting as both domestic servant and substitute mother to generations of the family’s children: first to Afshar’s mother, and then to Afshar herself (912). Though Afshar tries to stay within the bounds of Western political correctness and appropriate scholarly practice by acknowledging that she may be writing a “bio-mythology” (à la Audre Lorde), she cannot help waxing lyrical about this beautiful, “exotic” woman whom she claims was “the moral authority” of her family’s home (909, 912). She seems to miss entirely the fact that her mother, a daughter of the household that Sonbol served, was able to pursue a career outside the home in the sphere of women’s rights activism because of the labor of a displaced black slave absorbed into a bourgeois household, where it is uncertain if she received wages for her labor or if she lived there by choice or not. Ironically, the question of whether Sonbol would have been included in the category of “woman” on behalf of whose rights Afshar’s mother was fighting is one

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that is never addressed by Afshar. So, too, does Afshar brush off issues of racism in Iran that might have affected Sonbol and constrained her choices by suggesting, “even though Iranians are not less ethnocentric than others, perhaps the colour [sic] ‘black’ does not have the specifically denigrating class or historical connotations that it has elsewhere” (908– 9).2 This optimistic view is part and parcel of Afshar’s charmed memories of Sonbol Baji, whose “colour had been one of her major attractions” (909): “In the harem she was special, she was a companion and a solace to the lives of the ladies of the interior andarouni [the inner part of the traditional Iranian home, reserved for women and members of the immediate family]; they had shared their secrets and their joys with her and taught her their skills and crafts” (910). It is hard not to think of Sīmīn Dāneshvar’s story “Shahrī chawn behesht” (A City Like Paradise; this is the eponymous story of the volume in which it is contained, 1340 [1962]) when one reads Afshar’s account, and to wonder if Afshar has not read it herself. Her biography of Sonbol Bhaji so closely mirrors the fate of this story’s main character—a black slave-cum-nanny/concubine in an aristocratic family fallen on hard times in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution—that the reader might plausibly believe that Afshar’s autobiographical story is modeled on Dāneshvar’s fictional one.3 In Dāneshvar’s story, a black slave named Mehrāngīz is the primary victim when the great family in whose home she had been a retainer begins to experience financial hardships. With the breakup of the larger family structure and the loss of its wealth, Mehrāngīz, who has been given as the “prize” in the dowry of one of the family’s daughters, is raped by the daughter’s husband, beaten by the daughter herself, forced to have an abortion, and eventually expelled from the household altogether. We cannot know for sure what became of slaves like Sonbol: as Afshar herself admits, Sonbol remained illiterate, and indeed this seems to have been characteristic of the lot of Iranian slaves, however highly valued, for few accounts written by slaves in Iran exist.4 Yet, from literary accounts like Dāneshvar’s, as well as autobiographical accounts of royal family

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members like the Qājār princess Tāj al-Saltaneh, we may hazard a guess that the picture was not as rosy as that which Afshar paints of Sonbol’s life of slavery inside and outside of the royal harem. Although slaves were themselves a small percentage of the population of domestic workers in Iran—whose numbers have never been accurately tabulated—we may hazard a guess that in spite of the new, modern domestic order that posited a nuclear family headed by the husband-father and managed by the wife-mother, servants continued to play important roles in securing and maintaining that ideal, and also in continuing to nurture and rear children, to act as surrogate wives, and to generally enable their mistresses to act in roles outside the home, as in the case of Afshar’s activist mother. However, the contribution of domestics to the new order was never acknowledged as such; in contrast, the role of domestics like the wet nurse and the housemaid was ignored by the law and stigmatized by the discourse that supported the new domestic order. Servants, whose womanhood exceeded or existed outside of the law, become a topos in modern literature that is every bit as significant to our understanding of how marriage worked in Iran as any legal document or sociological study.5 Afshar’s romanticization of Sonbol’s role in her family’s household and her satisfaction with this situation points to a lacuna in our knowledge about service in both premodern and modern Iran. Did Sonbol Baji share Afshar’s feelings about this? Unfortunately, there are no dedicated histories of service in Iran such as those which are amply available for, say, modern England;6 much of what we know about domestic service and the institution of slavery in Iran comes from reading around the margins of historical studies treating other subjects. As such, little acknowledgment of the role historically played by women who were nannies, wet nurses, and domestics exists outside of literary texts. And while the law theoretically offered privileges to all women when it offered any to women at all, it is easy to see how women who were not part of companionate marriages were excluded from these privileges. As Najmabadi demonstrates, much of how the concept of the modern woman was articulated had to do with the word used for both “wife” and “woman” in modern

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Persian: zan.7 The presence of these non-kin females constituted both a threat to the dominant femininity of the wife and a challenge to the ideal of sexual monogamy in the household.8 In literary texts as well as in political discourse, female domestic workers would increasingly become the “other” to the imagination of a central, dominant Iranian womanhood, which defined itself not only in contrast to the traditional wife, but also to the household servants.9 In “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Gayatri Spivak evaluates a process she calls “soul-making,” which she finds evident in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and its bifurcation of the female subject into Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason. Spivak identifies “soul-making” as the darker half of the discourse of women’s rights that developed in Britain in the nineteenth century, wherein the British imperialist project offered the colonial woman as the “other” of the enlightened British woman.10 Proposing that this process endures into the present in the strain of Anglo-American feminist literary criticism which valorizes Jane’s individuality while overlooking the means of achieving that individuality, Spivak suggests that the concealed cost of Jane’s individual subjectivity is the sanity and the subjectivity of Bertha, Rochester’s first wife, whom critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar memorably dubbed “the madwoman in the attic.” In other words, Jane’s humanity, as that word is commonly understood in feminist discourses, is achieved at the cost of Bertha’s. The process of recognizing the British woman (Jane) as an individual therefore depended on the simultaneous act of suppressing the subjectivity of the colonized female (Bertha). As a way of critiquing both the imperialist project itself and the Anglo-American contemporary critics who unwittingly reinscribe that project through their focus on Jane as protofeminist, Spivak offers a reading of Bronte’s novel through Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a postcolonial recasting of Jane Eyre that recuperates Bertha’s subjectivity by telling the story of her life before her arrival in England, under her birth name, Antoinette. Spivak demonstrates how Rhys’s protagonist Antoinette becomes legible as the lost subject: the subject systematically suppressed within the logic of imperialism at work in the England

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of Bronte’s novel and in the latter-day feminism which uncritically celebrates Jane’s achievement of subjectivity. Whereas Spivak is dealing with the historical circumstances of British imperialism and its colonial project, this development in Iran can be seen in terms of what might be called an internal process of colonization. In the Iranian context, the (modern) female subject is constituted within the crucible of companionate (rather than traditional) marriage. In her role as companionate wife, she is made an agent of the civilizing mission of Pahlavi statist nationalism, and consolidates her own subjectivity against the objectivity of those (female) figures of state alterity to whom she must minister or manage: the rural, the tribal, the lower-class, the servile. As such, even authors who in other cases seem to be at odds with the state, like Dāneshvar, come to represent the status quo. Thus although many aspects of Dāneshvar’s oeuvre, as the previous chapter demonstrates, may be considered transgressive in their critique of masculinist resistance discourse, her short stories, which, although overtly critical of the position in which women of the lower classes are placed, nonetheless work to uphold conceptions of class and social position that were characteristic of this period. Accordingly, it becomes possible to see Dāneshvar’s short fiction as simultaneously questioning and reinforcing the dominant narrative modes of the period and the ideology such modes promote. If we look at the stories Dāneshvar published during this period in tandem with stories by Golī Taraqqī that were published after the revolution but look back to the same time, we can see a reworking of themes similar to that which Spivak identifies in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Whereas Dāneshvar’s narrative strategies rely on readerly sympathy to understand the critique of the social reality she presents, Taraqqī’s narrators may invite readers to share the narrator’s perspective, but will not posit a sociopolitical landscape stable enough to be unequivocally critiqued. Mīr-ʿAbedīnī calls this movement away from the social realism embodied (however unevenly) by authors like Dāneshvar “neorealism,” arguing that it emerged in the 1990s in Iranian letters as a reaction to “magical realism.” But the term postrealism proposed by K. Anthony

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Appiah is perhaps more appropriate, suggesting as it does a tradition developed beyond the boundaries of European literature, and laying claim to a different tradition of modernism. These stories are retrospective, looking back to the eve and inception of the revolution from a narrative subject position in exile; their presentiment of the loss that would come with the revolution is often mediated through the sympathy and anxiety that the narrator feels for the family’s domestic servants. Yet while Dāneshvar’s narratives basically accept—and even reinforce—certain social orders (such as perception of class and regional positions) through their representing appropriate relations between servants and masters by commenting on inappropriate roles and relationships, Taraqqī’s narratives do not represent such reliability of social position; her narrators inhabit a world of flux, where a realistic worldview is no longer possible. Further, Taraqqī’s stories are largely related from the first-person perspective, calling into question the reliability of the narrator. I focus specifically on the treatment of the figure of the female domestic in two pairs of stories by these authors and narrators, and explore the way in which this figure becomes a modality through which the authority of the companionate wife—or lack thereof—is expressed. Although Taraqqī’s narrative strategies in these stories are distinct from Dāneshvar’s, the conception of the female servant that emerges in these two stories is not entirely different. Yet, in the rupture caused by the discrediting of the dominant literary idiom, social realism, and from the viewpoint of exile, Taraqqī’s stories seem freer to imagine other subject positions for domestic servants.11

The Vexatious Kolfat In the stories considered here, the word for a female domestic servant, kolfat, is all the more significant for the way it is carefully avoided by both narrators and characters; the more refined prefer the obliquely polite and ungendered khedmatkār. Kolfat is only introduced, in fact, when Anīs’s suitor spits at her employer: “She’s not your servant [kolfat] anymore” (Dāneshvar 1985, 192). But what are these female servants if not house

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maids? Kolfat is a word of Arabic origin (kulfa) which can also mean an irritation or vexation, and perhaps no word could have more accurately anticipated the role that servants would play in the fiction of Iranian women authors in the latter half of the twentieth century. For if the imagination of companionate marriage altered relations between husbands and wives, so too did it alter relations among women, particularly between maids and mistresses in the domestic sphere. Though wives and servants may have sometimes coexisted in a kind of casual semi-equality in pre- and early modern households, the literature that developed in the mid- to late twentieth century demonstrated the extent to which the servants had become the figure of alterity for the bourgeois woman whose primary role in the domestic economy was reconfigured in her capacity as companionate wife. Though barred from formal participation in state institutions until the 1960s, women could achieve status within the national order by maintaining orderly homes and families. Though not scripted into the national order as such, domestic servants were a major site of the management practiced by companionate wives. In the prose fiction of the mid-twentieth century, these servants became the companionate wife’s ultimate “other”: the woman of rural origin, antimodern or imperfectly modern, sexually promiscuous, and uneducated. As such, she is a threat to the achievement of a modern state founded on companionate marriage: her unwed, ambiguously bred, and possibly tainted body is an excess which pollutes the modern nuclear family.12 A revolution that sought to lift up the mostazeffin, or dispossessed, the 1979 Iranian Revolution redrew the boundaries of class divisions, rendering the voice of the servant a powerful one both within the household and without. The contrast implied in the title of Taraqqī’s story “Khedmatkār” (The Servant; in Khāterehhā-ye parākandeh [Scattered Memories]; 1371 [1991]) and the role that the narrator of the story and her class peers still want this servant to occupy, that of kolfat, demonstrates the extent to which the Iranian Revolution of 1979 challenged existing class relations not only in society at large but within the home. In the aftermath of the revolution,

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as denunciations of masters by their servants grew common, the servant became a metaphor for the uncontrollable elements in the household. In novels like Hedāyat’s The Blind Owl and ʿAlavī’s Her Eyes, marriage disrupts existing modes of representing relationships among lovers and beloveds, problematizing the nationalist conflation of women as symbols and as citizens. In the fictions of writers like Dawlatābādī, Khānlarī, and Dāneshvar, the bargain of companionate marriage is evaluated and the importance of feminine consent is emphasized. To look closely here at how another class of woman is introduced in stories with woman protagonists helps us understand how the authority of the companionate wifeprotagonist and the narrator are constructed on the foundation of this assumption of difference. The stories of Dāneshvar and Taraqqī examined below interrogate the threat of non-kin members of the domestic sphere in a world being transformed by the ideology of companionate marriage. The female domestic, written into the national story as a threat to the family’s health and well-being, is figured in these stories as the stranger at the door who will not be turned away.

Fidelity and Legitimacy The question of citizenship would have been especially volatile at the junctures at which these stories were published: Dāneshvar’s “A City Like Paradise” appeared in the wake of new laws that enfranchised women and improved their access to divorce, and “Anīs,” though published shortly after the revolution, is acknowledged by the author to have been written before the revolution took place. Taraqqī’s “The Servant” and “Safar-e bozorg-e Amīneh” (Amīneh’s Long Journey) were published in the early 1990s in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where women’s reconfigured legal status continued to be the subject of heated debate.13 These contemporary debates would have created occasions for reevaluating the meaning of the terms woman and citizen, and may have required the exhuming of these figures of alterity in order to reaffirm the rights of the middleclass, educated wife—constructed in earlier, nationalist writings as the ideal woman-citizen. The stories examined here provided theaters and

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audiences for such debates, and they reveal an unequivocal insecurity both about the relationships the “modern” women maintained with the female members of their household who were neither kin nor strangers, and about social implications of class identifications: the servants in these stories consistently challenge the dimensions of the focalizing character’s identity as a modern, enlightened woman, forcing her into a position she would rather refuse: that of master. These servants demand that national sympathy, as it is embodied in the wife-mother-narrator, be extended to them, too. In both “Anīs” and “The Servant,” a young female domestic is brought into the household as a daughter-substitute-cum-servant, and proceeds to wreak havoc in the lives of her employers. The implicit criticism of both servants in these stories is of their failure to understand precisely how many parts daughter, and how many parts servant, they are. Neither servant is able or willing to follow the protocols expected of them by their employers (or the narrators): they are supposed to know that in spite of the fact that their employers assume familial attitudes toward them—a situation common in households employing servants in modern Iran—they are nonetheless excluded from the full privileges of a family member.14 The ambiguity of this situation, in which a female domestic is treated like a daughter and responds (in the narrator’s opinion) ungratefully, demonstrating disrespect in the form of disloyalty, an unwillingness to accept the “just” rewards offered by the superior, and a resistance to conforming to the categories applied to them as female domestics, is complicated by the fact that the employers themselves seem unsure of how to react. In Dāneshvar’s stories, the mode of interaction between female employer and female domestic seems to be one that assumes the domestic as a member of household at a time when changing social conditions are making such a notion untenable. In Taraqqī’s stories, the characters are living in the wake of the rupture that was beginning to happen in Dāneshvar’s stories: Taraqqī’s “The Servant” and “Amīneh’s Long Journey” both present the difficulty of functioning as a household in the social disorder that ensues during and after the revolution. This disorder is not

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conveyed so much through realistic technique as it is through an emphasis on the breakdown of the system of linguistic politesse called taʿārof. William O. Beeman’s study of Iranian sociolinguistic interactions in the 1970s argues that interactions between Iranian social actors can be divided into two groups: “perceptual equals” and “perceptual non-equals.” “Perceptual equals” use their influence to obtain favors on behalf of their equals (pārtībāzī) and socialize within the well-defined intimacy of the group setting known as the dowreh [sic].15 “Perceptual non-equals,” on the other hand, do not socialize except in work-related settings (e.g., an employee attending a formal dinner at the employer’s home) and largely relate to one another only in terms of “favors, orders, and rewards” on the part of the superior, and “service, tribute, and petition” on the part of the inferior (Beeman, 52). In ideal situations, both parties understand their responsibilities and obligations within this system (50). Beeman offers examples of situations in which the system “works” (i.e., both parties benefit from the interaction and retain secure identities) and situations in which violations of, or deviations from, the expected behaviors create disruptions of role and status that in turn cause social discomfort to one or both parties.16 These ideas related to perception and hierarchy are important here in establishing a model for expected behaviors that may help us understand how the narrative voice represents (and comprehends) departures from historical social expectations that we may assume would be (more or less) shared by author and reader. No substantive historiographical work has been undertaken concerning the role of servants in early modern or modern Iran, but from anecdotal evidence—and that which we find in novels and stories—we can surmise that servants in Iran oftentimes occupied a status in the household that was not unlike that of the household’s children, yet was at the same time markedly different. This becomes obvious in stories like Taraqqī’s, especially “Pedar” (Father; in Taraqqī 1371 [1991]), wherein the most childlike and abjectly loyal servant, Hassan, is treated by the father very much as a pet might be. (When the revolution transpires, the family is shocked that Has-

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san leaves the family immediately and files a claim to their home; they wonder why anyone they have treated so generously would behave in such a way.) Yet unlike children, the status of household servants was ambiguous: families often acted as patrons to their servants and the servants’ offspring, as well as in loco parentis, arranging marriages, overseeing marriage contracts, employing multiple members or generations of a servant’s family, as well as educating the servant and/or his children. The narrator’s mother in fact complains in “The Servant” that she has sent the servants’ children to school, only to be repaid with the servants filing a suit that claims the servants’ rights to a portion of the family’s property—a clear violation of the hierarchical relationship between inferior and superior identified by Beeman. The mother expects that, as her inferiors, these servants would ask for favors, and may deserve to be granted them, but to take the petition to a third party external to the family (i.e., the revolutionary committee) is an insult that fundamentally violates and undermines the system.17 Dāneshvar’s “Anīs” introduces such anxieties about maintaining social hierarchies immediately. The story opens with Anīs, a family retainer of six years, visiting her employer Batūl at home with her new beau, Mohammad. The reader understands at once that with this “visit,” several social boundaries are being crossed in the eyes of Batūl, the story’s mediating consciousness (or “focalizer,” in the parlance of narratology). At the first sight of Anīs, Batūl’s domestic, Batūl registers swift disapproval: “When they knocked on the door, Batūl Khānom answered it herself and was frozen in place by the sight of Anīs. Two mounds of rouge on her cheeks, black vinyl boots, and a tight red dress that amply revealed her knees and part of her thighs; no prayer chādor or the white scarf she’d always worn. . . . And what a pity for all that beautiful hair, that she’d cut like a boy’s” (Dāneshvar 1985, 159). Through the frame of Batūl ’s vision, and supported by the use of free indirect discourse, the reader learns to see Anīs as Batūl does. Batūl employs words like “always” (hamīsheh), “it was unthinkable” (lit.: impossible, mahāl būd), “pity” (hayf) to describe changes in Anīs’s appearance. These words help us understand that Anīs

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is deviating from a prior state of being in Batūl’s eyes; she is not as she was at some point before the story’s inception. Thus we begin by seeing Anīs through a lens of decline, as having departed from a norm.18 In the face of Anīs’s behavior, Batūl is temporarily stultified: “She didn’t know what to say or where to begin” (159). Batūl attempts to use the protocols of taʿārof to manage her interaction with Anīs and her suitor, Mohammad, as mistress and superior, but fails. Mohammad walks through the door without invitation, pronounces a “Sā’ām ʿalaykom” (hello) and begins to take off his shoes. His first speech act is marked by the slurred colloquial elision of the letter lam in “salām,” immediately marking him as lower class. Batūl responds to each such flawed enunciation by Anīs or Mohammad with interior thoughts that reveal the inappropriateness of their physical or verbal presentations, using corrective language as a counter to their colloquial.19 So, too, do we see that Batūl, though she “wanted a cigarette badly,” does not want to accept Mohammad’s taʿārof in the form of a proffered cigarette; she “didn’t want to accept the [little] man’s offer.” Doing so would put her at a disadvantage that would diminish the distance that she is trying to maintain between herself on the one hand and Anīs and her suitor on the other. In fact, after this point, she stops referring to him as a man (mard) and begins to call him a “little man” (mardak). Batūl’s thoughts reveal the complexity of her attitude toward Anīs: she thinks immediately that she made a mistake in securing Anīs’s first divorce, and guesses that she will be asked to do so again (Dāneshvar 1985, 166). We see through such reflections that Anīs is simultaneously a servant, a surrogate daughter, and a ward of the household. These are roles that would not have been entirely distinguishable even in “modern” twentieth-century Iran. Batūl’s attitudes contain elements of a kind of noblesse oblige, as well as a certain role-playing that is consonant with the demands of taʿārof. These disruptions of and adhesions to the expectations would be shared among readers, writer, narrator, and characters; these shared expectations mark and distinguish the expression of the narrative voice and

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the establishment of narrative authority. In “The Servant,” the narrator contemplates the idea that the revolution is a point of rupture after which all existing native social codes (especially here, behaviors mediated by the system of taʿārof) are destabilized. The story illustrates this truth not only descriptively, but also structurally, marking through speech interactions (dialogue), silences, and interruptions the places where social disorder and narrative anxiety exist. “Anīs,” as I have suggested, similarly relies on both description and representation of tangible attributes while also relying on the unarticulated expectations of social interaction that would be known to both author and reader. When we look closely at how the narrator becomes known to us and at the method of narration—in particular the divergences in meaning that may be expressed through the different subject positioning between first-person and third-person limited narration—we see that the identity of the narrator is intimately connected to her authority to narrate. “The Servant” continues to interrogate perception of relative status as it is assigned through behavior and speech exchanges among characters, but these kinds of exchanges become charged with different meaning in the postrevolutionary context in which the story is set. In both cases, the problem presented by the female domestics is their inability (or unwillingness) to understand their rightful status vis-à-vis those around them. Anīs’s behavior represents the threat of modernity/urbanity, wherein a village girl has at her disposal the means to superficially disguise her origins, changing in a short amount of time from provincial (dehātī–: “of the village”; a word that, like the English, has connotations of backwardness, ignorance) wife to girl-about-town, from temporary wife (sīgheh) to wife of a preacher (rawzehkhˇān) to kept-woman-cum-domestic.20 The focalization of “Anīs” through Batūl leads us to share Batūl’s judgment of Anīs’s behavior as promiscuous, irresponsible, and inevitable: it is not love of Mohammad or simply a social desire to be married, but rather her uncontainable sexuality that makes her agree to a temporary marriage (sīgheh) with Mohammad. This sexuality, which was safely chained to a social order in her village of Āyīneh Varzān, has been

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uncoupled from this safety by her husband’s repudiation of her and her flight to Tehran. So, too, in the logic of the story, does her animal nature prompt her to relish violence, exemplified both in her encouragement of her brother to enter into a brawl in her home village, and in her apparent desire to be beaten by Mohammad once they are married (163). This evident baseness is made—in Batūl’s eyes—more frightening because of her ability to shapeshift, to change entirely with each marriage. Batūl sees Anīs’s baseness as inevitable; determined by her village origins. Anīs, in Batūl’s estimation, is not a suitable candidate for freedom, so that the new rights guaranteed to women by the White Revolution and the FPL would be wasted on her. Though Anīs’s presence in the story is represented as a disruption to Batūl’s household, the narrative, governed by a third-person narrator, is able here to contain such disruptions within the structure of social realism dominant during this period of Iranian literary history. This social realism creates the expectation in (urban, upper- and middle-class) readers that representations of disorderly behavior by the lower classes are included in order to critique the society’s degradation. There is none of the linguistic hesitation and/or ambiguity here on the part of the narrator or his or her focalizing character, and the divergences from the expectations of social engagement pertaining to superior and inferior are noted swiftly and punished or corrected within the narration by representations of Batūl ’s angry but just thoughts. This narrator and Batūl know the “truth” of the matter unambiguously; there is no effort to validate Anīs’s point of view. However, Zaynab brings about disruptions in the narrative that the firstperson narrator cannot contain in real or narrative time. In “The Servant,” we understand the dimensions of the narrator’s character through the process of telling the story, but in “Anīs,” we know little of the narrator’s identity, which is all but effaced through the focalization process. In “The Servant,” the narrator negotiates feelings of anxiety about her surroundings through concerns about the loyalty of servants. These feelings, which set the tone of the story, have two chief sources: the desertion of the family’s old servants, especially the most senior, Hassan Āghā, at

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the time of the revolution; and the induction of a new servant into the family’s fractured household. These events are both metaphors for the narrator’s anxieties about the revolution and the associated changes it brings about, wherein the revolution represents and signals (in the context of these stories) a kind of rupture that leaves the narrator dispossessed of certainty where any speech or action’s effect is concerned. In Taraqqī’s fiction, the figure of the servant is in some sense the lynchpin of the old world that disappears. Her fears are expressed through asides to the reader even as she persists in trying to engage with the servant as an inferior. The profound unease that is engendered in the narrator results in misgivings (on the part of both the narrator and the reader) regarding her ability to discern between truth and lies or truth and fiction. In other words, she manifests mistrust, not simply of her authority to narrate, but of the veracity or reliability of any narrative. The dimensions of the narrator’s voice and its authority are examined through the process of telling the story, wherein her narrative attentions are focused on the servant Zaynab, who in turn looks to the narrator both for affirmation of her existence and for mediation of truth: “Zaynab was looking at me the whole time . . . she was afraid of herself and her bad luck and wanted me to help, but [this desire] not of her own accord” (118). The story is introduced with an extended sentence that establishes the focus of the story and its time-frame: “When the revolution happened, everyone who had worked for us put everything aside and left; even Hassan Āghā the cook, who had been with us forty-some years, and his wife, Zahrā Khānom, who swore she loved us more than her sight, and Mortezā the Gardener, who at each prayer time prayed for Father and his wife and all of his family, and even Nanny Karaji, who had grown old in our home and was counted an inseparable member of our family” (98). This defection exacerbates the general sense of displacement and dispossession wrought in the narrator and her mother by the revolution: “We didn’t understand the logic of what was happening, and history, like the attack of a foreign tribe, was destroying our old habits and legends and memories. However we tried to put one broken piece next to another,

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they didn’t fit, and each stray bead that we re-threaded still wasn’t in its proper place” (99). This complex counterposing of words suggests a profound sense of personal, social, and linguistic disorder all at once. The realm of the home, and with it, quotidian existence—formerly spheres in which native rationality and order prevailed—have been disrupted by history, represented here as an episodic, foreign, backward force; in fact, a “tribe”—the repudiated social other of Iranian modernity. The juxtaposition of the daily against the episodic, the native against the foreign, is important. History, heretofore a domestic creature, characterized by knowable elements, becomes a story written by a foreigner, difficult to understand, which the narrator is powerless to change. This uncontrollable (unnarratable) new story the narrator attempts to tell is one in which a formerly subdued group has new power. As will become clear as we look closely at the text, the figuration of this “foreign tribe” in the opening sentence anticipates the rebellion of the servants, whose behavior during and after the revolution distinguishes them suddenly as wholly sentient and authorized persons. Servants, thought to be a solid but largely passive phalanx of the family, possibly garrulous but fundamentally loyal, have suddenly reared up and attacked, like History, like a newly differentiated “foreign horde” living among the narrator and her family, and their friends, now intent on changing not only the present but also on revising or disordering the narrator’s understanding of the past: “With the departure of the old cook, a history of ours went, too; [and] the memories that pertained to him and that time . . . ” (98). This ability to exercise an independent volition outside of the parameters of their fealty to their employers is witnessed in the desertion of the old servants, Mortezā the gardener, Zahrā Khānom, and most importantly, Hassan Āghā, the family’s cook. Upon learning of the claim filed against the family with the revolutionary committee by Zahrā Khānom, the wife of Hassan Āghā, the narrator and her mother make an attempt to appeal to the servants’ good sense, and employ behavior meant to reinvoke the old social order and reestablish familiar codes and modes of interaction. They don the new, mandatory veil and make their way

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to Hassan Āghā and Zahrā Khānom’s residence. No one answers their knocks, though they can see that someone is at home (101). Insulted, the mother insists on hiring a new servant to spite the old ones and restore some equilibrium to the house, which is “spiritless and empty” without the servants. The narrator, for her part, discloses that she wants to hire a new servant because she hopes to leave the country and wishes to find a companion (hamdam) for her mother who can look after her as a daughter would in the narrator’s absence (reinforcing the feeling that the servants are quasi-family members). This has become especially important in light of the mother’s age and the prevailing sense of danger that exists in the wake of the revolution. Their efforts to reinstate the old order and escape the new one, respectively, are thwarted by both the old and new servants’ behavioral noncompliance. This noncompliance takes the form of rebellious body language and speech, both of which have the effect of subverting the narrator’s (and thus our) expectations of behavior and consequently, of order. When the narrator encounters a servant who seems to be adhering to the old codes and asserts fealty (“We ate of your bread and salt, and for us, Āghā Mohandes’s word is hojjat [indisputable]” [101]), the narrator responds not with happiness, but with dismay and surprise—“We couldn’t believe it”—and tests the interaction to discern the strength of his sincerity. She senses he may still be trustworthy: “We had known him for twenty years. He could be counted on; he was different from the others” (100). Mamad Āghā responds in kind to the narrator’s attempts at using the old codes, thus maintaining a sense of prerevolutionary order: “’I had heard about Hassan Āghā and was embarrassed by his behavior’” (100).21 Through this kind of speech, Mamad asserts the rules of taʿārof and hierarchy, embracing the role of inferior by making statements that conform to expectations: he offers tribute (praising the narrator’s brother and mother) and service (proposing his cousin immediately). Yet, in the context of revolutionary disorder, this very “correct” behavior can only arouse suspicion in the narrator, although it is quickly quelled by another manifestation of appropriate role playing by Mamad: “I’ll go right now to

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my aunt’s house. With her permission, I’ll pick up my cousin and deliver her to the service of the great lady [your mother]” (101). The narrator is overjoyed but disbelieving. When Mamad Āghā offers his cousin to serve in their house, she responds: “It didn’t get any better than this. Finally we had found exactly what we wanted. It wasn’t important that she knew how to cook, sew, or keep house; the important thing was that she was Mamad Āghā’s cousin, and we could [therefore] place our trust in her, that mother’s loneliness would be relieved, and that our lives would regain some order” (101–2). In other words, the presence of an obedient female domestic servant is restorative. The narrator wonders in passing why Mamad is cooperating when all other servants are not, but quickly dismisses her doubts as unfounded, ascribing his politeness to his relationship to another member of the family (the narrator’s brother, who is a mohandes, or engineer, and therefore an esteemed professional), whom the narrator has invoked to ensure the solidity of the exchange. But when the narrator returns home to deliver her news, she finds Zahrā Khānom waiting to make the family aware of her suit, and the narrator is plunged back into the chaos of the old servants’ rebellion. Zahrā Khānom has come with her sons to claim half the house and the garden. The narrator and her family, especially her mother, reject these claims, knowing that they are unenforceable. The two groups confront one another uneasily. The only thing that is clear is the instability of their new, postrevolutionary relations: “But one thing was clear for them: we were not in our former position and neither were they. This Zahrā Khānom, shy and awkward, did a better job than the others of helping us understand. From where she stood, she raised her face and said in a soft voice, ‘So what was the revolution for?’ She was right, and this mute, unformed truth had meaning for us, too” (102–33). Following as it does the “good” news of Zaynab’s coming, this exhuming of the revolution and its purposes by Zahrā Khānom destabilizes again the narrator and her family’s belief in the possibility of reinstating the old order and its authority.22 The rest of the story might be said to begin here, with the effective banishment of the old servants with a payoff and the introduction of Zaynab, Mamad

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Āghā’s “cousin.” With her arrival, the story assumes new dimensions: namely, a concentrated concern with the veracity of (any) narrative and an exacerbation of attention to the bases on which narratives may be believed or defined as true; who is competent to tell them, who has a right to tell them, and what happens to people who do not tell good stories, or truthful ones. Close readings of the language through which the identity of the narrator is delineated reveal how the authority of the narrator to narrate is established, and also the way in which this identity and ability to narrate is destabilized by Zaynab, who asserts her own right to do so.23 Narrative order and social order are closely related within this story. The former is destabilized by Zaynab’s assertion of the existence and potential validity of her own stories, as well as through her interruption of the narrator; while the latter is effected through her “physical” person, specifically her sexuality, her unwillingness to observe appropriate linguistic postures, and her lack of a verifiable pedigree (she claims that she may be a foundling when she asks how they can believe that she could have survived a car accident after having been thrown out of a car window as a baby).24 These destabilizations are expressed through the language the narrator uses to represent interactions between characters (in dialogue, for example), as well as to represent Zaynab and her body, its challenge to the narrative(s), how it communicates meaning, and who is in control of it. Zaynab’s honor, her fertility, her speech, her dress, her past and future, all become points of contention, matters to be guarded. The narrator and her mother are wooed by Mamad Āghā’s description of her religious upbringing and piety; yet on Zaynab’s first appearance, she inadvertently puts the lie to his tale. The narrator observes: “The girl was young and pretty, a little fat but it suited her [pleasantly so]. She was wearing a colorful prayer chador but no socks; Mamad Āghā saw me looking at her bare legs and said, ‘You’ll forgive her for coming like this. It’s my fault–I picked her up and brought her directly over. My aunt was not home. She wanted to put on stockings and a dark chador but I told her it was getting late and we had to get on our way’” (104). Following this first observation, the narrator’s attention returns al-

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most obsessively to the details of her body, making her exceptional among the characters of the story. Though a revolution that brought about a drastic change in dress code for women of the narrator’s class and evidently secular background has occurred, the only reference the narrator makes to this change with regard to herself is that when she and her mother go out, they gear up in the new hejab; and again, when the narrator’s mother reproves a neighbor admiring Zaynab in the yard, and he replies, to the mother’s outrage, “Why don’t you cover up?”25 Her sexuality is both fascinating and threatening to the narrator. Consider the following descriptions: “Sweat poured down her face and the sheer fabric of her clothes clung to her body. Her skin was white and her body young and firm” (107); “Sweat streamed from her pores and an animal warmth radiated from her young, firm, healthy flesh. Her short skirt was bunched up just under her belly, revealing her flowered underwear. . . . When she slept, she seemed younger, with her blushing cheeks and long eyelashes. There was something primitive and uncertain in her that mischievous look and impertinent smile that combined to make her childish appearance doubtful and suspicious” (110); “She was herself like a little garden, and her youth filled the yard like the scent of the acacia” (114). These descriptions suggest a power that is both vegetable and animal; the very force of Nature itself—exuding scent, moisture, beauty, warmth, change. Zaynab’s body needs to be contained for the very reason that it threatens disorder in much the way her speech does: in the first case, her body suggests the social disorder that may be wrought by an unmarried, sexually available woman; in the second case, her speech and unwillingness to stick to a story shows the threat of an unauthorized narrator. The narrator’s ability to retain Zaynab (and thus restore order) is contingent upon protecting Zaynab’s honor (her virginity/sexuality) and/or marrying her to someone who can also be a servant, as well as on making her either silent or linguistically compliant. This former (arranging her marriage) is figured as a reward, and the narrator’s mother elaborates what she will do for Zaynab if she continues to prove herself a good servant:

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God has sent this girl from heaven; she’s an angel. I’m going to look after her myself. I’ll get her a husband. I’ll give them the room at the back of the garden. Maybe her husband will know something about driving or gardening. I’ll give him the responsibility for the garden. Morteza, that dishonorable bastard, went and filed a claim against us. One hair on this girl’s head is worth a hundred of that stinker, and he can look after the garden. (108)

But as the story develops, we see that Zaynab is not only uncontainable sexually, she is also of unknown lineage. Thus, part of what frightens the narrator in her capacity as author of the story is the uncertainty of pinning Zaynab down, of knowing who she is; or, in other words, not being able to classify her, literally and figuratively. This is in contrast to Dāneshvar’s short story “Anīs,” where the protagonist, Batūl, ultimately classifies her servant Anīs in spite of her kinlessness. At the story’s conclusion, Batūl says decisively: “Suddenly it struck her that he [Anīs’s new husband] looked like Aspīran Ghīyāsābādī, the actor who was in the ‘Dear Uncle Napoleon’ TV serial, but he wasn’t quite as clever” (178). Seeing through the pretensions of the man who provides Anīs with her current legitimacy, Batūl sees through Anīs yet again. Zaynab, however, becomes doubly threatening within this disjuncture because the narrator and her family hope that she will restore order. Instead, through her speech and behavior, she further destabilizes the security of the narrator and the family’s circle of kin and friends (dawreh) when the narrator takes her to a party at a friend’s house: “We were all [as] members of one family, agreed and united; [we treated] our sufferings as one, and so with our desires. That night, an outsider had entered the circle of friends, and the result was that everyone was uncomfortable. Mrs X [our hostess] put on a sheer head scarf and asked mother how she could place her trust in someone she didn’t know. We were embarrassed at having brought Zaynab, but it was too late” (126–27). Consider the following passage, wherein the narrator and her mother are trying to read the afternoon newspapers. Zaynab, apparently illiterate, nonetheless wishes to participate. Reading, an activity in which she cannot partake, has been presented by the narrator as a way of silencing or ignoring Za-

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ynab and her behavior, but she persists in demanding that the narrator pay attention to her: “I really want to talk.” I pretended I hadn’t heard her and kept reading. She said again, “I know I’m not supposed to talk, but I really want to.” Mother said, “All right, go ahead and talk. What do you want to talk about?” “I’m afraid [if I do] Mamad Āghā will cut my head off.” Mother cut her off: “Get up, my girl. Go say your afternoon prayers. Don’t think such bad thoughts. Mamad Āghā wouldn’t hurt a fly.” (115)

In addition to these overt linguistic and behavioral threats to the expected trajectory of the story as the narrator presents it, wherein the latter finds a companion for her mother, restores order, and escapes to Europe, Zaynab’s body and what it signifies become a hazard to their ability to retain her as a servant, and thus an obstacle to the ending the narrator—and the reader— expects. Invited to share in the narrators longing for a restoration of order, we also see her desire to abandon herself to Zaynab’s wiles, which are figured alternately as sexual wiles and narrative ones: the narrator both takes careful note of her sensuousness and is tempted to abandon herself to listen to her stories. The “social apocalypse” Taraqqī depicts in the servants’ transgression of class boundaries is not avoided in Zaynab, and it exposes the way in which the female narrator’s assumption of the role of patron to Zaynab has developed aspects of the droit du seigneur: the narrator wants to help Zaynab but she is also fascinated and drawn by her raw physicality. The desire this narrator feels for Zaynab emphasizes the traditionally masculine role of the narrator, and puts into clearer relief the anxieties of the role for this narrator, who, although she is a woman, clearly finds herself attracted to Zaynab on two levels: she desires her as someone like herself and she desires her as an other whose sexuality draws her closer. Taraqqī’s “The Servant” goes further than “Anīs” in making clear what the threat of illegitimacy (both social and hereditary) means to the

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household: Zaynab’s personal changeability, the ambiguity of her lineage, and her possible connection to dangerous social hierarchies in the early days of the revolution affirm that the threat of servants is no longer simply a threat to the domestic order but to the domestic written as national. If the nation was imagined in the press and in political discourse as a bourgeois household created around the nuclear family, the 1979 revolution destabilized the order in that household by undoing any claims to privacy.26 Dissolving the boundaries of private and public, the revolution transformed the threat posed by servants from one implied, as in Dāneshvar’s stories, to something very real. In Taraqqī’s stories, even the most loyal servants waste no time in approaching the local komīteh to turn in their masters and lay claim to their wealth.27 Unmarried, younger than their mistresses, and living in households unprotected by their male kin, female servants pose a threat to the monogamous ideal of companionate marriage. Furthermore, they do not act like modern women “ought” to–they are uneducated and therefore, irrational. Finally, they are frequently kinless. This kinlessness has a variety of contextual meanings. In “Anīs,” it is her intent to maintain the detachment from her rural lineage that was affected when her first husband repudiated her; in Zaynab’s case, her lineage is literally unknown and quite possibly literally illegitimate. This illegitimacy simultaneously evokes the premodern social past in which household servants frequently were the offspring of the master and a servant, and the threat that this possibility persists in the modern social order. At the same time, these servants’ rural origins suggest the persistence of the rural as, alternatively, the repository of Iranian cultural authenticity and the backwardness of the premodern past. At these points, the status of the servants as foreigners inside the household becomes a point of renewed attention, and the narrators and mistresses in these stories look for answers to their servants’ problematic behavior in their backgrounds. Bruce Robbins asserts that at times of social flux, the origins of servants become more important, and indeed, the specter of illegitimacy rears its head in each of these stories (Robbins 1986,

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150). In some, it takes on the classic anxiety of the wife concerning her husband’s interest in the maid, while in others, illegitimacy is associated with trustworthiness. In “The Servant,” Zeynab’s questionable loyalty becomes a present danger as the narrator and her mother negotiate the vigilantism of the komīteh and the very real threats of denunciation, fines, imprisonment in revolutionary Iran.

Foreign Domestics Anxieties about origins and legitimacy structure the narration of these stories. The narrator of “The Servant,” having believed that her new housemaid is safe to hire because of her connection to another trusted servant, is undone by fear when the servant asserts that this story of kinship is a lie. Even after she expels Zaynab, the narrator cannot relieve her doubts about her own legitimacy as authoritative teller of the tale, and the story ends with the mother’s question about Zaynab: “Do you think she was telling the truth?” Such a conclusion leaves open the possibility of the narrator’s culpability and the possibility that she has misjudged the contours of the story she was narrating. In “Anīs,” Batūl is irritated by Anīs’s village origins, but more piqued still when she abandons them and attempts to ape the ways of the city. If the servant is always, in some sense, foreign to the household in which she serves, the pair of stories considered in this section takes on the notion of foreignness more explicitly by foregrounding a servant who is literally foreign. In “A City Like Paradise,” Mehrāngīz, the family’s dadeh, or nanny, is a black African slave, and thus not only visibly foreign but also a relict of the Qājār period, when slave trading and owning were still normalized aspects of elite life. The ownership of a black servant like Mehrāngīz suggests the family’s former status, and its declined conditions in the present: “It upset her [ʿAli’s mother] that she was obliged to put Mehrāngīz to work in her husband’s house: ‘A person does not put the prize of the trousseau to work; she should look after her mistress’s jewelbox. But where is the jewelbox for Mehrāngīz to keep?” (9). Mehrāngīz’s fetishization as the remaining marker of the mother’s supe-

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rior breeding, degraded in her husband’s house, signals that her status will be subject to further devaluation as the family’s fortunes deteriorate. As a symbol of an older, premodern world and its concomitant romanticization of slavery and the role of slaves in an aristocratic household, Mehrāngīz is introduced as a nostalgic, if expensive, relict, but over the course of the story declines to be the object of the father’s sexual attention, and thus a fair object of the mother’s rage and violence.28 Mehrāngīz is figured quite straightforwardly as the repository of the family’s fears and fantasies about their changing financial and class status, the mother’s powerlessness to control her husband’s sexuality, the availability of female servants for the satisfaction of the master’s desires, and the inability of the family to broker good marriages for their children.29 When Mehrāngīz’s own mother, Bājī Delnavāz, also a member of the old family’s retinue, dies, Mehrāngīz’s vulnerability increases at once. When ʿAlī and Mehrāngīz visit Bājī Delnavāz’s grave on the fortieth day commemoration of her death, Mehrāngīz cries so bitterly that “ʿAlī was afraid” (Dāneshvar 2001c, 13). That same night, ʿAlī waits up for Mehrāngīz, who never arrives at his bedside; he instead sees his father making his way stealthily to the kitchen where Mehrāngīz sleeps (13). Confused, ʿAlī does not comprehend what he is witnessing when he sees the father either leaving Mehrāngīz’s quarters or actually engaged in a sexual act with her in the presence of the family while they are sleeping outside during the summer. ʿAlī places these observations in the only contexts available to him—that of story narratives that Mehrāngīz has given him: He sat up in bed. It seemed his father’s blankets were swollen. He thought of the story of Bakhtak which he had heard from Mehrāngīz, and he waited for his father to grab Bakhtak’s earthen nose and subdue him so he could ask where the treasure was. But he couldn’t see Bakhtak’s nose, and Bakhtak shook and struggled. ʿAlī was overcome by fear but still hopeful. Finally the swelling of the blankets went down. Bakhtak got up. ʿAlī yelled, “Get him! Grab his nose!” Mother barked, “Go to sleep!” and ʿAlī wet himself. (16)

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Like “Anīs,” “A City Like Paradise” is narrated in the third person, but the focalizer is ʿAlī, whose attention and interests frame and delimit the story.30 We see Mehrāngīz, quite simply, because ʿAlī loves her. The youngest child in his family and the only son, ʿAlī’s relationship with Mehrāngīz echoes that described in many Iranian women’s memoirs of the period: intense empathy that grows through the closeness of the quasi-maternal relationship between the child and the dadeh, which is typically “outgrown”—in other words, the child accepts the class and racial hierarchies propounded by the family and comes to view the dadeh as just that: a slave, albeit a valued one. But unlike in these memoirs, here we see only the deep identification felt by the child, not the revision of the adult looking back. Indeed,

ʿAlī identifies so deeply with Mehrāngīz that his mother angrily points out the inappropriateness of this sympathy when he weeps and attempts to intervene in her beating of Mehrāngīz: “It’s the black dadeh who’s bleeding. What’s [wrong] with you?” (17).31 The ruthlessness of the mother’s actions are magnified through ʿAlī’s perception of them as senseless and callous. In keeping with this child’s view of the world in “A City Like Paradise,”

ʿAlī ’s mother and father are sketchily characterized: his mother is a caricature of cruelty and his father virtually absent; in fact, ʿAlī is aware of his father largely through observing his sexual relationship with Mehrāngīz. Part of ʿAlī’s affection for Mehrāngīz derives from his appreciation of her abilities as a narrator, though her stories are repetitive and unchanging: “And every night, the same stories were repeated: the stories of Mehrāngīz and her mother and the other black maids” (6). ʿAlī tries to intrude, to participate in these stories by changing their outcomes and therein enhancing their value to him as an audience, but Mehrāngīz rebuffs his attempt to change the trajectory of this most important story— the story of how Mehrāngīz comes to be in bondage: “ʿAlī had heard this story many times, and every night when he heard it again he promised that if he got his hands on the strange man he’d cut him into pieces with the kitchen knife. And Mehrāngīz would say, ‘Okay, go to sleep now’” (7). However scant her knowledge of her own past, Mehrāngīz nonetheless attempts to protect it from being subsumed into the master’s own nar-

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rative. Uncannily, she perceives that the power of narration is the most fundamental kind of power, and protects her own limited authority to narrate her life. Only toward the end of the story, when Mehrāngīz is at the edge of her death, does Mehrāngīz tell a new story: a story that incorporates elements of ʿAlī ’s narration of the history of the slaves who built the Egyptian pyramids, and what little she herself knows about her own history of slavery. An important aspect of Mehrāngīz’s invention of self through narrative involves her construction of the beauty of Nūr al-Sabā, another African slave whom Mehrāngīz believes was a Sudanese princess. This story is a narrative of salvation, of hidden worth, of redemption from the horrors of slavery: “As she came through the door, she bent her head slowly so she wouldn’t knock it against the top of the doorframe, that’s how tall she was. She didn’t kiss the mistress’s shoulder, either. All she said was ‘hello’—that was it. She brought out a black silk handkerchief and unwrapped from it a saucer of coffee beans. She would put it in front of the mistress” (7–8). Nūr al-Sabā will not kowtow to the power of the mistress: she comports herself as the equal of the other women, even though she is black and a slave. Through the voice of Mehrāngīz–—married for a moment to the narrator’s, but without the marker for direct speech—we learn that Nūr al-Sabā was the “best among them.” This merging of narrator and character voice is marked by the appearance of Mehrāngīz’s highly recognizable dialect (the author offers footnotes for words like zūzūki [sīyāhī, blackness] and for karanjī [hair that is kinky]) but no quotation marks set it off from the descriptive passage to which it belongs: “First of all, she wasn’t as black as Delnavāz or Mehrāngīz. Her nose wasn’t wide and her eyes weren’t round but were like almonds. Her hair wasn’t kinky, either; she was like the statues of the two black girls that flanked the clock in the parlor” (7). The narration here is sympathetic to Mehrāngīz in a way that it cannot be to Anīs. Mehrāngīz is validated by the narrator as a storyteller—albeit as a storyteller whose stories have no life outside of the frame narrative, and are fragmentary and unverifiable because they lack a textual basis; at the same time, they suggest a kind of

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utopian counterreality that cannot be sustained in the bleak realism of the narration. Her very existence in the household is the residue of an older order of social organization that is breaking down. There is no room for Mehrāngīz in the new order that comes into being with the dissipation of the family’s wealth and status. The marriage between ʿAlī’s mother and father was arranged by the old order, but the marriage between ʿAlī and Nāyyer is frustrated by the landowning family’s demise: caught between the old and new orders, the first sacrifice made to preserve itself is Mehrāngīz. In contrast, “Amīneh’s Long Journey” seems far from the time in which having a dadeh was tacitly accepted to a time when the concept of a foreign servant is itself so foreign that the narrator hardly knows how to understand it. The narrator of this story, a single mother from Tehran’s intellectual elite, compares it with the introduction of a borrowed or foreign word into the language:32 “Having a foreign servant (before the revolution)—Philipino, Indian, Afghani, even, sometimes, European—was a new thing, outside of the customs and habits of yore, like the entry of an unknown word in the language of everyday, a word with no precedent, gratuitous, which had no referent and no place” (Taraqqī 2000, 76). Like “The Servant,” “Amīneh’s Long Journey” is related by a first-person narrator—again the employer of the titular domestic. The story largely takes place in Paris, in the narrator’s small apartment; however, it begins by introducing us to Amīneh in Tehran and the history of her service with the narrator’s family before the revolution. The narrator collapses the revolution and its rupture into approximately one paragraph, and that is all we hear of it, though it is the impetus for the narrator’s exit to France. In the narrator’s mind, the presence of foreign servants in Iran is somehow, tied to the revolution. The narrator uses almost exactly the same language and syntax to represent the coming of the revolution here that is used by the narrator of “The Servant”: She [Amīneh] was used to working in foreign cities. It was us who stared at her with fear and misgivings and were discomfited deep in our hearts by the pres-

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ence of an unknown element (though we didn’t show it). A foreign presence had entered our lives—ours and many others—and this small change, this simple event, brought with it news of the silent entrance of other unknown happenings. It was as if an invisible hand had opened the gates of the city and an invading foreign horde had actually instituted tribal order. (75)

The narrator comments on the servants’ obliviousness to the discomfort they cause, and the family’s experience of something nameless and sinister entering their presence unbidden. The revolution—and with it, the narrator’s own story—are in fact all but absent, and we must discern its effects in the margins of Amīneh’s progress toward something we may call freedom. Through her description of Amīneh’s “long journey,” we may note the narrator’s elision of her own story as a kind of story in itself. So, too, may we see the narrator negotiate her own status as an exile, a woman, a mother, a divorcée, an Iranian, and a new French citizen against Amīneh’s transformation into a French subject. Amīneh, unlike Zaynab, does not resist the narrator’s ministrations actively. She does not talk back; the only way she defies the narrator is through her naïveté. The narrator is infuriated by Amīneh’s gullibility and willingness to submit to her husband, the villainous Āghā (Mister) Rājā, who is such a stereotypically “bad” Muslim man that he is almost a caricature: having married Amīneh (a Hindu) off the street, where she begs with her father, he subsequently converts her to Islam, and brings her to his home, where she discovers he has a domineering first wife and several sons. The first wife controls the family wealth, and Āghā Rājā sends Amīneh off to servitude (kolfatī) in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and insists that she render unto him all of her wages. Worse: Amīneh’s little daughter Shalīmeh must, in her absence, beg with Amīneh’s father in the street. The narrator is horrified by Amīneh’s gullibility and marvels at her otherness, which is constituted not only through her nationality, but also through her physical and mental foreignness. Why would any woman tolerate such a thing? The narrator likens this ignorance, this total absence

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of guile or wiliness (zerangī), to Amīneh being “underwater”—silenced and unable to see or hear.33 The water metaphor is derived from the description of the flood that wrought havoc in Amīneh’s life as a child, killing most of her family, destroying their farm, and forcing Amīneh and her father (the only survivors) into a life of begging (and by extension, forces Amīneh into Āghā Rājā’s clutches): Amīneh is still underwater and she likes being underwater. She remembers seeing her mother swept away, calmly and quietly. She sees her becoming one with the waves: no resistance, no fear. She doesn’t go under, she doesn’t swallow a stone or pebble, she doesn’t go under the waves or struggle. Her eyes are above the water. She looks at Amīneh, the calm look of someone going on a pleasant trip, to a known place. Below the cold water, Amīneh thinks of her last sight of her mother and her frozen body entrusted to the logic of the sea. She doesn’t move her hand or foot. She sleeps and the silence of death is no stranger to her. (82)

In Paris, though, the narrator finds it difficult to retain a servant; here, the tables are turned: it is she who is categorized as “third world” by French servants: “Hiring a French servant was difficult. It was expensive. It wasn’t possible. Whomever I hired was sweet and haughty and couldn’t accept an Iranian third-worlder as boss. The Portuguese maid was bad-tempered and beat the children. The third was Polish. She got drunk and brought strange men to the house when I wasn’t at home. I said to myself, No more servants! I don’t need anyone. No one” (84). Through unknown machinations, Āghā Rājā finds the narrator in Paris, and writes persuading her that Amīneh is the answer to her dilemma. Conflicted but ultimately amenable, the narrator convinces herself that Amīneh will restore some of the comfort and familiarity of the old world. Yet she finds that Amīneh in Tehran is one thing; when she arrives in Paris, the narrator’s doubts deepen: “I saw that Amīneh in Paris was another person. She had no sparkle or spirit. She was third world. She was a third rate actor in a B movie. There were a lot of her type and they were unwanted. Amīneh in Tehran had a certain je ne sais

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quoi. . . . Her foreignness [there] had a taste that improved her” (87). Āghā Rājā is the foil for the narrator’s rationality, which she smuggles into exile, cultivates, and wants to impart to Amīneh: “Amīneh had still not woken up and Āghā Rājā’s voodoo was still more potent than our logical reasoning. . . . Blind fool. I was mad at what an ass she’d been and I didn’t mind seeing her punished. But I couldn’t have done anything about it. Changing Amīneh would take time. Possibly more time than the length of my life or hers” (99). She is frustrated by Amīneh, but ultimately, she is persuaded by Amīneh’s profound maternal instincts and her desire for her own children to grow up to be like the narrator’s children: “She said, ‘I’m going to go get my children. If they stay there they’ll become beggars. Both of them. I want Shalīmeh to go to school. Like your children’” (101). The narrator suggests that when this declaration finally occurs—when Amīneh understands that she must take action to throw off Āghā Rājā’s patriarchal yoke in order to secure the safety and future well-being of her children—Amīneh emerges from her underwater state: “She had discovered anger: her head was above water. She had opened her eyes” (102). The narrator—whose own husband mysteriously disappears without mention when she moves to Paris—may be measuring her own progress, testing her own (invisible) choices, against those of Amīneh, and this process seems integral to her ability to imagine Amīneh as a woman, and not simply as her servant. Finally, the narrator understands Amīneh in terms of her “womanly soul” (rūh-e zanānehash). Consider the conclusion of the story, wherein the narrator is prompted to a remembrance of the younger Amīneh, the drowning Amīneh, by a visit from Amīneh’s daughter Shalīmeh, who brings word of her mother’s death. Watching Shalīmeh take leave after her visit, the narrator thinks: I see Amīneh under muddy waves, kicking for her life . . . the flood carries away her family’s house and farm, just as it carries away her mother and her brothers. All four brothers. They grab Amīneh from the water. She breathes. She’s alive. The destiny of her [Amīneh’s] daughter is preserved in her belly and in the depths of her womanly soul; an ancient mother watches over her

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children. Amīneh’s long journey has no end and her heart—in the realm of unknowable horizons—beats for her children’s children. (121)

This concluding passage offers a suddenly different view of Amīneh’s long journey, which, until now, we—with the narrator—have understood in terms of her emancipation. But here, the narrator seems to suddenly see that journey differently—it is a journey with no end, a journey of reproduction, and a scheme in which primordial mothers protect women so that they might give birth to children. Men are secondary in such a scheme: Mohshen, Amīneh’s son by Āghā Rājā, disappears—Shalīmeh characterizes him as “not having the patience for study.” He is rendered unimportant, whereas Shalīmeh herself appears as a reinvocation of her mother’s spirit, fulfilling Amīneh’s wishes for her children (that they be “just like yours [the narrator’s]”). Now Shalīmeh is Mademoiselle Shalīmeh, pediatrician, who speaks “a perfect French.” Shall we see in this idealization of reproductive womanhood a new kind of othering, or an identification with self? Both “Amīneh’s Long Journey” and “A City Like Paradise” conclude with the death of the servant—the former with a death that transcends the social constraints of the deceased and the latter with a death that confirms the status quo. Mehrāngīz is forced by the mother to abort the child she conceives by ʿAlī’s father, dooming her to a barrenness that is both literal and figurative: she has no heirs. ʿAlī ‘s cousin and lost bride Nāyyer, whose swollen belly he observes as they wait together by Mehrāngīz’s death bed, is presented as another victim of domestic slavery: she has been married off to the highest bidder rather than saved for her cousin as would befit the traditions of an aristocratic family. Indeed, the narrator notes that “the shadow of her belly on the wall looked like a pyramid turned on its side” and in the context of ʿAlī’s story about the building of the pyramids and Mehrāngīz’s assertion of her connection to a larger, global history of African slavery, we must read this as an assertion that Nāyyer’s undesired marriage is another kind of slavery. In this way, the notion of “service” functions on both literal and metaphorical levels in the story: ʿAlī views both women as slaves in a corrupt society. Yet in spite of

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the fact that, as the family’s only son, he should be taking on the mantle of patriarch and exploiting the family’s female servants in a fashion similar to his father’s exploits with Mehrāngīz, ʿAlī’s identifies with Mehrāngīz, over and against his mother or father, and his realization of what the traffic in women has cost him makes him a victim of service more than a beneficiary of it, although his is the family that owns Mehrāngīz. (The story’s sympathies are as much with the disinherited male of the Pahlavi era as they are with the victims of Iran’s tradition of slavery, though one can see Daneshvar developing a line of reasoning here that echoes the argument that women’s rights benefit Iran’s male citizens as much as its female ones.) While “A City Like Paradise” begins to suggest that there are parallels between the bondage of a black female slave and other oppressed members in Iranian society—even members who are themselves slave owners—the discourse is still focused on women’s rights as they pertain to both male and female members of the elite classes: ʿAlī’s concern for Mehrāngīz is, finally, figurative; his real concern is the loss of Nāyyer. Constitutional-era newspapers, pamphlets, and etiquette books for girls and women emphasized that leaving the care of children to nannies and wet nurses would lead to coarse, ill-spoken, and maleducated children: for Iran to produce sound citizens, its girls must be educated so that they might make better mothers. Such a movement makes the dadeh— Mehrāngīz—the object of reforms that must be undertaken by wives in their households. “A City” cannot posit Mehrāngīz as a woman, still less a protagonist; it can put her as the primary object of the focalizing character’s sympathies, even as it keeps her neatly from being a subject. The development that “Amīneh’s Long Journey” makes over “A City Like Paradise” is to extend the category of woman and individual to include Amīneh. Her transformation from the narrator’s servant to her quasi equal in Paris is in fact the titular “long journey” that she and the narrator undertake together. Though we may look askance at the story’s celebration of the process of remaking Amīneh into an individual from the rough material of servant, wife, and third-worlder, such a process,

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with its concomitant gains and losses for the actual subject-coming-intobeing, is paralleled both in earlier historical efforts to reform the status of women in Iran and in, for example, the intentions of some American and European feminists to “enlighten” their sisters in the Middle East through a universal concept of human rights.34 Taraqqī’s story—and the revolution—may offer briefly the illusion of reforming existing schemes of class and gender relations, only to reaffirm almost immediately the impossibility of such a difference. Yet, when compared with Dāneshvar’s stories, a change in the mode of representation and in sensibilities is quite clear. Taraqqī’s postrevolutionary stories suggest some of the ways in which the ideals of realism and marriage were subjected once again to transformation through the dissection and reinvention of the domestic servant. The narrative spaces created in Taraqqī’s stories are decidedly feminine if not without hierarchy: in her domestic settings, husbands and fathers are marginalized or written out of the plot altogether. This power vacuum engenders new roles for the remaining members of the household—both the family unit proper as well as its servants. The fiction that emerged in the aftermath of the revolution would be forced to deal with a new set of problems related to marriage and the family: most profoundly, the Islamic regime’s identification of the family and motherhood as sites of ideological resignification.

4

Exhuming the Beloved, Revising the Past L AWLE SSNE SS, POSTMODER NISM, AND HETEROTOPIA

The Shah is gone! — Kayhān, January 16, 1979 It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. —Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The History of Late Capitalism

The simple statement “Shāh raft! [The Shah is gone!]” that ran in oversize font as the headline of Kayhān and almost every other daily newspaper in Iran on January 16, 1979, seemed to sum up in a few simple words the enormity of the departure of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Soon, both the newspapers and the slogans painted on the posters of countless demonstrators would fill in the second part of the equation of the revolution: “Emām āmad! (The Imam has come!).” If Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s departure marked the successful completion of a protest twenty-five years in the making, Khomeini’s return seemed not only to mark the denouement of the revolution, but also to portend the beginning of a new age. He was not an imam; rather, he might be the Imam—the twelfth Imam of Shīʿī cosmology, returned to restore the world to justice.1 These were end times, and the creation of a new utopian society was at hand. Soon, however, the frenzied excitement and amazement at the realization of the impossible—the shah’s departure, Khomeini’s return— were replaced by a growing dread. Gradually, it became clear that the Islamist faction led by Khomeini had prevailed in the disputes among the revolutionary factions, and this cadre had something very different

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in mind from the others who had also supported and helped effect the revolution—not simply in the year leading up to the Shah’s departure but also in the decades that preceded it. Intellectuals and writers like Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, ʿAlī Sharīʿatī, Gholām Hosayn Sāʿedī, and others (not all of whom lived to see the revolution) had played a pivotal role in preparing Iran for the revolution that had transpired. But what ensued was not the majority of the revolution’s supporters had envisioned—it was not even the utopia imagined by those who believed fully in the prophecy of the Twelfth Imam; rather, what replaced the Pahlavi state was a statesanctioned lawlessness that would assume greater permanence when the revolutionary committees (komīteh) were regularized by the new government. Ahmad Shāmlū’s memorable poem “Dar īn bonbast” (In This Blind Alley) painfully remembers the fear and horror of this period: They sniff at your breath to see if you’ve said, I love you They sniff at your heart— These are strange times, my dear They beat love at the roadblocks— We must hide love in the closet.2

Shāmlū’s poem develops a terrible progression that reveals the power of a nameless they that was everywhere at once, even in the most private of places. Consequently, individuals guarded their privacy with renewed vigor: beyond one’s inner circle, no one could be trusted; even the most inane details of one’s daily life could become suspect. The 1980s, then, was a decade marked by the fear and suspicion that grew out of the reality of neighbors reporting on neighbors, the disintegration of trust, and the disappearance of even the most basic of human rights, the right to love. The narrator of Hūshang Golshīrī’s King of the Benighted calls it “the demonic decade,” characterized by raids of private homes, burning of books, imprisonment without trial, torture, and death.3

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Such horrors demonstrated that whatever the weaknesses of the former legal system, it had, over time, created the expectation that there was recourse in the law—if there difficulties with doing so, it was possible to attempt to redress it through formalized legal channels. It had also created barriers between religious authorities and the state. Anxious to collapse these barriers, the 1979 constitution struck down all existing legal codes that were judged incompatible with Islamic law, and vowed that all future laws would be consonant with Islamic precepts. One of the first areas in which this permeation was felt was in the sphere of the home, where the relationship between husband and wife was reconfigured by a new civil code. The role envisioned for women in the Islamic Republic was that of valiant mothers and wives—a role based loosely on ʿAlī Sharīʿatī’s evocation of the daughter of the Prophet in Fātemeh Fātemeh ast (Fatima Is Fatima; 1970). But perhaps most distressing was that in any given confrontation with the authority of the regime, no one knew which laws would prevail, or when—much depended on chance, luck, and the person who presided over one’s case. Iranians, already great believers in qesmat, or fate, settled more firmly into the superstition that one’s destiny, or sarnevesht, was, literally, “written on the (fore)head” from the day of birth. Watching the executions and recantations that transpired with alarming frequency in the 1980s, what could one do but endure? Was it in response to this sense of suspended reality (and a complete reevaluation of the history that had brought them to it) that in the “demonic decade” writers moved increasingly toward alternative modes of representation? By 1989, when Shahrnūsh Pārsīpūr published Zanān bedūn-e mardān (Women Without Men), it was becoming clear that the social realism of the prerevolutionary period, though far from dead, would no longer do. That kind of realism’s innocent assumption that it could positively reform the world that it represented seemed quaint, if not naïve, and unsuitable for the world that it had helped to create—the world of what had become an Islamic revolution. Furthermore, that realism was being co-opted for the regime’s new

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cinema, which would convey the message of Iran’s revolution through art to the world. The realist writers who had been the voice of a generation of resistance before 1979 seemed dwarfed by the magnitude of the revolution they had helped to effect; in its aftermath, they began to understand with horror what they had helped to achieve. Having witnessed the assassination of writers and intellectuals whose view of the future did not conform to the vision of the Islamic Republic, some, like Sāʿedī, went into exile; others, like Dāneshvar, stayed, and continued to publish novels in the postrevolutionary period. But the realistic novels Dāneshvar offered readers no longer seemed to be part of the present moment—indeed, they seemed to belong to another time, one in which this brand of social realism could still hope to change the world for the better. The mode which had so characterized and embodied the relentlessly hopeful, progressive mood of most of the twentieth century—even in its darkest moments, like the 1953 coup—now seemed childlike in its innocence, pathetic in its pedantic right-and-wrong; misguided in its late hope that religion, as the idiom of the people, could offer redemption and authenticity to a modern Iran.4 Though Dāneshvar remained a respected author, critics whispered that the revolution had finished her as a writer. In a 2002 interview, when asked about why she had chosen the theme of bewilderment (sargardānī) for two of her postrevolutionary novels, she insisted improbably, “Everyone in the world is bewildered” [Sargardānī yek jīreh-ye hamegānī ast]” (Daqīqī 2002, 33). Gone, then, was the stability and the idealism that had enabled social realism’s didactic critiques of society; in its place, authors like Shahrnūsh Pārsīpūr offered a vision of historical reality that was deeply and comprehensively self-reflective, and an attitude toward realism that was irreverent, to say the least. Ironically, this movement away from realistic representation had begun to seem truer to the period than the contemporary writings of veteran realists like Dāneshvar. Unlike Dāneshvar’s novels, which insist on the reality of the conditions they critique, Pārsīpūr’s postrevolutionary novels (first Women Without Men, and subsequently

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Tūbā va maʿnā-ye shab [Tūbā and the Meaning of Night]), express the contingency of the real. Pārsīpūr and later, Monīrū Ravānīpūr, in novels like Ahl-e gharq (The Drowned; 1989–90) and Del-e fūlād (Heart of Steel; 1990), had begun to use postmodernist techniques to express that something had broken not only in the state of Iran, but in its spirit.5 What mode of writing could better suit a nation that had begun to feel that the law, insofar as it existed, was contingent, ephemeral, or, in some cases, not even there? Or else that when it did exist, it would be clumsily and subjectively applied, just when one least expected it? Hassan Mīr-ʿAbedīnī calls the 1980s the “decade of magical realism,” arguing that this mode of writing allowed the author to “free himself from time and place by focusing on details, emphasizing minutiae, and making things complicated” (Mīr-ʿAbedīnī 2002, 50). Consequently, he believes, the next decade brought a reaction to this magical realism in the “neorealism” of authors like Zoyā Pīrzād and Nāhīd Tabātabāʾī. But the line between these two modes of writing is not as tidy as he suggests: even in works like those of Pīrzād and Taraqqī, there is an evident tilt away from stable realistic forms of narration and representation.6 Indeed, magical realism and neorealism seem to be part of the same impulse—a desire to draw attention to and problematize the social realism that helped engender the Islamic Republic of Iran. The dismemberment that signified taking apart the tradition of the poetic beloved in works like The Blind Owl now becomes again the work of taking apart a tradition, but a tradition of which The Blind Owl is itself the primary symbol. Prose fiction in Iran, deeply tied to a sense of reform and opposition, now becomes the ontological plaything of authors paralyzed by a regime of censorship that altered (and exceeded) the system that existed before the revolution. But it is not simply taking apart that remains essential to prose fiction, it is also the act of recuperation in the union of marriage that is subject to a new kind of scrutiny. Marriage itself is closely reviewed, and the (constructed) nature of the idealized emotional bond between husband and wife questioned. In these authors’ works, the frayed relations between

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spouses after the revolution begin to suggest the possibility of endings that are neither tragic nor intended to spur the reader on to greater patriotism by sublimating the romantic energy of the story in the drive toward nationalism.7 Rather, these stories examine the consequences of alienation in marriage caused by different temperaments, social and familial backgrounds, and by the circumstances of the revolution itself. The wife-protagonists of their stories are removed from their husbands, their children, and their families; they contemplate frankly adultery and divorce—hard to imagine in the works of Dawlatābādī, Khānlarī, Dāneshvar, or even Hedāyat or ʿAlavī. Spouses in these new fictions are divided by the choice of whether to remain in Iran or to choose exile; by circumstances of wealth and poverty; and by their children, who abandon them to emigrate abroad. Stories like those that appear in Taraqqī’s postrevolutionary collections Khāterehhā-ye parākandeh (Scattered Memories; 1991), Jāyī dīgar (In Another Place; 2000), and Daw donyā (Two Worlds; 2002) also emphasize the absence of husbands and fathers against a nostalgia for the safety of the domestic world created by Taraqqī’s own powerful modernist father, embodied in the home in Shemrān that he imagines and summons into being, Prospero-like.8 Taraqqī’s father tells her, “I am made of iron, and iron never rusts,” and indeed, while he lives, his iron will structures the world around him: the house is orderly, the servants docile and tame. It is only after his death that the home in Shemrān and its modern ways crumble—without the force of his will, the family is powerless to sustain the order of that home. Overdetermined metaphors, the father and the home he rules dictatorially must still be acknowledged for their parallels to the reign of “the great father,” Reza Shah, who governed the national family with an iron fist, quashing dissent in his effort to achieve a “modern” Iran. The presence of these men ensures order, but their removal from power creates terrible vacuums in their realms. The Shemrān home the father builds is itself simultaneously the space of the period before the revolution, the space and time of childhood, and the space in which the complementary spheres of the companionate marriage imagined by modernists

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could amicably exist, supported by a panoply of servants and retainers who protected the family from the danger of social disintegration. Like Taraqqī, Pīrzād also examines the consequences of too-powerful fathers, and the damage they can wreak upon their children in stories like those in the collection Yek rūz māndeh beh ‘ayd-e pāk (One Day Left to Easter; 1998). This is not the strident, reformative social realism of ʿAlavī or Āl-e Ahmad (or even of Dāneshvar), but a realism that only halfheartedly clings to the idea that representation literally reflects a stable social reality. The narrator of the three stories is an Armenian-Iranian man who passed his childhood in a village in the north before moving to Tehran in his teens. In “Hastehhā-ye Ālbalū” (Sour Cherry Pits), he is an anxious boy— the only child of parents locked in an unhappy marriage. His only solace is in Tāhereh, a Muslim girl who is charitably allowed to attend the Armenian school because her father is the custodian, and distinguishes herself as the school’s finest student—even, embarrassingly, in Armenian—and as the narrator’s best friend. The violence between the narrator’s parents remains figurative, limited to verbal arguments; however, when the boy witnesses Tāhereh’s father beating her mother, he understands the parallelism between the two homes, which are divided by creed and class, but similarly structured by the imperative of patriarchal violence. “Gūsh-e māhīhā” (Seashells) and “Banafshehhā-ye sefīd” (White Violets), the companion stories in the collection, are narrated from later vantage points of age, but are similarly preoccupied with questions relating to the affective structures that marriage creates among individuals, and how they must cope with these in the face of death and estrangement. So, too, do Pīrzād’s stories confront through “nonviolence” (avoidance of the present and direct engagement of subject matter) the laws that formalize and exacerbate the differences between aqlīyat-e mazhabī beh rasmīyat (“recognized religious minorities,” or RRMs) and Muslims before the law. As the law of the father collapses, magical realism, too, confronts this same content but exploits its absurdity for style. Though ostensibly very different in form and content from the writings of Taraqqī and Pīrzād, the novels and stories of authors like Pārsīpūr and Ravānīpūr, who fall

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strictly under Mīr-ʿAbedīnī’s definition of magical realism, are also preoccupied with questions of how women can exist in society inside and outside of the restrictive social institution of marriage. Because, in these cases, women writing about women have produced some of the most compelling experiments in postmodernism, it is tempting to suggest that it is the supplementarity of women’s narratives—suddenly available in spades after the revolution—that deconstructs the façade of truth in representation that the masculinist tradition of Persian realism presented.9 Yet, to inspect this body of woman-authored literature—from the most banal and sentimental romance, represented by works like Bāmdād-e khomār (The Morning After; considered in Chapter 5), to the most daring experiments in modes of narration and representation, like Pārsīpūr’s Women Without Men or ʿAql-e ābī (Blue Logic)—is to find that they are no more exclusively feminist projects than were the fictions of Dawlatābādī and Dāneshvar. Rather, what these works have in common is not an immanent feminist agenda, but the explicit centering of the literary traditions and narratives of modernity in Iran as subjects of examination—a centering that works to undo the coherence of realistic fictional narration and of the stability of marriage as a benign metaphor at the same time. From Taraqqī’s imagination of history as “a foreign tribe,” to the symbols of Iranian womanhood that Pārsīpūr’s protagonist Tūbā carries heavily in Tūbā and the Meaning of Night, history is not “what happened”—it is the manipulable fabric of narrative itself. Both neorealism and magical realism challenge the intimate and assumed relationship between realism and history through their engagements with the conventions of realistic literary practices in both fiction and historiography. Frederic Jameson asserts that the postmodern “looks for breaks” (Jameson 1991, ix). By problematizing the genres of both “history” (whose realism is a foregone conclusion) and “fiction,” authors like Pīrzād, Taraqqī, Ravānīpūr, and Pārsīpūr make visible the scaffolding that supports any assertion to truth made through realistic writing.10

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Of Other Spaces: Literary Space as Heterotopia As Michel Foucault observes in “Of Other Spaces,” every culture has types of spaces that may be called “heterotopia,” in that they contain elements of a utopia but at the same time contain that which the utopia must exclude. Heterotopias, unlike utopias, are simultaneously real and mythic; they are actual places, and there is an important difference between the two kinds of spaces: whereas utopia is a space of “fantasy . . . motivated by desire,” heterotopia, “is characterized as a real and localizable” space, the recognition of which may “le[a]d me to reconstitute myself where I am” (French, 297; emphasis in the original). In other words, the identification of heterotopia opens up the possibility of change. Many of Ravānīpūr’s works take place in spaces that have become too small. They are set in the recognizable past or present, but they offer female protagonists isolated by their craft—most often, by their vocation as writers. In the story “Jomʿeh-ye khākestarī” (Gray Friday), from Ravānīpūr’s first short story collection, Kanīzū, a woman writer is married to an older, predatory theater director who lures young women like her into his power through demonstrations of his intellect and talent, seducing them into servitude as his wives and mistresses. Having left him, she lives alone, trying to “write stories.” Isolated and lonely, the woman attempts to reach out to her friends, but finds that they remain loyal to her husband: declining her invitations, they counter by telling her they plan to attend a performance of her husband’s new play. When she hangs up the public phone, the man waiting in line to use it tells her he has been eavesdropping, and attempts to convince her of the virtues of marriage for women, then to solicit her as a second wife—she has an independent income and will be an asset to whomever she marries. Like many of Ravānīpūr’s writings, the story is sketchily characterized and set in the timelessness of the present, heightening the sense that she is flouting the conventions of fiction that valorize women as companionate wives: wives need no characterization—a wife is a role, not a person, and when the protagonist of “Gray Friday” steps outside of that role, her identity as a

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writer and woman is sketchy, unformed. There is no conventional model for a woman writer in Persian fiction. When the convention of companionate wife is challenged by exposing the reality of husbandly betrayals, the figure collapses—sometimes literally. The companionate wife-cum-writer is further abstracted by the conventions that create the stereotype in “Dāstān-e ghamangīz-e ʿeshq” (The Sad Story of Love). Part of the collection Sanghā-ye shaytān (Satan’s Stones, 1991), this story indicts the conventional narrative of romantic love by self-reflexively disclosing it against the story of the woman writing the story itself. When, at the story’s conclusion, the woman writer is at last touched by heterosexual love in the form of her lover bringing flowers to woo her, the romantic gesture literally turns her to stone, and she crumbles into pieces. In the novel Heart of Steel, we again encounter a protagonist isolated by both an unhappy marriage and by her vocation as a writer. Afsāneh (a name which itself means “story” or “legend”), having escaped her husband, lives in a reality peopled by the characters of her fiction: the Dictator, who suggests the power of the state to exert violence discursively by denying the validity of history, and the Horseman, who reminds us of the literal physical violence of the past. The latter is evoked in the novel through Afsāneh’s obsession with the brutality of the torture—rape, mass blindings—committed during the period of struggle between the comparatively pacific Zandī dynasty and the violent Qājār tribe which would dethrone and succeed them, in turn becoming the ushers of Iran’s modernity. Mediating between these historical stereotypes of power and violence is Afsāneh’s own abusive husband, who may be understood as the domestic manifestation of this historical patriarchal violence visited upon women at yet another level in the home. To mend both herself and history, Afsāneh must write her way to a different ending: by crafting a historical novel, she attempts to find a way to overcome the Dictator’s insistence that “history is all a lie,” and to use fiction to heal the wounded body of the past.

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Refusing the role of beloved in their own stories, Ravānīpūr’s protagonists find that attempting to don the garb of the writer (perhaps what Jamālzādeh, three-quarters of a century earlier, had called the “gown of prose”) is an inelegant process: they are haunted by the ghosts of dismembered beloveds and the violated others of Iranian history and fiction. At the same time, Afsāneh is also the feminized reversal of The Blind Owl’s narrator, haunted not by the dismembered beloved who is the avatar of the poetic tradition sacrificed by early prose writers like Hedāyat, but by the conventions of the prose tradition she inherits and the historical position she inhabits, which have transformed the beloved into a wife but refused her the agency of the writer. Seventy years after the publication of Sadīqeh Dawlatābādī’s “A Pitiful Tale,” Pārsīpūr’s Tūbā and the Meaning of Night revisits the idea of arranged marriage, but this time as an object of postmodern play. Here, such a marriage is figured as an oddity and the reader is encouraged to understand it as a relict—an old code that is being made to play a new tune in Pārsīpūr’s hands. The aspects of the tropes developed by generations of modernist writers are here, but their elements rendered farcical: there is a young girl, an old man, a widowed mother, and an arranged marriage that condemns the young girl to a life in the prison of her husband’s home. Yet here, the girl does the contracting, the startled old man accepts, and the mother benefits from the situation by becoming a bride again herself. The marriage between the Hājjī and Tūbā—and the thirty years’ difference in their ages—is thus rendered farcical here in a way that it could not be in the work of Pārsīpūr’s literary forerunners. For Dawlatābādī, Khānlarī, Bāmdād, and Dāneshvar, marriage is no laughing matter—it is what makes a woman recognizable in social terms; it is what makes her narratable on the cultural stage. Furthermore, a child-marriage like this one would have been the stuff of outrage in their authorial hands. In contrast, Tūbā’s marriage is figured by the narrative as an out-and-out mistake—one that the narrative will work quickly to correct. Tūbā in fact is released from her marriage by the Hājjī, who cannot bear the thought

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of consummating the marriage and thus risking the birth of children who “could not be protected by this girl with golden hair.” Consequently, Tūbā is released and perforce her young age and beauty, must be married again—but this time around, she has the opportunity to experience romantic love in her marriage to Prince Ferīdūn. But the sweetness of this love is brief, and Tūbā learns again that marriage, under any circumstances, cannot bring happiness to women: never truly partners in the marriage, women are vulnerable to their husbands’ whims—especially the whim of taking a second wife. Eventually, Tūbā seeks out divine love, becoming an apprentice to a Sufi pīr, or master. Yet Tūbā is again frustrated by her status as a woman, which she is told may keep her from experiencing union with the divine. In the hands of earlier women authors, these would be tragedies, but here, Pārsīpūr’s understanding—and lampooning—of the conventions of these scenarios makes Tūbā’s plight simultaneously hilarious and pathetic. Tūbā and the Meaning of Night exhumes the nameless feminine ideal of history from the pages of traditional historiography, positing in Tūbā a character circumscribed both by the limits of this historiography and by the tradition of fiction through which she is realized. Tūbā’s father, a learned adīb (man of letters), decides—when faced with the multiplicity (and possible mendacity) of conflicting historical narratives—that Tūbā must learn to read, so that she might know his story, rather than that of the Englishman who has, ironically, offended him by offering his wife a gift of a diamond ring to compensate for the injury he did to the Hājjī’s honor: “It was necessary for him to make his daughter aware, to tell her everything, before the Englishman could do so; his wife was of no importance now.” (Pārsīpūr 1989, 17). The father will teach the daughter himself. Yet the first sentence Tūbā learns to read is an act of double signification, introducing her to the semantic complexity of language and meaning in which she, as a young woman, is mired: “the first sentence in Persian that the girl learned stayed in her mind forever: ‘Tūbā is a tree in paradise’” (18). In her protagonist’s mistaken identification with the paradisiacal “Tūbā” of the sentence, Pārsīpūr mocks the reform of the category and the status of

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women in modern Iran. There is perhaps no better crystallization of the confusion of the conceptions of women as children in need of the reforms of modernity (literacy being a primary one) and symbols of religious purity than Tūbā’s inability to distinguish between the name she is called on earth and the heavenly tree her name simultaneously evokes. This vexed entry into literacy, figured for the girl-bride Gawhar of Khānlarī’s story as a lost opportunity to be successfully modernized and thus freed from the shackles of tradition, is for Tūbā, another daughter of Iran’s early reforms, a more ambiguous gain, multiplied and complicated by countless other meanings. Tūbā is temporarily advanced by this acquisition of knowledge and status even as she is burdened by it: her literacy, in combination with her beauty—metonymized by her striking gold hair—marks her doubly as the protagonist of Iran’s twentieth century and of the novel itself. Yet Tūbā is no easy figure of liberationist feminist identification: not only can she not extricate herself successfully from the bonds of social and religious tradition that prevent her from achieving socially recognized individuality, but at several crucial junctures, she in fact acts to preserve those traditions and their patriarchal imperatives. When her tenant kills his daughter, Setāreh, because he knows that she has been impregnated by the Cossacks who raped her, Tūbā does not condemn him but instead helps him bury the girl in the backyard and remains silent about the murder. Murdered, dismembered, and buried, Setareh—like the beloved in The Blind Owl—cannot be forgotten. As Tūbā works at her loom one day, the girl appears to her. Though at first terrified, Tūbā eventually takes comfort in Setāreh’s spectral presence. Tūbā’s compliance with the ghost’s wishes offers her the opportunity to perform a kind of penance: through her obedience to Setāreh’s demands, Tūbā is partially relieved of her shame at helping to conceal the murder. The horror Tūbā initially feels at this return of the repressed is ameliorated by the quotidian nature of Setāreh’s presence, until finally, she becomes just another aspect of Tūbā’s remarkable life, and the two coexist peacefully: the ghost of feminine chastity violated and the embodiment of the feminine complicity that upheld it.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly given its status as the fountainhead of Persian prose modernity, The Blind Owl has proved influential for many “postmodern” authors, but especially for Pārsīpūr, who cites Hedāyat as a major influence.11 Not only do the buried bodies of women comprise a central motif in Pārsīpūr’s works, but Pārsīpūr recreates a portion of the story of The Blind Owl in Tūbā’s adventures. Prince Gīl, the mystical prince Tūbā meets when her second marriage brings her into the world of the fading Qājār aristocracy, clearly represents himself through his own narration as a reincarnation of The Blind Owl’s narrator, while his wife, Laylā (notably, a synonym for shab, or night), appears to be the mysterious beloved of Hedāyat’s novel. Yet implanted into Pārsīpūr’s narrative, Hedāyat’s story is altered by its presence (or perhaps teleopoeisis) in a novel in which a woman is the protagonist. This transposition effects an immediate change, altering the law of that novel, which in turn created the law of modern Iranian diction. Yet Tūbā incorporates elements of realism which conflict with the eeriness of The Blind Owl, recasting the latter in terms the reader recognizes not simply as farce but as a kind of ironic, critical tribute. Laylā, the mysterious beloved, is not a source of horror or exclusively of emulation for Tūbā, who is our “source of identification”; rather, Laylā arouses sympathy and pity in Tūbā. She wants to know Laylā, but not as a lover: she wants to be Laylā’s friend. Manifestly, the gender of the reader has changed, and Pārsīpūr’s work posits a female reader who can identify with female protagonists and other female characters. Buried female bodies structure the narrative and rhetoric in Pārsīpūr’s novel Women Without Men as well. The successive relation of four women’s stories patterns the novel; the first is Mahdokht’s. Having spent years preserving her own virginity for marriage to no real benefit (the only candidate for husband marries a woman who is less preoccupied with her chastity), Mahdokht is overwhelmed when she witnesses a sexual liaison between her family’s gardener and maid. When the maid appeals to her for mercy, begging her not to expose the act, Mahdokht reacts by condemning the girl. But this condemnation—and the uncertainty of its results—produce such guilt in Mahdokht that she decides she must bury

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herself in the earth and attempt to become a tree. When she succeeds, she must be carefully tended by the members of the community of women that form around the garden that was the site of the maid’s transgression. Mahdokht’s confusion about the meaning and value of her own virginity (which she likens to a tree) is a theme shared by the other characters in the novel, including Mawnes, who is also buried alive. Mawnes has literally imagined virginity as a “curtain,” a “hole,” and a variety of other symbols, compelling her to act, like Mahdokht, in complicity with patriarchal imperatives to preserve women’s chastity, even when they have the chance to subvert such imperatives by protecting other women from harm. Her burial and resurrection endow her with a kind of superpower (or curse), enabling her to see the truth of every situation, even when people are lying. Suddenly, she understands the absurdity of her life in her family’s home, where her family’s protection of her chastity is linked to violence: when Mawnes goes missing and returns, her brother murders her in a rage. On their journey to the garden, Mawnes and her companion Fāʾezeh are raped, an act that robs them of the virginity they have been taught to preserve and severs their last bond to society in which their chastity is their only asset. These women’s common attraction to and ultimate arrival in the garden is closely related to these preoccupations with the virginity and chastity each woman has been taught to cultivate. The garden is an ancient and revered trope in Persian storytelling, simultaneously a literary and religious convention, celebrated in Iranian letters even before the advent of Islam and given renewed signification in the Islamic identification of paradise as a lush garden populated by hūr and ghilmān (lovely girls and prepubescent boys, both of which are eroticized in Islamo-Persian poetry). The beloved, too, is often associated with the garden—a place of lushness and release for the male poet or writer. In the imagination of the Sufi poet, the garden is the site of union with the divine beloved, God (Schimmel, 37). It is set up in opposition to the world outside the garden, where nature vanquishes man; in the garden, the situation is reversed: here, nature is subdued by man (Hanaway 1990).

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It is therefore significant that Pārsīpūr’s remaking of the garden in Women Without Men looks so much like a development of modernist poet Forūgh Farrokhzād’s transformative use of the garden in the poems “Tavallod-e dīgar” (Another Birth) and “Fath-e bāgh” (Triumph of the Garden). Whereas in classical poetry, the garden is the site of masculine abandon—the place where nature, so often figured as feminine, is subdued and controlled by man—in Farrokhzād’s iconoclastic poems, the garden is a site of nonhierarchical, mutual pleasure and of feminine regeneration, not exploitation. For Farrokhzād, the garden remains a place outside of society, as in the classical tradition, but she develops this theme in a different, feminist direction by proposing it as a place of radical equality, untouched by social conventions.12 Here, the couple are “two suns,” undifferentiated by gender, and the union they form is not “the flimsy linking/of two names / and embracing in the old pages of a ledger,” but our loving hands which have built across nights a bridge of the message of perfume and light and breeze.

So, too, is it a place of feminine regeneration. In “Another Birth,” Farrokhzād’s narrator vows, I will plant my hands in the garden I will grow I know I know I know and swallows will lay eggs in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.13

Like Farrokhzād’s narrator, Mahdokht plants herself in the garden and is tended by the ideal couple, by “two suns,” the Gardener and Zarrīnkolāh, a former prostitute who is one of the four women who seek refuge in the garden.14 The Mahdokht-tree comes to dominate the garden. Thus we may say that the garden itself is feminized, but that its femininity differs substantially from the sexualized femininity of the classical tradition, where the garden is a site of male pleasure, the place of houris who offer

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the male sojourner endless temptation and the promise of magical satiation beyond any previously experienced. The novel turns that trope on its head by foregrounding the problems of women’s perceived sexual availability and rapacious male sexuality in Zarrīnkolāh’s realization that her ever-increasing numbers of clients have no heads, and in the rape of Mawnes and Fāʾezeh. The garden explicitly becomes the site in which women’s problems are buried, but that burial is regenerative—it is the burial of the seed, not of the corpse. From such burials, these problems may—like Mahdokht herself—nonetheless produce their own antidote. Yet the garden in Women Without Men is truly, then, not a utopia but a heterotopic space. Indeed, Foucault pointed to the Persian garden as one of his cardinal examples of an historical imagination of heterotopia: Perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias, in the form of contradictory emplacements, is the garden. One should not forget that the garden, an astonishing creation now thousands of years old, had in the Orient very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a center space still more sacred than the others, that was like an umbilicus, the navel of the world (it is there that the water basin and fountain were). All the vegetation of the garden was supposed to be distributed in that space, within this sort of microcosm. (Foucault 2008, 19)

Though not unproblematic, Foucault’s reading of the garden helps us see how in Iranian postrevolutionary fiction literary space itself functions as a kind of heterotopia—a mirror-space that is nowhere and everywhere at once. For the women of Women Without Men, who remove themselves from the city and its nationalist ambitions that have been frustrated by the Mossadeq coup, the garden is a space outside of time; it is the space for all of the ambitions that are contemporaneous with and yet outside of the nationalism that Mossadeq represented. The garden becomes a kind of mirror-space, wherein the women make faces at themselves but ulti-

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mately turn away from the mirror and return to the society that has expelled them. Certainly the garden posited by Pārsīpūr in Women Without Men is no utopia. Its inhabitants disagree, quarrel, and finally part, each going her separate way, and as often as not, returning to the society she briefly eschewed. There is no permanent escape from society’s strictures. Yet the women leave the garden altered, if not reformed: the garden permits a reevaluation of the society that has been foresworn, even if changing the society itself is not possible. Literature would continue to function as a heterotopic space—however constrained—within which writers could explore alternate ways of being in the anchorless space of the postrevolutionary world. The lawlessness that characterized the first decade of the Islamic Republic of Iran would, in time, create a counter discourse in the form of a civil society debate, which sought to fundamentally reexamine the premises of secularism and civil law.

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A Metaphor for Civil Society? M A R R I AG E A N D “ R I G H T S TA L K” I N T H E K H ĀTA M Ī P E R I O D

During the presidency of Mohammad Khātamī (1997–2005), the question of civil society acquired a special status that brought the idea out of the realm of the political elite and the intelligentsia and into the public domain. Khātamī was a hojjat al-Eslām (a status within the Shīʿī clerical hierarchy ranking just below that of ayatollah) and regime insider who had held various positions within the upper echelons of the state before he ran for president. Insiders and average voters alike remembered his tenure as minister of culture (1986–92) as a period during which strictures on many kinds of artistic production—especially cinema—were loosened. Not only was he perceived as an ally of civil society during his candidacy; he made the idea central to his campaign platform. But what “civil society”—a term of diverse provenance that had an uneven record in the Middle East—meant to a figure like Khātamī (or indeed, to any member of the ruling Islamic regime) was unclear. Definitions developed by Western thinkers as various as Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, and Gramsci came into play as the term was discussed in the Iranian context, but observers of the Iranian civil society discourse noted that certain key additional elements became particular to this con-

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text. Iranian discussants, especially those living in Iran, emphasized the importance of “indigenizing” civil society and reconciling it with Islamic precepts and governance.1 One area that prominent participants in the discourse seemed loath to address, however, was the question of women’s rights and the role of women in a civil society. This extended to Khātamī, who became perhaps the most visible advocate of civil society in the Iranian government. Yet in spite of this, advocates of reforms concerning women’s rights in Iranian society viewed him as the superior choice by far to his leading rival, ʿAlī Akbar Nāteq-Nūrī. In an effort to encourage both candidates to define their positions on women, the progressive women’s magazine Zanān invited both men to answer a series of questions ranging from, “What do you think the most significant problem facing women in our society is?” to, “Do you help your wife with the housework?” and “How committed are you to financial independence for women?” (“Khātamī darbāreh-ye zanān cheh mīgūyad?” [What Does Khātamī Say About Women?]). Khātamī’s replies seemed candid and good-humored, and the magazine—as if to reward him for this goodwill—ran a picture of a beaming Khātamī on its cover and another four flattering shots with the article that showed the candidate looking sympathetic, engaged, and approachable. Khātamī answered every question (albeit some curtly, with a khayr or nakhayr [no]) repeatedly using the expression “civil society” (jāmʿeh-ye madanī) to emphasize his vision of the ideal circumstances for women to achieve the goals of social and legal parity the interviewer’s questions implied. Though vague in his exact aspirations for women in Iranian society, Khātamī impressed readers—and women more broadly—to such an extent that he was perceived as the “only candidate who respected women” (Kian-Thiébaut, 56). In contrast, his rival Nāteq-Nūrī declined to answer any of Zanān’squestions. The magazine’s editor, Shahlā Sherkat, highlighted his refusal by running an article entitled “Zanān’s Unanswered Questions to Presidential Candidate Nāteq-Nūrī,” which featured

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an unflattering photograph of the grimacing Nāteq-Nūrī next to the interview with Khātamī. Nonetheless, in spite of Zanān’s valiant attempts to persuade the leading contenders for office to clarify their positions, women’s rights advocates (as opposed to the larger female public) remained uncertain about Khātamī’s exact position on both women’s rights and civil society. Furthermore, most of the leading discussants of civil society—both secular and religious—carefully avoided mentioning women’s rights issues, leaving the debate to be staged by Zanān and other women’s periodicals.2 Political scientists like Diane Singerman point out that although the Middle East appears to be barren soil for civil society if conventional Western liberalist definitions are used to evaluate it, when the ameliorative role of family and kin-based groups are considered, the assessment of aspects of civil society in many modern Middle Eastern countries changes substantially. Singerman argues for a revision of definitions of civil society to include the feminist and Gramscian interpretations, which include family and extended kin and kin-based friendship networks, proposing that doing so may permit more substantive examination of the issues of gender and women’s rights which have been marginalized within the contemporary discussions of civil society in the Middle East. Singerman’s approach does seem to risk an accidental valorization (or at the least, tacit acceptance) of the ambiguous, and sometimes negative, role that kin-based structures have played in these societies in the past. But Singerman protests that this need not be the case, and suggests that arguing for the inclusion of the family and kin-based structures in an assessment of civil society does not necessarily mean an endorsement of the “norms and values that familiar ethos promotes.” It is instead a practical move, one which sees that these are operative “modalities of power that structure society and the polity” (Singerman, 3). Though the Iranian case is substantially different from the Egyptian one that Singerman examines, her insights can nonetheless help frame an examination of the existing civil society discourse that played out in the

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pages of the so-called women’s press. They also suggest some preliminary directions for reading what seemed like a resurgence in neorealism in Iranian fiction in the late 1990s and the detailed and minute attention to what one critic referred to as the “crisis” (bohrān) of the domestic sphere in such works (Mīr-ʿAbedīnī 2002, 50). It is important to note that because the Iranian regime had already appropriated the family into its domain of power by asserting the importance of the Islamic family and particularly the important role to be played by women as Islamic mothers, women’s rights advocates in Iran were forced to utilize the regime’s discourse in order to contest it. In other words, feminists—both Islamic and secular—attempted to answer questions about women’s role in civil society and in society more broadly by challenging the regime’s rhetoric of valorized motherhood on its terrain. In the midst of the civil society debate’s heyday under Khātamī, Islamic and secular feminist activists associated with numerous women’s journals, including the aforementioned Zanān as well as Pāyām-e Hajār (Hagar’s Message), Pāyām-e zan (Women’s Message), Farzāneh, and Jens-e dovvom (The Second Sex), in order to seize on the central contradiction of the regime’s rhetoric on motherhood, leveraging it to their advantage.3 In particular, the work of well-known women’s rights legal advocates like Mehrangīz Kār and Shīrīn ʿEbādī, both of whom wrote for Zanān throughout the late 1990s, drew attention to inherent contradictions between the regime’s rhetoric concerning the importance of women as mothers and the severe constraints on women’s status instituted by the regime.4 Kār pointed out that while mothers are praised as fundamental to a healthy Islamic society, they are prevented from doing some of the most “basic” tasks of mothering by custody laws that favor fathers. Further, she notes, they are prohibited from opening bank accounts on their minor children’s behalf, limiting their ability to manage any funds their children may inherit (Gheytanchi 2001, 566–67).

ʿEbādī argued that a girl married at the legal age of nine, who could be divorced or widowed before she reached sixteen, the legal age of employment, would not be able to work to support any children she might have by the marriage (567–68). By emphasizing the absurdity of the regime’s

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contradictions, Kār and ʿEbādī, as well as a regular circuit of other writers, poked holes in the regime’s stated valorization of motherhood and created space in the press to discuss the issues that other advocates of civil society had neglected: legal reforms that would improve women’s rights so that women could properly fulfill their “destined” roles as mothers.

The Anti–Civil Society Novel? Another, more subtle way in which civil society was discussed in Zanān and in print culture more broadly was through reviews of novels treating the so-called “neorealistic” trend in Iran. During Khātamī’s campaign for and tenure as president, two such novels seized the attention of Iranian readers and added another dimension to the reevaluation of the relationship between marriage, society, and the state: Bāmdād-e khomār (The Morning After; 1995) and Cherāgh-hā rā man khāmūsh mīkonam (I’ll Turn Out the Lights; 2001). The Morning After exploded into Iran’s popular literary scene in the mid-1990s and quickly became the bestselling novel of the decade. This work of first-time author Fattāneh Hājj Sayyed Javādī concerns the question of whether or not a young woman named Sūdābeh will accept the counsel of her parents concerning the son of a financially successful but uncultured family whom she has chosen to marry. Sūdābeh’s liberal, educated parents oppose her choice based on fundamental differences in education and cultural values between their own family and the family of her intended. Urging her to reconsider the recklessness of her choice, they compel her to listen to the story of her aunt, Mahbūbeh, who, during the early Reza Shah period, was also a headstrong young woman from an upper-class family, and insisted on marrying a lower-class man of her own choosing—a carpenter’s apprentice, with whom she had fallen in love.5 Though her family eventually assents to the marriage in spite of the grave differences between the social and economic statuses of the bride and groom, the marriage proves disastrous. After suffering physical and emotional abuse, as well as the death of their child through the negligence of her mother-in-law and barrenness that ensues because of a disastrous abortion she undergoes to avoid being further tied to Rahīm’s

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family, Mahbūbeh repents her decision to marry for love, and returns to her father’s home, begging for forgiveness. Her father helps her obtain a divorce, and Mahbūbeh becomes the second wife of a kinsman who originally sought her as his first. Now both childless and barren, she comes to see the wisdom of her family’s initial objections to the marriage and accepts the appropriateness of arranged marriages, realizing that the consequence of a decision based on passion, rather than the wisdom of the family, leads to a life of misery. Needless to say, the novel seems to emphatically endorse marriages contracted through families, not between individuals, and based on considerations of class, education, and social standing instead of love.6 Although the novel was published in 1995, the debate concerning it would continue in the press throughout Khātamī’s campaign and presidency, spurring a record thirty reprints of the novel. One critic angrily accused the novel of being “feudalist” in its ethics, while another tried to explain why a work of so little literary value was so “popular” (ʿāmehpasand) (Kabīrī; Emāmī). One publisher explained her refusal to print the manuscript when it was submitted to her by claiming that it was an “insult to civil society,” but did not explain exactly what she meant by this, except to say that she objected to the way that its protagonist suffered because she denied the authority of the patriarchal order (Najmabadi 2004, 372–73).7 If we agree with the judgment that the development of civil society is contingent upon the creation of individuals who “become aware of their distinctiveness even though, by a dialectical process, they also become aware of their interdependence,” then a novel asserting the superiority of arranged marriage seems to accept the authority and rights of the community (here, represented by the family) and other predemocratic forms of power over the authority and rights of the individual.8 The triumph of the law of the family in The Morning After was clearly—and understandably—perceived by feminists as a threat to the struggling women’s rights agenda. In contrast to the response to The Morning After, criticism of Zoyā

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Pīrzād’s 2001–2 novel I’ll Turn Out the Lights was mild; if critics had a bone to pick with the author, it concerned what they saw as the novel’s unfair placing of blame for the banality of marriage at the doorstep of the protagonist’s husband. On the surface, the novel tells a fairly conventional story: an Armenian-Iranian housewife and mother dissatisfied with the repetitiousness of her domestic life falls in love with an Armenian-Iranian neighbor who seems to hold forth again the excitement of romantic love. What complicated the reception and interpretation of the novel, however, was the author’s minority status as an Armenian-Iranian, and therefore, as someone who was writing in the national language not in her ethnoreligious community’s language. It is worth noting that while outside of Iran’s current borders, there is a broadly held assumption that Persian is, and always has been, a national language for Iranians, novels like I’ll Turn Out the Lights remind us that the issue is far from settled to anyone’s satisfaction. Since the early twentieth century, Persian has been the official national language of Iran. In fact, if there is one issue that the pre- and postrevolutionary regimes can agree upon, it is the importance of Persian in this regard. Although Iran’s current constitution theoretically recognizes the linguistic diversity of Iran’s many peoples, and does not prevent Iranian schools from teaching tribal and ethnic languages from being taught alongside Persian, many linguistic minorities feel that this is not true in practice, and in reality there have been breaches of this law.9 Often considered Iran’s “beloved” minority, the Armenian Christians of Iran live in a curious state. This community (whose population is an estimated two hundred thousand) exists as one of the religious minorities officially recognized and granted protected rights by the 1979 Iranian constitution, including two parliamentary representatives (Nercissians, 62; Sanasarian 2000, 40). Interestingly, the situation of these RRMs (“recognized religious minorities,” as Sanasarian calls them) is very similar to that of women after the revolution: though they retained (or even improved) their political rights, they were subject to other new restrictions in the public sphere—namely, limitations on the teaching of their religion

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and language in public schools. But the Armenian community, long diasporic even after an independent Armenian state was finally established in 1991, rarely intermarries with the Muslim majority and seldom has entered the Persian literary sphere in spite of the fact that it is bilingual with a high degree of competency in Persian (Nercissians, 61 and 65). These circumstances distinguish the community, legally and linguistically, from the dominant Shīʿī Muslim majority. As a result, the success of the Armenian-Iranian author Pīrzad’s (born in 1952) I’ll Turn Out the Lights was remarkable. Pīrzad is the second Armenian woman to publish a novel in Persian, and is the first to be critically acclaimed. Not only did the novel win numerous awards, including the Golshīri Award for Best Novel of 2001, as well as the Yaldā and Mehregān prizes in fiction, it also, at last count, had gone through an impressive eighteen editions—a feat remarkable in a country where copyright laws, where they exist, are irregularly enforced, which means that books are illegally reproduced by photocopy and other means, and distributed with little fear of repercussion in the form of penalties; furthermore, the price of a book makes the purchase of a novel a luxury for most. What accounted for this notable success? Some observers have noted the importance of the growth of a “rights discourse” as a counterpart to the civil society debate, and in particular, note the ways in which women broadly—not just women’s rights activists or advocates—began to use these terms when they filed divorce petitions and other kinds of marriage-related claims in family courts. In other words, their marriages were the first places that they began to adopt and employ a discourse of human rights and a “language of rights.”10 I’ll Turn Out the Lights and the move toward neorealism focused on the domestic sphere seem to be of a piece with these changes. While the theme of companionate marriage is an important part of the novel, insofar as it takes up a theme that has structured much of Iranian fiction in the twentieth century, it is only one of the important ways in which I’ll Turn Out the Lights engages with the tradition of novel writing in Iran and with contemporary language practices, especially as they pertain to Iran’s ethno-linguistic and religious minorities.

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In their study of “minor” literatures, Deleuze and Guattari observe that: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari, 16). Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of “minor literature” is a useful point for discussing I’ll Turn Out the Lights. Pīrzad makes use of the divided, diglossic state in which Iran’s Armenians live to reveal the problems inherent in acts of cultural and linguistic translation, and in turn, the normative nature of any national language. As such, her writings do in fact seem to “deterritorialize” the dominant language, Persian, in the ways that Deleuze and Guattari describe. One way in which they do this is by unsettling the confidence of the Persophone reader in his ability to understand Persian perfectly. Pīrzād introduces transliterated Armenian words from time to time, but perhaps more importantly, she also suggests at junctures that the entire verbal and thinking action of the novel has been taking place in Armenian, and has been translated so that the Persophone reader can understand it. Although the novel proceeds in Persian, Pīrzād emphasizes the disjuncture between the reader’s language and the narrator’s. Consider the following example, which transpires when the novel’s protagonist Clarice visits her neighbors, the Simonians, and remarks on the diction the family’s matriarch, Elmira, uses. Clarice has brought flowers from her garden but they are in the wrong sort of vase. Elmira moves to remedy the situation: “She put the crystal vase back in the cupboard and took out a red china vase, closed the door, and faced me. ‘The color of this one is more harmonious [hamāhangtar] with the color of the flowers.’ I don’t know what she saw on my face, but she smiled. ‘Do you like this cupboard? It’s English, from the end of the eighteenth century.’” What has startled Clarice is not only Elmira Simonian’s insistence that even small things match perfectly, but the word she has used. Clarice asks herself, “More ‘harmonious?’ How many times had I heard that difficult Armenian word used? If it had been me, I’d have said ‘It goes better,’ or maybe ‘It suits it better’” (Pīrzād 2001–2, 47).

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Here, Clarice, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, draws our attention to the fact that the whole action of the novel—every represented speech act, every internal thought—has been proceeding somehow in Armenian, even as we read it in Persian and are able to forget the difference. Pīrzād and Clarice give us the impression that the Armenian in which the novel’s protagonist thinks and speaks has been translated into the Persian in which the book is authored, but periodically reminds Persophone readers that there is a persistent friction between the language in which the action takes place and the language they are reading. Thus the act of translation replicates the situation in which Armenians live as an ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority in a dominant Persophone culture. Along these same lines, Pīrzād’s narrator explains concepts that would be known to an Armenian but not to an Iranian Muslim, telling her reader through dialogue between Clarice and her mother that Julfa (Isfahan) Armenians regard Tabriz Armenians as inferior. Pīrzād makes use of these dueling systems of language and knowledge, deploying the conventional language and social codes of Persian against the knowledge of the Armenian narrator in order to demonstrate the fundamental duality of the Iranian subject in contemporary society. This duality is not only the enforced differentiation between religious majority and minority, but also between religious authority and secular thought; and between men and women, who have been constructed as citizens of different orders by the laws of the Islamic Republic.11 At the same time, Pīrzād literally deterritorializes the site of the standard Persian she uses, displacing her characters from the urban national center of Tehran to the southern city of Abadan in the 1960s, long before the infamous Rex Cinema fire of 1978 and the city’s destruction during the early days of the Iran-Iraq War. In the contemporary Iranian imagination, the city is a site of mourning and nostalgia. Some critics have observed that the site of Abadan is important in the novel in two ways: it functions as a nostalgic cue for Iranians, helping them to remember collectively the lost modernity that cosmopolitan, international Abadan symbolized, and it also can lead to a kind of romanticized alterity, wherein the dominant

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Muslim Shīʿī majority can safely remember its past through an Armenian woman’s evocation of religio-ethnic plurality and peace in prerevolutionary Abadan. In other words, by thinking with Clarice, as processes of first-person narration invite us to do, the reader who is a member of the majority population but feels alienated by the current political regime can identify with the sense of marginalization that Armenians may feel as minority members of Iranian society, both before and after the revolution. I’ll Turn Out the Lights effects these displacements and creates possibilities for friendship between Muslim and Armenian citizens even as it focuses on the domestic sphere and revisits the figure of the companionate wife within a prerevolutionary setting. Clarice, our protagonist, is narrowly focused on this domestic world, and aside from her role within it and her hobbies of reading Armenian novels and translating the occasional story from English into Armenian for a local literary journal, Clarice has no work that is meaningful to her, and no friendships or associations with persons outside the sphere of her family and Armenian community. Though not entirely miserable, Clarice does not find her life satisfying. As she struggles with these romantic feelings toward Emile, Clarice also agrees to meet with her husband’s secretary, Mrs. Nūrallāhī, a Muslim women’s rights activist who has begun to seek her out to recruit her to the women’s rights movement. The novel is set in 1960s, in the year in which women’s suffrage would be revisited in the parliament. Mrs. Nūrallāhī sees Armenian women as models for their Muslim sisters, and praises the rights they have long had. Clarice is unconvinced by Mrs. Nūrallāhī’s glorification of the status of Armenian women, whom she sees as equally repressed within the confines of their ethno-religious community, but she is also reluctant to check Mrs. Nūrallāhī’s enthusiasm, which she admires: “Mrs. Nūrallāhī said, ‘You Armenian ladies are way ahead [of us]. You’ve had things for ages that we’ve only just begun to fight for. We’re at the very beginning of the road.’ Maybe I should have said, ‘It isn’t how you think it is,’ but I just nodded my head instead” (193). Clarice is fascinated by Mrs. Nūrallāhī but is not ready yet to accept her overture to participate in the women’s rights group. Instead, Clarice asks about Mrs. Nūrallāhī’s

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husband. Upon hearing the story of how Mrs. Nūrallāhī resisted her parents’ desire for her to make a traditional marriage by wedding her cousin and instead persuaded them to assent to a love match, Clarice inquires gingerly if she is still happy with her marriage. Mrs. Nūrallāhī smiles sheepishly at Clarice and answers with a kind of parable: “Do you see this dress?” She pinched the collar between two fingers. “I saw it in a magazine.” The dress had an English collar and six buttons down to the waist. “I walked all over Tehran looking for the right fabric.” The dress was made of white cotton with big yellow polka dots. “I went ten times to try it on and I spent a fortune on the tailoring before it was done . . . I wore it a few times and then it was just another dress. Of course I still love it. I’m careful not to stain it, and every time after I wear it, I hang it up carefully so that it doesn’t wrinkle, but . . . ” (194; ellipses in original)

She then explains how the last time she was in Tehran, she found a belt that suited the dress perfectly. This belt gives new life to a dress that Mrs. Nūrallāhī loved and yearned for, but has tired of, and Clarice understands from her story that the interests she pursues—work outside the home, activity in the women’s society—like the belt, are palliatives that help ease the disappointment of romantic love’s extinction in the companionate marriage it fomented. It is important to note the ways in which Clarice’s relationship with Mrs. Nūrallāhī is likened to the development of her relationship with Emile Simonian; indeed, the relationship between the two women may be likened to a romantic affair. Both characters enter her consciousness at virtually the same moment: the first time we are introduced to her in the novel, Mrs. Nūrallāhī is giving a speech on women’s rights at the oil company’s social club while Clarice is thinking about Emile, whom she has just met. Similarly, the first time Mrs. Nūrallāhī telephones to speak with Clarice, it is while Emile is in the house, helping Clarice—in a very husbandly way—to repair the supper she has burned. So, too, does her meeting with Mrs. Nūrallāhī have the quality of a romantic rendezvous:

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they meet during the day, while Clarice’s husband is at work, in the Milk Bar, a new café that is purportedly a site of flirtations between bored oil company wives and truckdrivers. When Clarice emerges from the Milk Bar, dazed by her charged encounter with Mrs. Nūrallāhī, she almost immediately runs into Emile, who proposes that she spend the day with him, helping him negotiate Ābādān’s bazaars. The parallelism between the two relationships is obvious: in both cases, Clarice is becoming involved with two new friendships that have the potential to separate her from her marriage and her responsibilities to her family. When Clarice first meets with Mrs. Nūrallāhī, her expectations of Emile have not yet been snuffed by his confession that he is in love with, and plans to marry, another woman. When his feelings for Clarice are revealed to be purely platonic, Mrs. Nūrallāhī’s offer to Clarice to be part of a collectivity of women poses a new kind of promise. When Clarice and Mrs. Nūrallāhī meet again at the social club toward the end of the novel, and Clarice agrees to attend the next meeting of the women’s rights society, we can assume that she has, like Mrs. Nūrallāhī, accepted the bargain her life now offers: a kind and compassionate (if not passionate) husband; good, well-mannered children; the companionship of female friends, and—suddenly—the opportunity to participate in the life of the nation. Now that the romance is gone from her marriage and most likely from her life, Clarice sees in Mrs. Nūrallāhī not only an alternative model of wife but also enfranchisement on a literal and symbolic level. At the same time, an optimistic reading could see the friendship between Clarice and Mrs. Nūrallāhī as renewing the promise of a unified Iran that needn’t be stymied by differences of language, religion, or ethnicity; at the very least, the novel suggests the possibility of Clarice and Mrs. Nūrallāhī “sharing a laboratory” in Virginia Woolf’s sense of the term—becoming friends and collaborators even within the confines of a fundamentally patriarchal society. I’ll Turn Out the Lights reads marriage as the place where women can begin to make changes that may affect society on a broader scale. This novel revises the idea that marriage as an institution is—whether it is

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arranged by one’s family or initiated through romance—limited by its emphasis on kin structures of loyalty, which can enforce a separation of social and political life. Clarice’s marriage, while initially disappointing in terms of its romantic potential, has, by the novel’s end, become something positive: it is a base from which Clarice can launch her political activism. Though romantically disinclined, Clarice’s husband, Artūsh, not only supports her interest in achieving women’s rights, but himself rejects both Armenian nationalism (Dashnakism), which he views as divisive and inappropriate for Armenians who live in Iran, and opposes the Pahlavi regime. At the same time, to Clarice’s surprise, Artūsh is more attuned to the exigencies of their domestic and social life than she assumes at the novel’s inception, and helps her resolve the difficulties related to her spinster sister and elderly mother by bringing about her sister’s marriage to a colleague and inviting her mother to live with them permanently. The novel thus offers a reassessment of the role of family in promoting political activism as well as in promoting pluralism and tolerance within the home. Although both novels may be said to criticize romantic love, the trajectories of their critique travel in different directions. In The Morning After, the failure of romantic love leads back to an affirmation of family authority; whereas in I’ll Turn Out the Lights, the same failure (though not as dramatic) leads Clarice away from the insularity of the family and into a cooperation with non-Armenian women. Thus Clarice sees herself as not only freed from what she perceived as the shackles of her kin family, but also from the restrictions of the larger ethno-religious “family” of the Armenian community. Mrs. Nūrallāhī invites her to override the differences among ethno-religious groups, and even attends the commemoration of the Armenian genocide. Clarice finds this puzzling, and asks her about it at the end of their meeting at the Milk Bar: “We were already saying goodbye in the street when I remembered to ask, ‘By the way, did you come to the memorial on April 24?’ She said she had, and seemed surprised when I asked, ‘Why?’ Startled, she answered, ‘Why not? A tragedy is a tragedy, it doesn’t matter whether it happens to Muslims or Armenians’” (198).

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With this, Clarice, who has up to now made fun of Mrs. Nūrallāhī’s way of speaking, suggesting that she always talks as though she is giving a lecture, says, “It didn’t sound like she was giving a lecture anymore” (198). Finally, by setting the novel in the prerevolutionary past, Pīrzād allows the intervening time between the novel’s setting and the moment of its reading to act as a continuous possibility that is neither fulfilled nor extinguished. In that period, the contemporary reader knows that the 1979 revolution transpires, dramatically reorienting the vision of Iranian modernity that Ābādān expressed. But that suspension allows for a creative reimagination of the future. In Pīrzad’s novel, the possibility for collaboration among Iranian women of different religions and social backgrounds that began with the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, but was seemingly smothered by first the cooptation of the women’s rights movement under Reza Pahlavi and further stymied by the creation of a religiously governed state and the constraints it places on Muslims and religious minorities alike, is still alive. I’ll Turn Out the Lights, then, reminds its readers that cooperation among women is an unfinished, but not an impossible, story; in fact, it is the story that Clarice hopes her twin daughters will be able to embody instead of the “happily ever after” fantasy of romantic love and marriage. When the girls ask her, “Maman, what does ‘women’s rights’ mean?”, Clarice answers hopefully, “When you grow up, you’ll understand” (280). This revision is echoed in the staging of the school pageant that is part of the novel’s denouement. The pageant, as is conventionally the case in the genre of comedy, allegorically rights the wrongs of the story and allows for a new beginning. As she watches her son play the romantic lead in the production of Sleeping Beauty that is at the pageant’s center, Clarice understands that her flirtation with Emile been nothing more than the playing out of childish desires, which she finally lets go of in order to take up the socially significant work of advocating for women’s rights. In the end, we are led to believe that in addition to her knowledge of Armenian, Persian, and English, Clarice has added to her repertoire the language of rights.

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Reforming the Narratives of Marriage and Civil Society Sīmīn Dāneshvar’s Savūshūn marked a notable revision of stories like “Gawhar” and the stories of women’s seduction and disruption popularized in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, Lights is a revision of Savūshūn. Like Zarī, Clarice is the dutiful mother of three children—a son and younger twin daughters—and the wife of a politically active husband; she, too, is surrounded by a panoply of complicated characters who are part of her extended circle of kin and acquaintances. Yet whereas Savūshūn’s denouement begins with the death of the hero, Yūsef, and the staging of a procession celebrating him as a martyr, Lights relies on the narrative logic of the pageant but substitutes for the values of taʿzīyeh a pageant celebrating changing seasons and romantic love.12 The figure of the husband-hero in Savūshūn is divided in Lights, into the characters of Emile and Artūsh, but unlike Yūsef, neither figure dies to achieve the novel’s resolution. Emile’s death is a symbolic one: what dies is not the man himself but Clarice’s misperception of him, a correction which allows her to see that he is not a romantic hero, after all, and that no man can save her from her daily domestic travails. At the same time, her understanding of Artūsh is revised, so that she sees his political activism and his attitude toward her and their children differently, more sympathetically. The novel’s real death, in fact, is the extinguishing of romantic fantasy for Clarice. Pīrzād’s novel allows its heroes to live, but deheroicizes them, and the consequence is that unlike Zarī, Clarice is not forced by the tragic death of her husband-hero to take up the cause of a male-identified nationalism. Because she does not have to do this, Clarice instead is able to accept Mrs. Nūrallāhī’s invitation to be part of a feminine solidarity by working for the cause of women’s rights, and in particular, women’s suffrage.

Conclusion: A Severed Head? IR ANIAN LITER ARY MODERNIT Y IN T R A N S N AT I O N A L CO N T E X T

This study began with an examination of those bodies—literal and metaphorical—that had to be silenced, taken apart, and buried in order to permit a progression toward a vision of Iranian modernity in which marriage and heterosexual love were central. One last story in this vein, then: in 1921, following the failure of a separatist state in the province of Gīlān, the leader of that movement, Mirza Kuchek Khan, took to the mountains of Khalkhal for refuge. In the wake of the disastrous pact between the new Soviet Union and Britain that brought an end to Gīlān’s socialist aspirations, Kuchek Khan was being hunted by Reza Shah’s minions. But the weather got to him first: Kuchek Khan wasn’t murdered, but instead froze in the mountains. But his body was found, the minions cut off his head and took it first to Tehran and then to Rasht, where it was displayed in triumph and as a warning to those whose vision of modernity deviated from the swiftly consolidating Pahlavi state’s. Though Kuchek Khan’s head would, in time, be reunited with its body and given proper burial, the fate of this Iranian nationalist is an apt closing tale for this book, which has attempted to follow the development of a realism in Iranian letters and law that sought simultaneously to change the world, and keep it under the control of the state. In the aftermath of the revolution, with the mass exodus of Iranians 129

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from the Islamic Republic to the West, it is tempting to see Iran today as a head severed from its body. The head continues speaking in the West in the form of Iran’s intellectuals and writers who, fearing censorship, imprisonment, and torture, have fled from Iran and taken up life and work in the West. They are employed as academics; in think tanks; and in Western governments as advisors; and they continue to write books and articles, in Persian as well as in the languages of their host countries. These talking heads, severed from the vitality of the home country, are simultaneously envied and reviled by the body of the nation that languishes at home. The Islamic Republic prohibits their return to the home country, and uses them as a warning: to deviate from the will of the modern state—whatever vision of modernity is its standard bearer—is to court premature death. This point was illustrated in two very different ways in the summer of 2009. As Iran moved toward what promised to be a lively presidential election, the publication of Shahriar Mandanipur’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story was announced. As its title implies, it is a work about writing a novel that is being censored, and the process of self-censoring and revelation that the author-narrator undertakes. Scored with boldface text and strikethrough font to demonstrate the ways in which the author-narrator is self-consciously avoiding censorship by performing the act himself, Mandanipur’s novel—though it sometimes feels like an exercise in postmodernism—in certain ways captures perfectly the condition of the writer in Iran. His protagonist-lovers, Sara and Dara, are plucked out of prerevolutionary textbooks (à la Dick and Jane). In other words, they are already not characters in their own right, but bear the accretions of meaning that attach to characters who have been subject to the regime’s program of censorship. They are characters made from another ideal: the secular ideals of the prerevolutionary era, remade into Islamic revolutionaries and now playing a game in a love story that is not permitted to exist as a love story. This is the postmodern—or fully dismembered—novel in a hyperbolic state; indeed, it has transcended the need to be published in its original language altogether, going

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straight into the global network. Censoring an Iranian Love Story may become the first Iranian novel many Americans have read, but, ironically, it has never been published in Persian. In the same week that thousands of Iranian protesters took to the street to protest what were widely perceived in Iran to be fraudulent election returns, New Yorker critic James Wood published his review of Censoring an Iranian Love Story. Perhaps inadvertently, Wood brings together some of the most important questions facing artists in Iran today. Drawing on a moment in the novel to create a basis for comparison with the films of

ʿAbbas Kiarostami, who, like Mandanipur, until recently spent his life laboring under the regime of censorship in Iran, Wood reveals his admiration for Kiarostami and his skepticism about the project that Mandanipur is undertaking in this novel: It is this luminous film [Under the Olive Tree]—not named, but clearly recognizable—that Dara and Sara watch, in a Tehran cinema, in “Censoring an Iranian Love Story”: “During the final scenes of the movie, they even have tears in their eyes.” Where Mandanipour’s love story fails to generate any great interest of its own, the two young actors in “Through the Olive Trees” are utterly solid and realized; and, paradoxically, their solidity is not softened by Kiarostami’s postmodern self-consciousness but magically enhanced by it. (One would happily forever watch the two of them rehearsing the scene about the socks.) Kiarostami’s fascination with fictionality—his films often collapse the theatrical fourth wall—emerges naturally from his great interest in the real, as one might be very interested, say, in colors because one loved flowers, or in angels because one believed in God. To complain that Mandanipour does not equal Kiarostami’s almost Chekhovian humaneness and delicacy would be unfair; for one thing, Mandanipour is politically much more savage than the wily neorealist survivor, who has lived all his life in Iran, and has different ambitions. But Kiarostami’s film does demonstrate that one can beautifully combine the telling of a love story with a deep inquiry into the artifice of telling such a story—and, indeed, that the two concerns belong together. (Wood)

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Both artists share, Wood observes, a “fascination with fictionality,” but, as he points out, these play out in very different ways in their creations. Mandanipur, he seems to suggest, makes the labor of his task too obvious. The question Wood poses through his clear preference for Kiarostami’s method of negotiating the constraints of Iran’s censorship regime is simultaneously one of both aesthetics and of politics. Kiarostami’s methods make it intentionally difficult to watch his films—think of the ten minutes devoted to watching a bulldozer in The Taste of Cherry—but although Kiarostami’s films are difficult to watch, they hold forth a beauty that is hard to find in Mandanipur’s novel, which seems to suffer and flounder rather than to transcend the boundaries of the censorship it critiques. But there is a larger question in Wood’s preference for Kiarostami (one which is likely shared by most American viewers/readers of these two works), one which pertains to the role of literature and cinema in contemporary Iran. Cinema’s relationship to literature and its role in postrevolutionary Iran are complex to delineate. During the revolution, cinema was vilified as an entertainment medium that celebrated immoral practices: the exploitation of women, the consumption of alcohol, and capitalism, among other vices. Yet, to the surprise of many, Ayatollah Khomeini announced in 1979 that he was not opposed cinema as an art form; rather, it was only corrupt films that he opposed. As an example of a film that he did admire, he pointed to Gāv (The Cow; 1968). Although the director of The Cow, Dariush Mehrjui, was surely influenced by Italian neorealism, he was equally inspired by the story upon which he built the film: ʿAzādārān-e Bayal (The Mourners of Bayal), by Gholām-Hosayn Sāʿedī.1 Cinema should not be used to entertain, but to educate. Sāʿedī was, of course, one of one of Iran’s premiere engagé writers, and Khomeini’s praise of a film that brought the techniques of social realistic concerns of literature into the realm of cinema marked a momentous juncture for the future of film in Iran. Thus authorized by the blessing of the Imam, the regime’s art bureaucrats began to build a program for rebuilding Iranian cinema. The first decade of the revolution would witness the creation of new institutes and schools to train a new generation of Ira-

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nian filmmakers who would carry forth the principles and values of the revolution not just into Iran but into the broader world. Essential to the process of creating an Islamically consonant cinema was the purging of the existing system of symbolic value and meaning—that system which, as Khomeini had averred, was corrupt and exploitative, fatally tainted with “Western” values. As Hamid Naficy observes, A major goal of this system [the regime’s implementation of “a complex system of modesty at all levels of the motion picture industry and in the cinematic texts”] was to disrupt the direct discursive link between the representation of women and the promotion of corruption, amorality, and pornography which the Pahlavi cinema is said to have established. . . . Th[is] realist illusionist theory claims a direct and unmediated correspondence between “reality” and its representation (illusion) on the screen. For the illusion to be Islamically modest, reality had to become (or be made to appear) modest. This necessitated a “purification” process for women on and off screen. (Naficy 1994, 131–32)

The regime and its cultural officers thus not only accepted the premises of the realism that fiction had engendered, but decided to co-opt them for their own purposes.2 At the same time, as the case of postrevolutionary directors charged with making films that celebrated and heroicized the Iran-Iraq War aptly demonstrates, realism can undo even the most didactic of state messages. As Roxane Varzi observes, films about the Iran-Iraq War, which were intended to allow Iranian viewers to simultaneously mourn and be moved to celebrate the martyrs of the war, often dramatized aspects of the conflict that the state wished to obscure. Varzi maintains that these films produced “ghosts” that interfered with the “machine” of the state apparatus set up to help the nation process the trauma of the war. In films where veterans return alive from the war, ranging from Mohsen Makhmalbāf’s Arūsī-ye khūbān (The Marriage of the Blessed; 1989) and Ebrāhīm Hatakīmīā’s Āzhāns-e shīsheh (The Glass Company; 1997), to, most recently, Rakhshān Banī-Eʿtemād’s Gīlāneh (2005), directors examine

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the fate of war veterans returning home to find that their possibilities of marrying—the hope that helped them survive the trauma of war—are foreclosed by their injuries. Society can offer them nothing in exchange for the years and health they sacrificed—not even adequate medical care. Gilaneh, a mother trying to tend to her disabled veteran son, is revisited by the brides of weddings past, and one bride of a wedding future; hopeless and hopeful, she is visited by her daughter, burdened and impoverished by her marriage and by too many children; by her son’s fiancée, now married to another man; and by the war widow who annually visits the roadside stand Gilaneh runs, who she dreams will marry ʿAli and care for him when Gilaneh is gone. Thus this mother pins her hopes for marriage not on her daughter, as Gawhar’s mother and countless other mothers of the Iranian literary imagination have done, but on her son, in whose marriage lies the only redemption for the war that she can imagine. Banī-Eʿtemād’s non-war films also suggest that marriage is especially important not only for women but those marginalized in Iranian society— war veterans, criminals, prostitutes, the poor—because it offers, above any other institution, the opportunity to feel, if only fleetingly, that they are themselves part of the mainstream of society. In Nargess (1992), marriage is overtly equated by the thief ʿĀdel with a conventional, “normal” life. Forced to leave home at an early age because of his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, ʿĀdel re-creates a semblance of a normal life with Afāgh, a street-wise operator who teaches him to survive, protects him, and acts as both mother and eventually wife to him. His relationship with Afāgh, however, comes to stand for everything about his life that he wishes to leave, and in seeking to marry the young, pure Nargess, he hopes to revive his chances of being reassimilated into society. Anxieties over marriage endure and are given voice in Iran’s postrevolutionary realist cinema. Marriage remains a powerful normalizing institution and normative force in films like Nargess, where ʿĀdel sees marriage as having the power to lift him out of the life of theft and crime that he has pursued under Nargess’s protection; however, he must rely upon Nargess to help him contract the marriage. Here, we see a terri-

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ble paradox in marriage’s reliance on both the old order of families and kinship as well as on the idealism of romance. We also hear the echo of Dawlatābādī’s “A “Pitiful Tale” in Afāgh’s sad recounting to Nargess, her rival wife, the story of her forced marriage at the age of nine to a man forty years her senior, and in her lamentation of his subsequent abandonment of her and refusal to let her see their child. Eighty years later, transmuted onto the big screen, realism’s cry for the reform of marriage remains a demand for society to transform itself through its conception of love. In its exploitation of cinematic action and memory, Censoring an Iranian Love Story forces us back to an examination of the bond between realistic cinema and realistic. Given the close relationship between these two forms of media in twentieth-century Iran, it will perhaps come as no surprise that to find that the novel is at its liveliest when the narrator or characters recount the plots and details of films—Iranian and foreign— they have watched. Much as in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman, where two prisoners recount the plots of old films to one another, the retelling of films in Mandanipur’s novel is a way for the author-narrator and for his doomed lovers to talk about what they love and what they have in common. It also allows Mandanipur to reveal what he believes is painfully absent in contemporary Iranian literature: by foregrounding the dominance of films over the contemporary Persian literary tradition in which he works, and by circumventing publication in Persian altogether, Mandanipur seems to be admitting defeat; cinema in postrevolutionary Iran has eclipsed the realist novel, which, as his narrator knows, is less than the sum of its scattered parts. Sadly, it is also a way for the novelist to talk about what is absent in contemporary Iran. By foregrounding movies over the contemporary literary tradition in which he works, and by circumventing publication in Persian altogether, Mandanipur seems to be admitting defeat: cinema in postrevolutionary Iran has eclipsed the realist novel, which, as his narrator knows, is less than the sum of its scattered parts. Cinema not only seems to have taken on the mantle of critical realism that literature was wedded to in the prerevolutionary period; it also

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seems to have usurped the role that literature played before the revolution. While literature seems bound by censorship as it attempts to negotiate the traditions of the past, cinema seems to have escaped and engaged in communion with the transnational effortlessly, where it represents for most non-Iranians all that is Iranian today. Iranian cinema’s success, not only in Iran but outside it, makes books like Mandanipur’s seem to be red herrings—awkward negotiations of the present and the past, parceled up and translated for American readers so that they can see how hard it is to be an Iranian author. Ironically, this is an experience that has long been in the public record, pointed out by countless Iranian authors, critics, scholars of Iran, but it is only through the publication of a novel like this—directly into English and backed by a major publisher—that allows the common experience of Iranian writers to come into the mainstream consciousness of the American cosmopolitan. Any study of realism that takes up where this study leaves off must take into account the other story of realism in Iran: namely, the rise of cinema in the postrevolutionary period as both the regime’s favored medium for representing itself to the world, as well as the transcendence of those boundaries by artists at the vanguard of the medium.

Notes

Introduction 1. Youssef Ishaghpour maintains that “Sadegh Hedayat and his suicide put their stamp on the middle of the Iranian twentieth century and its ‘impossible’ relationship with modernity” (Ishaghpour, qtd. in Elena, 132). 2. For further discussion of the meaning of Tāhereh’s life and death, see Mottahedeh (2008b), Cole (1998), and F. Milani (1992). 3. This list goes on. Other notable reformist intellectuals who died of “natural” causes but whose deaths are nonetheless held against the state are Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad (d. 1969) and ʿAlī Sharīʿatī (d. 1977). 4. Homa Katouzian suggests that Hedāyat may have decided either that Tehran was “unworthy” of the site of his death, or else that he did not want to defile Iranian soil with his suicide (Katouzian 1991, 243). These contrary arguments suggest the general perplexity with which critics approach Hedāyat and echo the sentiment with which all fables in Iran begin: “[Maybe] it was, [maybe] it wasn’t.” 5. Another pilgrimage site for frustrated modernists is the headstone of Sadīqeh Dawlatābādī (d. 1962) in Tehran. The inscription on her grave reads, “Let no veiled woman visit my grave.” 6. See, for example, Tavakoli-Targhi (2001) and Najmabadi (2005). 7. The term most straightforwardly associated with the beloved in classical Persian poetry is maʿshūq, but Ehsan Yarshater also points out that the following terms were frequently used to designate the beloved: sāqī (cupbearer); kūdak (child, youth); bot or sanam (idol); negār (picture); pesar (boy); dūst (friend); yār (companion); māh (moon); māhrū (moon-faced beauty); sarhang (troop leader) (Yarshater, 51). 8. Some historians (Amin 2002, Yassari 2002–3) refer to the 1931 the “Marriage Law” while others refer to the 1931 laws as simple “portions of the code” and the 1937 revisions as the “Marriage Act” (Paidar 1995). There is general agreement that the section of the code regarding marriage was put into effect in 1931 and revised in 1937. 9. Interestingly and importantly, these writers both lived outside of modern-day Iran, not within its borders, and Ākhūndzādeh in fact wrote in his mother tongue, Azeri Turkish. 10. Camron Amin notes the state’s recognition of marriage reform as an important method of placating feminists, but does not adequately address the issue of sexual 137

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

Notes orientation mandated by companionate marriage and the social and cultural implications this mandatory heterosexuality created. Najmabadi begins to address these in her compelling study Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards (2005). There was not, of course, universal agreement over which reforms would be appropriate. The Marriage Law of 1931 is viewed by many historians of women’s rights as a moment of defeat for the women’s rights movement, since it implemented existing Shīʿī practices pertaining to marriage. In contrast, Amin avers that rather than being the beginning of the end for women’s rights advocates, the Marriage Law of 1931 was in fact a sign of the Pahlavi state’s responsiveness to a prominent aim of the women’s movement; namely, reform of traditional marriage and the idealization of companionate marriages. Citing several prominent newspaper articles as well as the first marriage of Prince Mohammad Reza Shah to Princess Fawziyeh of Egypt, Amin proposes that companionate marriage was rapidly being assimilated as a norm in the regime’s rhetoric on marriage. He suggests that although it is true that the final draft of 1931 law had excluded minimums on marriage age for men and women and had kept intact those aspects of the shariʿa that most vexed feminists—polygamy, unilateral divorce, unfavorable divorce settlements for women—the law was in fact an attempt to form an alliance with advocates of the women’s movement. Amin points to the very public prosecution of several cases involving child brides—and the quiet amendment of the Marriage Law in 1937 to include minimum ages for women and men (sixteen and eighteen, respectively)—and the punishments meted out in these cases to suggest that the regime was at pains to demonstrate it was opposed to these traditional aspects of marriage in Iran. Observing that not only husbands but, notably, officiating clerics and consenting parents were punished by imprisonment and fines following marriages to child brides, Amin reads this as a crackdown on child marriages among the lower classes that was meant to reform the strata of society seen as most resistant to reform. The pivotal role that marriage played in a variety of legal and cultural debates coeval with the rise of nationalism in other parts of the Middle East has been more fully explored. See, for example, Cuno and Desai (2009); Kholoussy (2010). See, for example, Amin (2003), Najmabadi (2005), and Afary (2009). See, for example, Sanasarian (1982), Paidar (1995), and C. Amin (2002). Najmabadi also points out that the amendments did not stop at the title. Eʿtesām al-Molk also revised key passages of Amin’s treatise in order to unhook the question of veiling from education. See her discussion of these revisions on pp. 135–37 of Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards where she suggests that the connection between reform and the veil in Iran was not a given among Iranian reformists of the period. The identification of women’s bared heads and women's role in marriage as symbols of the modern nation would imbue the veiling of women, first as a sign of

Notes

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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voluntary resistance to the Pahlavi vision of modernity, and later as a mandatory practice enforced by the law of the Islamic Republic, with a charge it was never to lose; it would also make the idealization of motherhood under the post-1979 regime an essential part of the campaign to reform the gender of public space. These changes pertain primarily to women in urban contexts. Outside of cities, the picture was quite different: women often worked outside the home (e.g., in the fields) and followed different protocols for veiling. The kashf-e hejāb (Mandatory Unveiling Act) targeted women living in cities. Farzaneh Milani sees this architectural practice and the practice of veiling as inextricably connected in the Iranian context, proposing that “like walls that enclose houses and separate inner and outer spaces, the veil makes a clear statement about the disjunction between the private and the public” (F. Milani 1992, 23). She believes that women writers in particular found it difficult to “speak” through the public medium of literary forms because this separation was deeply internalized by generations of Iranian women, who believed that they were marked as private. See chapter 2 of her Veils and Words for fuller discussion. This metaphor is particularly interesting given the title of a pamphlet (Lebās-e Taqvā [The Gown of Piety]) on the importance of Iranian self-reliance in industry coauthored in 1900 by Jamālzādeh’s father, Jamāl al-dīn Īsfahānī, who was an ardent nationalist and constitutionalist murdered for his activities and beliefs. For further discussion of this work, see Dadkhah (1992). Jamālzādeh 1922, 7. Indeed, Jamālzādeh’s best-known short story, “Farsī Shekar Ast” (“Persian Is Sweet”; literally, “Persian Is Sugar”), serves as an important reminder of the will to “purify” the Persian language that existed in Iranian public discourse following the Constitutional Revolution. Of course, Reza Shah did not stop there: not only was it necessary to reform the Persian language itself, it was also necessary to stipulate a change of the name by which his nation would be known abroad. Therefore, he declared in 1934 that the country should now be referred to internationally as “Iran” rather than as “Persia”—the name by which it had been known to foreigners since antiquity. The reification of this work as the linguistic-cultural artifact of a purer state of Iranian nationhood, as Tavakoli-Targhi and others have demonstrated, would play a major role in nationalists’ bid to clarify and define the “purer” Iranian lineage that had been corrupted by Arab-Islamic influence and which nationalism sought to restore to its full glory. The Shāhnāmeh thus helped to build the nationalist ideology upon which the modern nation of Iran could be ideologically founded. For a brief discussion of the Farhangestān and related reforms, see Ervand Abrahamian 2008, 86–88. For a more detailed discussion of the process of language purification in Iran in a comparative perspective with that of Turkey, see Perry (1985). For discussion of the role played by the Shāhnāmeh in imagining the Iranian nation, see Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi (2001).

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23. This was not specific to women: the convention of self-effacement in social discourse, wherein Iranians of all statuses commonly refer to themselves as bandeh (slave), is gender-neutral. For discussion of the use of bandeh, see Beeman (1986). 24. As Najmabadi points out, the discussion was in any case moot, as the legislation already barred women from eligibility by classifying them as those under “legal [Islamic] guardianship” (Najmabadi 2005, 210). 25. In 1944, Tūdeh party representatives to the Majles introduced a bill on the subject but it was not successful; in 1949, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossādeq attempted to re-introduce women’s suffrage through an electoral bill, but the bill never got off the ground (Paidar, 132). In 1959, the issue was raised again in the Nineteenth Majles, but here, too, the reform was defeated (Paidar, 140). 26. In addition to early reformists who were also men of letters like Tālebāf (Tālebzādeh), Marāgheʾī, Ākhūndzādeh, a later generation of prose writers, such as ʿAlī Akbarī Dehkhodā, Mohammad Hejāzī, and ʿAlī Dashtī, were all early contributors to the creation of a modern literary idiom in twentieth-century Iran, went on to elected or appointed government service under the Pahlavis. 27. Though the merits of marriage were frequently questioned in literature, until very recently wifehood was a compulsory status for women in Iran. In fiction and history alike, women who remained unmarried, became divorced, or otherwise lived outside of matrimony were marginalized in society, and are often represented as objects of pity. For an historical first-person account of this dilemma, see the Qājār princess Tāj al-Saltaneh’s memoirs, entitled Khāterāt-e Tāj al-Saltaneh (Memoirs of Tāj al-Saltaneh). These were published posthumously in 1982. 28. Pīrzād’s novels, examined in Chapters 4 and 5, present an interesting challenge to the ideal of the companionate wife: the heroine of I’ll Turn Out the Lights is certainly the ideal housewife and mother, but her status as a speaker of Persian is constantly troubled by the author’s reminders that the speech represented in Persian is actually taking place in Armenian. 29. Kamran Rastegar (2007a, 2007b) points out that this perception (and the ensuing struggle to determine whether the novel is truly a Persian [or Arabic, or Turkish, etc.] form or not) is tied to a “novelistic-nationalistic” reading that views literary production within the limitating framework of the “coterminous” nature of nationalism and modernity. In other words, when we assume that the novel must arise under conditions of nationalism and use European models as a point of reference, literary production in non-European contexts appears to yield deformed or imperfect versions of the “true” model. As an alternative, Rastegar proposes a mode of reading that traces the points of contact and exchange that form the literary modernities of Arab, Persian, and European texts.

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30. Indeed, they were often the same people. Figures like Malkom Khān, Ākhūndzādeh, and Mīrzā Yusef Khān Mostashār al-Dawleh (author of the treatise

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

on law entitled Yek Kalameh [One Word]) not only knew one another, but shared work, exchanged letters, and thought together about questions of reform. A distinction should be made between lyric poetry (e.g., that exemplified by Hafez and Saʿadi) and narrative poetry, like that of Ferdawsī’s Shahnameh. It must be noted that Kasravī was not against all poetry. He praised Ferdawsī’s Shāhnāmeh, as well as modern poet Parvīn Eʿtesāmī’s writings. See Jazayery (1973) for fuller discussion of Kasravi's attitudes toward poetry. The insights of poststructuralist critics like Roland Barthes entailed a radical reevaluation of realism in the European tradition. Later, critics would again revisit the critique of realism in specific modern contexts in an attempt to overcome the taint that seemed to accrue to it from these poststructuralist assessments. See, for example, Levine (1981) and Kaplan (1988). Hamid Dabashi (2001) and others have rightly challenged this view of an Iranian modernity that was insupportable because inherited from Europe; rather, argues Dabashi, “the history of Iranian art in modernity can be read at times as a jeremiad of that defeat, and at others as a joyous wish for its victory” (13). Poetry itself would undergo its own transformation, but the “new poetry” (sheʿr-e naw) that emerged from this rebirth—and which Nīmā Yūshīj (1896–1960) is widely credited with pioneering—was as different from its predecessors in the classical tradition as fiction was from both types of poetry, the new and the classical. For a thoughtful study of this process, see Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak’s Recasting Persian Poetry (1996).

Chapter 1 1. Various critics have noted ways in which this is so. See, for example, Beard (1990) and Simidchieva (2003). 2. Citations from the Persian edition are marked BK and are my translations of the Chāpkhāneh-ye Muhammad Hassan ʿElmī (1315) edition. Translations marked TBO are from D. P. Costello’s 1957 English translation. 3. Janet Afary briefly pursues a psychological reading of Hedāyat’s writings through his sexuality and reservations about marriage in Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (2009), proposing that the fact that Hedāyat remained a bachelor revealed his contempt for the modernized institution of marriage. 4. Paidar and others have observed that the civil code and coeval legal reforms largely codified existing Shīʿī practices and customs where marriage and family

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law was concerned; the major change, she asserts, that the Marriage Law enacted was to force couples to register marriages with the state notary instead of with the clergy—a reform that disgruntled many clerics, who had made a living as notaries (Paidar 1995, 111). For a personal account of the irritation this caused, see Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad Sangī bar gūrī (A Stone on a Grave; published posthumously in 1981). Āl-e Ahmad’s father was one such disgruntled cleric, who was driven into retirement by the passage of the law. 5.  Moallem’s Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister is a remarkable book which attempts to revisit many of the most discussed topics in the study of modern Iran (e.g., veiling) and also to plumb the depths of many of the lacunae that scholars have been loath to engage (e.g., conceptualization and utilization of the body). 6. Afary’s study gestures toward the realm of fiction in her recent study of sexual politics in Iran, wondering if it is possible to “conclude that Hedāyat’s anxieties stem from his anger at the compulsory heterosexuality of the modern urban world?” (Afary 2009, 171). 7. A strikingly similar circumstance occurs in Tayyeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1972), when Mustafa Saʿid murders his English wife Jean with a knife in a moment of sexual passion. 8. Beard’s sophisticated analysis of The Blind Owl must be seen in the context of an existing critical tradition which had heretofore overpriviledged the book's sociopolitical content. 9. Beard does address the portraiture, but does not link it to the dismemberment. Instead, he links it to a trope which he finds in many of Hedāyat’s works: the grotesque male figure paired with the beautiful young woman. See chapter 6 of The Blind Owl as a Western Novel, “Salome: The Parable of the Artist.” 10. Beard points out that the word būf never in fact appears in the novel, though a synonym for it, joghd, does appear. 11. In fact, Beard’s observation about the female characters in The Blind Owl being the “non-being around which the novel is shaped” might be applied to the novel’s position in the Iranian canon itself: it is a dense absence around which the rest of the fictional canon is formed. Beard himself alludes to this when he admits that “if we were to make The Blind Owl that [critic Hassan] Kamshad describes a fundamental text of modern Persian literature, we would have a tradition without a center” (Beard 1990, 14). 12. ʿAlavī was arrested and imprisoned in 1937 along with fifty-two other members of the Tūdeh (Masses) Party for attempting to spread communism in Iran. Held in prison until 1941, when the men were freed after Reza Shah’s abdication under pressure from the occupying Allied forces, this group came to be known as the “Fifty-Three.” ʿAlavī later published his writings from this period as Varaq pārehhā-ye zendān (Notes from Prison; 1953), and also discussed the experience

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with Donné Raffat in the interviews that comprise a part of Prison Papers of Bozorg ʿAlavī (Raffat 1985).

13. Hedāyat and ʿAlavī were also two of the four members of the satirically named Rabeʿ (the Four) group, along with Mojtaba Minovi and Masʿud Farzad—so named to parody the Sabaʿ, or the Seven, a group of establishment writers derided by these young upstarts. 14. Hedāyat especially showed a sensitivity to and interest in poetry, not only in his book on Omar Khayyam, but also in playful satirical engagement with his friend Nīmā Yūshīj’s poems. See Iraj Parsinejad’s valuable examination of Hedāyat’s interests in this regard: A History of Literary Criticism in Iran, 1866–1951. 15. Alessandro Bausani’s Encyclopedia Iranica article treating the bāz gasht provides a concise description of the movement, which seems to me to foreshadow a nationalist sense of poetics. See also Karimi-Hakkak (1996) for an illuminating discussion of the transformation of poetic aesthetics and form during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 16. Some critics close the circle, linking the troubadours back to the Islamic tradition via the muwashsha form popularized in Andalusia in the ninth century c.e. See Alvarez (1998). 17. Najmabadi argues that even in paintings where there is an identifiable male-female dyad, the heterosexuality of the couple is far from determined, as the gaze of one of the figures is typically directed outward to lock with the viewer’s, thus suggesting multiple possibilities for interpretation. See “Reading for Gender through Qajar Paintings” and chapter 2 of Najmabadi (2005). 18. See Tavakoli-Targhi (2001) for a fuller account of the methods through which Iranian reformists reimagined the past in a way that could lead to a sovereign, ethnically pure, non-Islamic conception of nation. 19. It is important to remember that the work of realistic fiction was often figured as a painterly task. As Gold observes, “A rhetoric based on visual metaphors characterizes their [nineteenth-century European realist authors’] assertions regarding their own novelistic practices, the most famous examples of which are undoubtedly Stendhal’s mirror carried along the road and Zola’s screen” (830). 20. Kristeva prefers the term transposition to intertextuality because she claims that “this term [intertextuality] has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘study of sources’” whereas “transposition . . . specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of enunciative and denotative personality” (Kristeva Reader, 111). 21. See Moallem’s discussion in the section “Unveiling and Reveiling: Corporeal Inscriptions of Citizenship” in chapter 2 of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. 22. For Freud, the talisman is the protector against death that becomes the harbinger of death. As Beard and Kamshad have demonstrated for Hedāyat and ʿAlavī,

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respectively, both authors would have been familiar with Freud’s writings, and therefore we cannot discount this possibility for nuance. 23. Leonardo Alishan notes the repetition, but attributes its significance in a different way. See his “The Ménage à Trois of The Blind Owl.” 24. Several illuminating studies of the plight of intellectuals in twentieth-century Iran exist: Boroujerdi (1996), Gheissari (1998), and Nabavi (2003a, 2003b). Chapter 2 1. For a discussion of Bāmdād’s text as an assimilation of Western feminists’ point of view concerning the Iranian women’s rights movement, see Naghibi (2007). 2. Camron Amin points out that in 1923, Reza Pahlavi (then Reza Khan, not yet Reza Shah) vigorously pursued a marriage to a girl who was the daughter of a prominent aristocratic family, the Dawlatshāhīs, in order to strengthen his ties to the old guard as he consolidated his power. Amin notes the irony that the man who “would outlaw child marriages in 1931 had sought a child bride himself in 1923” (116). Amin also points out that although Reza Pahlavi’s son and successor married three wives, he obtained a divorce from each of the first two before proceeding to the next one in the succession, thus becoming a state model for the Pahlavis’ vision of monogamous marriage (134–39). 3. See Sanasarian (1982), Paidar (1995), and C. Amin (2002). 4. The Family Protection Law was revised in 1975 to clarify some of the reforms made in the original act and to raise the age of marriage for women to twenty. Sometimes this wariness became downright hostility, owing to the broadly held perception that the Pahlavis co-opted the proposals for reform generated among intellectuals, passing them off as their own. In her discussion of intellectuals’ responses to Pahlavi reforms, Negin Nabavi observes, “As far as intellectuals were concerned, the episodes of land reform and the White Revolution were tantamount to a betrayal; not only had the experience proven their ineffectiveness in ever being taken seriously as a ruling class, but more importantly, it had put them in the uncomfortable position of seeming to agree with the regime in principle” (Nabavi 2003, 55). 5. For fuller discussion of these points, see Ali Raza Naqvi, “The Family Protection Act of Iran.” 6. The writings by Sadīqeh Dawlābādī, Zahrā Khānlarī, and Badr al-Molūk Bāmdād that will be discussed in this chapter are all examples of this theme. Additionally, Mortezā Moshfeq Kāzemī’s Tehrān-e makhawf (Terrible Tehran; 1922, serial; 1924, book); and Tafrihāt-e shab (Nighttime Amusements; 1932), by Mohammad Maʿsūd (“Dehātī”), criticize the institution of arranged marriage, and of marriage for family profit. Camron Amin discusses these conventions in passing in chapter 3 of The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman (see esp. p. 71 and note 90 on p. 270). Interestingly, in spite of Dawlatābādī’s social views on the practice of child-marriage,

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she apparently arranged for her widowed father to marry a nine-year-old girl, and subsequently arranged for this “mother-in-law” to re-marry an “old man” when Dawlatābādi's father died, widowing her at the age of fifteen (Sullivan, 231). 7. Although the modernizing forces of the civil code are seen as the reformative saviors of women’s status in these kinds of articles, it is interesting to note that by the 1960s, some authors would already be discussing “female criminality” as an outcome of modernization. See Schayegh (2006) for discussion of Qadeseh Hejāzī’s arguments in this regard. 8. Najmabadi’s reading of this tale in Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards passes over this point, mentioning it only to suggest how Hūshang finds a technicality on which Nosrat can be saved. But in fact, this focus on consent is an innovation that highlights the importance of rule of law (even if the law is religious and not secular) and becomes a hallmark of the literature of the era. Najmabadi’s summary of the story emphasizes its author as a protofeminist and the story itself as a recasting of an earlier narrative, Yahyā Eskandarī’s “ʿArūsī-ye Mehrangīz,” which was serialized in the newspaper Īrān-e Naw (The New Iran; Tehran), from October 24, 1910, to February 18, 1911 (Najmabadi 2005, 271, n. 44). Where Eskandarī’s story posits a double tragedy, Dawlatābādī re-writes it as a tragedy for the woman alone. Her perception of the shared elements of these stories lead her to read them as a tale “twice-told” but also to see the stories in terms of their oppositions: male author versus female author; male reader versus female reader; patriotic love versus romantic love; traditional marriage versus companionate marriage. Though Najmabadi rightly identifies these differences, her attention to them overlooks the fact that they do not function exclusively as dichotomies. In other words, romantic love was not simply patriotic love’s opposite, but functions in Dawlatābādī’s story as a facilitator of patriotic love; similarly, the rancor with which traditional marriage was re-created in such stories encouraged the belief in companionate marriage as a corrective to despotism. Neither were the goals of male and female authors necessarily exclusive. Najmabadi considers Dawlatābādī a protofeminist, and sees her as woman activist disguised in the drag of the cooperative women’s rights activists, willing to speak the parlance of the day. But she also reads back onto Dawlatābādī’s story a narrative that is commonly espoused by Iranian feminists: Hūshang is the “patronizing modern male who always defers women’s cause, always arrives too late for women, explains this time lag as too early, as the not-yet time for women” (Najmabadi 2005, 173). 9. Interestingly, Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of Sun features a very similar scene and fashion of narration when its protagonist, Asya, is married. The scene of Asya’s preparation by the servants and women of her household in a “modern,” twentieth-century setting is also related partially through excerpts of the songs sung to the bride as she is prepared for the wedding, and partially in prose, suggesting that this is a mode of narration that may have been widespread through-

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out both the Arabic and Persian literary traditions (in spite of the fact that her work was written in English and published in the UK, Soueif sees it as being part of the Arabic literary tradition) (Dallal, 9). 10. Many intellectuals of this period were fascinated with folklore and with rural life, seeing the village as the repository of an indigenous Iranian culture rapidly being lost to Westernization. This tendency is visible in authors like Hedāyat, who was an avid collector of folklore (though firmly an urban dweller), and becomes heightened in authors of avant-garde social realism like Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, who spent time traveling through Iran, collecting folklore, songs, etc., and wrote three books documenting his experiences, which celebrate life in the village as embodying an Iranian authenticity that was in opposition to the false modernity promulgated by the Pahlavis. For a discussion of Āl-e Ahmad’s work on this subject, see Nabavi 2003a, 36–38. 11. Indeed, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Literacy Corps (sepāh-e dānesh), created as part of his 1963 White Revolution reforms, would send fifty thousand young urban Iranians to villages all over Iran to find the Gawhars, believing that literacy might literally save them from this fate. Interestingly, young men were offered this opportunity as a way of fulfilling their compulsory military service. For more on this program and its place in the White Revolution, see Sabahi (2001). 12. Zarī is naming the characters who have roles in the taʿziyeh plays, which commemorate the martyrdom of the third Imam of the Shīʿī tradition, Hosayn, by Sunni partisans. 13. In the same vein, the scene can also be understood as an implicit critique of the autocratic rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose celebration of all things Western disgusted Iranian intellectuals like Dāneshvar, and whose grip on Iran seemed unbreakable at the moment of the novel’s publication. 14. In “Women or Wives of the Nation?” Afsaneh Najmabadi discusses the play of language related to women (and in particular, the word zan) during the Constitutional Period. She suggests that the discourse of parity (tasavī) posited women as the partners of men (as in the dyad zan-mard) whereas a competing discourse of protection posited women as the possession of man (as in zan-shawhar) (51). 15. The female characters in the Shāhnāmeh have facilitative roles: they typically exist to carry the heroic and/or kingly seed from one generation to the next; to continue lines; to authorize transitions. For more on this point of view, see, for example, Omidsalar (2004). 16. Although novels like those of Mohammad Hejāzī (Homā, 1927; Parīchehr, 1929; Zībā, 1931); and ʿAlī Dashtī (Fetna, 1949; Jādū, 1952; Hendū, 1955) bore women’s names, suggesting that their protagonists would be women, the women at the center of these novels are difficult to understand as protagonists in the sense of a subject. Rather, the women in these novels seem more like canvases on which their lovers paint their virtues.

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17. This is of course a reference to Thomas Jefferson’s “tree of liberty”: “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure” (letter to William Smith, 1787). 18. Frederick Jameson controversially proposed that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (Jameson 1986, 69). While I do not agree that this is necessarily true of all “third-world literature,” it is often the case where twentieth-century Iranian novels are concerned. See, for example, ʿAlī Mohammad Afghānī’s, Shawhar-e Āhū Khānom (Āhū Khānom’s Husband; 1961); Sādeq Chūbak, Tangsīr (1963); Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, Modīr-e madraseh (The School Principal; 1966); or Gholam-Hossayn Sāʿedī, Dandīl: Chahār qesseh (Dandīl: Four Stories; 1966) for some notable examples. For a discussion of earlier works, see the discussion in chapter 6 of Najmabadi 2005. 19. A “figure of identification” is Najmabadi’s term, which she use to describe the female character in the story “Mehrangīz’s Wedding,” which she argues is an antecedent to “A Pitiful Tale” (Najmabadi 2005, 169). 20. I am transposing Najmabadi’s argument concerning the consummation (or lack thereof) of the marriage between Hūshang and Mehrangīz in “Mehrāngīz’s Wedding” onto her later reading of “A Pitiful Tale” in the same chapter. 21. Milani cites an infamous 1987 interview with Dāneshvar conducted by her fellow novelist Hūshang Golshīrī as evidence of the lack of regard for her originality and the perception that Dāneshvar must have been channeling Āl-e Ahmad’s genius (190). Golshīrī published another article reviewing Dāneshvar’s work (Golshīrī 1984) that made similar claims. Golshīrī’s bombastic approach, however, has been tempered by critics like Hassan Mīr-ʿAbedīnī, a contemporary of Dāneshvar and Golshīrī, who avers that Savūshūn “is one of the most readable works of Iranian fiction,” and “must be counted as the initiator of a new chapter in the history of Iranian fiction (dāstānnevīsī)” (473). 22. Compare Zarī with, for example, the explicitly engagé narrator of ʿAlavī’s Her Eyes discussed in Chapter 2. 23. Yet unlike the stereotypical wives of Persian fiction of the period, Zarī has a rich interior life. Here again, comparison with the heroines of Dāneshvar’s contemporaries’ fiction or with her antecedents is useful: in many of the other major novels of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, Zan-e zīyadī [A Superfluous Woman; 1331 (1952–53)], ʿAli Mohammad Afghānī’s Shawhar-e Āhū Khānom [The Husband of Āhū Khānom; 1963]; Sādeq Chūbak’s Tangsīr [1961]), women occupy important positions in the narrative, but not one is a protagonist—with the exception, perhaps, of Ahū Khānom.

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Chapter 3 1. Parvin Paidar points out that “the labour laws of the 1970s left a lot to be desired both in terms of the protection of the rights of women workers and their implementation” (163). “Women workers” is a broad term that here probably refers to women working in the public sphere, and only hints at the lot of women working both outside of their own homes and outside of the public sphere—that is, in domestic service. 2. Other histories of the slave trade in the Islamic world confirm that the role of race was different in the context of Persian Gulf slave trading than in the Atlantic slave trade, but was still important in constructing hierarchies of value; that is, “lightness” in skin color tended to confer greater privileges, status, and value. For discussions of the slave trade and Islam, see, for example, Lewis (1990), Ricks (1989), and Toledano (2007). 3. Dāneshvar herself grew up in a wealthy household in Shiraz, which was a major market for African slaves. She acknowledges that “A City Like Paradise” grew out of her experience of a household slave and her own family’s history of slaveholding (Harīrī, 11). 4. Slavery was officially abolished in Iran in 1928. Though scholarship on this subject has been very limited, valuable new research on the history of slavery in Iran has been undertaken by Behnaz Mirzai in the form of a Ph.D. dissertation (2005) and short documentary (Afro-Iranian Lives, 2007), and suggests that interest in this important and understudied part of Iran’s history is growing. Such studies draw primarily on British diplomatic records from the Persian Gulf during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and on memoirs by Iranian aristocrats and courtiers. For a brief biographical account of one freed slave’s experience in early twentieth-century Iran, see Martin (2005); for autobiographical accounts similar to Afshar’s, see, for example, Khāterāt-e Tāj al-Saltaneh (Memoirs of Tāj al-Saltaneh; 1982), or Mariam Behnam, Zelzelah: A Woman Before Her Time (1994). Interestingly, Tāj al-Saltaneh—writing before the “Women’s Awakening” that at least superficially advanced the lot of elite women like Afshar’s mother and Behnam—is far more critical of the practice of slaveholding than either of these more contemporary authors. Minoo Southgate (1984) offers an interesting survey and discussion of the negative depiction of black slaves in premodern Persian literature. 5. The topos of servant is not per se new in the Persian prose tradition, per se. Farzaneh Milani observes that in premodern prose works like the romance Vīs o Rāmīn (Vīs and Rāmīn), the nanny plays the role of “go-between,” akin to that of the nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In that case, the nanny-nurse works as a facilitator of romantic love, but in quite a different way. See F. Milani (1999) for a fuller account. 6. These range from the historical to the literary. For the former, see, for example, Steedman (2009) or Stern (2008); for the latter, see, for example, chapter five (“The

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Old Wives’ Tale”) in Trumpener (1997); or Robbins (1986). For a work that combines the historical and literary, see Richardson (2010). 7. See Najmabadi (1993). 8. Wet nurses in particular were demonized under the new regime of companionate marriage as impostor mothers and interlopers whose unsuitable breeding— and milk—might taint the innocent and “unique” (yegāneh) child: see “Dāyeh az mādar mehrabāntar nemīshavad.” See the discussion of these sentiments in Najmabadi 2005, 204–5. 9. Interestingly, ʿAlī Sharīʿatī uses the word kolfat when referring to the plight of the traditional wife. See Sharīʿatī 1970. 10. The term soul-making, chilling as it is in this context, is not a phrase of Spivak’s invention, though the discussion in this chapter will be inflected with the meaning she gives it—that is, the sense of female individualism or subjectivity being constructed at the cost of the subjectivity of disprivileged others. Bruce Robbins, in his development of Spivak’s essay, calls it “the Kantian pedagogy Jane was preparing to administer, late in the novel, if she had gone to India with St. John Rivers as a missionary instead of returning to discover the former Mrs. Rochester dead, marry Rochester, and live happily ever after” (Robbins 2003, 16). “Soul-making,” he observes, “also produces subjects, but it does so by means of work, the educational work of . . . making ‘the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself’” (16). The project of “soul-making,” therefore, is figured in Spivak’s argument as the dark double of the companionate love that will produce Jane as a subject within British domestic society of the nineteenth century. 11. Though Taraqqī’s postrevolutionary writings are distinguishing her not only within Iran but in the wider Iranian diaspora as a major voice in Persian letters, few substantive studies of her work exist. Like Dāneshvar, Taraqqī’s oeuvre is often read for evidence of women’s experience or for a nascent literary feminism rather than in terms of its relationship to literary history in Iran more broadly or in terms of its formal qualities. Interestingly, Taraqqī has firmly expressed her objection to gendered readings of literature. When queried about the presence of a “feminine tone” (lahn-e zanāneh) in her own work, she replied: “I don’t understand what a feminine tone is. For me the question of gender, of woman and man . . . is absolutely not under consideration anymore and is disappearing . . . high art is beyond such considerations. In great artistic creations, woman and man are one with one another” (Daqīqī 2001, 34). Taraqqī’s views on this subject are uneven, however. About ten years earlier, Taraqqī gave an interview in which she characterized women as outsiders to history in Taraqqī 1993. Though she has long insisted that she is “not a feminist,” she says that a “feminine principle” persists in her work (see Daqīqī 2001). 12. Drawing on prescriptive literature that advocates new roles for women as marital partners and “mothers of the nation,” Afsaneh Najmabadi (2005) argues that

150

Notes wives, who had previously been conflated with the house itself (epitomized in the common use of the word “house” [manzel] to refer to a wife), were refashioned as managers of the home (modabber-e manzel). The changing role of servants within that changing household would have been the collateral damage of this reformative effort: in the constitutional-era discourse on womanhood and domesticity, they are posited as the antithesis of the ideal wife and mother. The domestic ser-

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

vant appears as a figure of threat in newspapers articles instructing women in the hygiene of childrearing and in the dangers of wet nurses, who may transmit their tainted milk to the “unique” child. See Najmabadi 2005, 204. Although Taraqqī divides her time between France and Tehran, she continues to publish in Iran, rather than through Persian presses in the United States or Europe. This decision means that her writing is subject to the review of the censor. Taraqqī has spoken on various occasions about the constraints of this censorship, which she construes humorously. For one such account, see her article Taraqqī 2003. No comprehensive study of service in early modern Iran or modern Iran exists, so I have drawn on studies of service in nineteenth-century England and France to inform my study of this body of literature. I must also acknowledge conversations with many friends and relatives concerning their memories of household servants in the Pahlavi era as having influenced my view of this subject. Beeman defines pārtībāzī or pārtī as “the institution of ‘pull’ or inside connections with persons in the position of granting favors or marshaling power on one’s behalf,” and dowreh as the “circle of intimates” (45). Note that Beeman’s transliteration system differs from my own. While Beeman’s study has been criticized by linguists for employing problematic methodologies (N. Haeri 1988), it nonetheless remains one of the few studies of taʾārof. In the period following the revolution, the rhetoric of equality among Iranians is introduced, further destabilizing the traditions of taʿārof. The story begins, “When they knocked on the door, Batūl Khānom answered it herself” (Dāneshvar 1985, 159). We understand by the “herself” (khod) that Batūl doesn’t usually answer the door, and infer that she is the mistress; because it is her perspective that focalizes the narration, it quickly becomes evident that she is the authority and the arbiter of taste and manners presented by the “they.” Not only the way in which it is spoken, but what is said. When Anīs tries to gloss over her past and marriage to a butcher in her village, Batūl reproves her and demands that she tell the “whole story” (az sīr tā pīyāz) (160). Temporary marriage or sīgheh (also known by the Arabic mutʿa) is permissible for Shīʿī. Though oftentimes a veneer for prostitution, such marriages theoretically confer some of the privileges of a permanent marriage—e.g., a mehrīyeh (dower) is required, and children born of these unions are considered legal issue of their fa-

Notes

151

ther, who is responsible for their maintenance even after the marriage ends. For a fuller discussion of the practice and uses of temporary marriage in contemporary Iran, see Haeri 1989. 21. Again, when I refer to “order,” I am using Beeman’s definition. 22. The understanding of the 1979 revolution offered by “The Servant” seems to suggest that the revolution is class-based, but in the most superficial of ways. The narrator implies that the servants class (a) did not have a justifiable reason to demand anything more than they’ve been given, and (b) used religion deceitfully, without genuine feeling, as a tool to achieve gain. 23. Following the revolution and the disillusionment with engagé writing that it effected, one cannot overlook the ironic use of the name Zaynab for a character who causes so much disorder. Using the names of the family of the Prophet was common in the period leading up to the revolution as a way of demonstrating dissent from the secularist Pahlavis. Zaynab was the sister of the second and third Shīʿī imams, and one can only assume that the use of such a name here is intended to heighten the farcical aspect of the story, given the prevalence of such allusions in earnest during the prerevolutionary period. One might also note that the names Zahrā and Hassan are also those of prominent figures of the Ahl al-Bayt (House of the Prophet). 24. These are not mutually exclusive–her lineage and sexuality and marital status are an aspect of her stories; I mention them, however, to be specific and draw attention to the ways in which they function in relation to each other. 25. For the narrator and her mother, the concern is with their privacy; with Zaynab, the concern over clothing is for her chastity. 26. A multitude of historians, ranging from Partha Chatterjee to Lisa Pollard, have made this observation about a variety of national contexts. See, for example, Chatterjee (1993) or Pollard (2005). 27. The komīteh were initially armed Islamist groups that arose during the revolution as vigilante forces but were later institutionalized by the Islamic regime. 28. Tāj al-Saltaneh devotes a section of her memoirs to her black nanny, about whom she adopts a series of different attitudes and postures: though she loves her, she regrets that her mother delegated her “natural” responsibilities to an uneducated black slave; though she adores this black slave, she cannot help but comment on the coarseness of her features, her “strange” accent, and so on. 29. Afsaneh Najmabadi notes in her discussion of changing women’s roles in constitutional-era texts: “For the wife to manage the household, female homosociality within that space had to break up. . . . The wife [had] to regulate her female servant instead of chatting and socializing and befriending her” (Najmabadi 2005, 195). It is unclear in Najmabadi’s scheme where a figure like Mehrāngīz would be accommodated, and may reveal the extent to which even as nuanced a study as Najmabadi’s operates with an assumption of racial (and ethnic) homogeneity.

152

Notes

30. This is an interesting point to reflect on the dissemination of knowledge in a story like this one, where the age and knowledge of the focalizer change. Here, the

31.

32.

33.

34.

reader understands quite clearly what is happening, and therefore the narrator counts on our understanding of this in order to make the mother’s sudden violence toward Mehrāngīz comprehensible. Thus we are made complicit in an interpretation of a particular social order and its repercussions. Note that dadeh-ye sīyāh is rendered by Hassan Javadi and Amin Neshati as “the nigger”–a strongly tinged interpretation of a word that can simply mean “[black] wet nurse.” Note that Amīneh’s foreignness is entirely different from Mehrāngīz’s. Without reading American racialism into these stories, it is nonetheless important to be aware of the way in which Mehrāngīz’s blackness and her originlessness functions in the story. Beeman suggests that zerangī is one of the most prized attributes of a skilled social operator in Iran, and suggests that as an aspect of Iranian linguistic interactions, it may find its roots in the Shīʿī practices or doctrines of taqīyeh (dissimulation) and in esotericism. For a discursive analysis of this process in twentieth-century interactions between Iranian and Anglo-American feminists, see Naghibi (2007).

Chapter 4 1. One of the ways in which Shīʿī belief is distinguished from Sunnism is in its religious leadership: Shīʿa believe that the caliphate should rightly pass through the line of Mohammad, from the Prophet to the children of ʿAlī and Fātemā Zahrā, his beloved daughter. These religious leaders are called emāms. In Sunni practice, an “imam” is anyone who leads the prayers; in Shīʿīsm, this word signifies ʿAlī and his successors, of which there are a disputed number. The majority of Iranian Shīʿa believes that there were twelve imams, and that the last one went into occultation in 874 c.e. He is the emām-e zamān, or “lord of the age,” and is a messianic figure: when he returns, the end times are at hand and a glorious new world awaits after the purging of this realm. Khomeini was often identified with this figure. 2. This is my adaptation of Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak’s translation in Strange Times, My Dear (2005). Most notably, I have changed the rendering of pastū from “larder” to “closet,” in order to retain the sense of a place where important things are hidden. My thanks to Vargha Dana for discussions of this point. 3. Golshīrī sent this manuscript a bit at a time to Abbas Milani in the United States; Milani then translated it and published it under the pen name Manucher Irani to protect Golshīrī’s identity. 4. In 1953, nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq nationalized the oil industry in Iran, which was perceived as a direct threat to British and American

Notes

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

153

interests. “Operation Ajax,” a joint effort of the CIA and MI6, was a coup that ended the popular rule of Mossadeq and restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. In a different vein, The King of the Benighted looks to older, mythic themes to try to explain the irreality of life in Iran. Its narrator, a writer persecuted and imprisoned by the regime, is convinced to tell the story of “The Princess of the Black Dome” from the twelfth-century poem Haft Paykar (The Seven Beauties), by Nizami Ganjavi. In doing so, he comes to see the figure of the king perversely embodied in his cellmate Sarmad, a young man who has been forced to participate in the execution and washing of women in the prison. Critic Hassan Mīr-ʿAbedīnī wonders if the “neorealism” (ne’ū re’ālism) evident in Pīrzād’s fiction isn’t a reaction to the “magical realism” (re’ālism-e jādū’i) of the earlier decades (Mīr-ʿAbedīnī 2002a, 50). See the discussion of eros as a driving force in nationalist tales in chapter 6 of Najmabadi 2005. Taraqqī has discussed the semiautobiographical nature of her fiction on many occasions, including in Taraqqī 2003. One of the ironies of the revolution and its curtailing of women’s rights has been the seeming consequence of women’s hypervisibility as authors: as of 2005, 370 women had published novels in Iran since the revolution (“Women Emerge”). Most critics, not knowing how to make sense of the fantastical realism in postrevolutionary Iranian literature, have backed away from trying to understand it as anything but the kind of awkward experiment that results from “Western formal influence” and “local materials.” See Rahimieh’s discussion of this problem with regard to Ravānīpūr ([1989 or 1990]). When asked which Iranian author has had the deepest influence on her work, Pārsīpūr replied without hesitation: “Sādeq Hedāyat. His Blind Owl has had a tremendous impact on me. I have used Hedāyat’s Blind Owl in Tūbā and Meaning of Night. In my Blue Intellect, I have extensively used the Blind Owl. There seems to have been a constant challenge between me and the Blind Owl in these two books” (Bashi 2006). Though references to The Blind Owl are perhaps too numerous to mention, see also Shahriar Mandanipur’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2009) for an example of how a work of postmodernism takes up TBO and uses it to structure part of the love story between Sara and Dara. Farrokhzād’s poetry utterly transformed the beloved. As Sīmīn Dāneshvar observed in a 1987 interview, “What was interesting about Forūgh and about women poets in general is that their beloved is a man not a slave boy [gholām bacheh] and not a boy-man, and not a woman, [by which I mean] the beloveds of noted poets. Therefore the mentality of an Iranian woman is revealed–the view of an Iranian woman with regard to men–and in my opinion, love [in these poems] becomes more alive, more mysterious, more affectionate” (Harīrī, 68).

154

Notes

13. I have adapted Hillmann’s translation of these poems (“Conquest of the Garden” and “Another Birth”) in his biographical study of Farrokhzād (1987, 97, 112). 14. Since Pārsīpūr has acknowledged many times the profound influence Hedāyat’s work has had on her own, this character’s name is certainly a reference to Sādeq Hedāyat’s story “Zanī keh mardesh rā gom kard” (The Woman Who Lost Her Man). Chapter 5 1. Conventional definitions require the separation of church and state as an enabling condition for civil society. Yet in Iran, any public discussion of civil society must tread carefully on this issue. Asghar Schirazi examines attempts by religious thinkers in Iran to reconcile the concept of civil society with religion, while others discard civil society as incompatible with the theory of the velāyat-e faqīh, or “rule of the jurisconsult,” which is the structuring theory of the present regime (Schirazi 2003, 56). Amir Mohebiyan, one such thinker, dismisses John Locke’s conception of civil society as that which is committed to the “highest good” and argues that this is incompatible with the goals of the velāyat-e faqīh, which strives to preserve order above all other social goods (Schirazi 2003, 57). Others have pointed out that the emphasis in the Iranian context on “rule of law” is one that may seem foreign to traditional definitions of civil society, since it implies an active role for the state, typically excluded from Enlightenment conceptions of civil society. 2. An exception is Sayyed Mohsen Saʿīdzādeh, a progressive cleric and advocate of reform who was a frequent contributor to Zanān. 3. Throughout much of its existence, Zanān featured a section entitled “Law” (hoqūq) and regularly published articles posing broader, more fundamental questions about women’s status in Iranian society, with titles like “Women in Political Discourse” and “Obedience.” 4. Soon after the revolution, the new regime struck down critical articles of the 1967 and 1975 Family Protection Acts which had guaranteed women greater rights where divorce and child custody were concerned (Yassari, 51). 5. It seems important to point out that Mahbūbeh means “beloved” and Sūdābeh is the name of the villainess in the Sīyāvash story referenced in Chapter 3. 6. The Morning After has, since its original publication, been reprinted more than thirty times, and its circulation is likely greater than estimated since it is rumored to have been shared widely among friends and kin (Najmabadi 2004, 382, n. 1). Critical response, however, did not echo the public’s enthusiasm for the novel, dismissing it as a “popular” (ʿāmehpasand) novel akin to romance paperbacks by authors like Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon, or, even more controversially, as “ladies’ literature” (bānūpasand) (see Emāmī [1997] for a longer discussion of

Notes

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

155

why novels like The Morning After have proved so perennially successful in contemporary Iran). At the same time, the book and its author were criticized for reinforcing class divisions and invoking the destiny of class through its use of naturalism, wherein character was determined primarily by class and origin. The controversy extended so broadly that another author in fact penned a refutation to it in a novel called Shab-e sarāb (The Drunken Night), by Nāhīd Pezhvak, which narrates the story from the point of view of The Morning After’s male antihero, Rahīm. Afsaneh Najmabadi suggests that in fact a larger question lurks beneath the façade of the critics’ hostility to the popularity of the novel and the values of classism that it seems to endorse. Playing on the novel’s title in her article “The Morning After: The Travail of Romantic Love in Iran” (2004), Najmabadi suggests that contemporary Iran is waking up with a hangover from its prolonged devotion to the conception of romantic love as a practice of modernity—both literally and metaphorically—an affair that lasted for most of the twentieth century. Drawing on constitutional-era stories and popular novels serialized in the press 1920s and 1930s in Iran, Najmabadi argues that the themes of classcrossing romantic love and marriage in modern literature were facilitators of a vision of nationalism, but that novels like The Morning After suggest a backlash to such themes. Acknowledging the validity of Najmabadi’s argument, one still must account for how a novel that endorses family-organized marriages in a period in which several studies suggest that women are increasingly asserting autonomy in their marital option—not simply to gain a partner of their own choosing (though this is certainly true) but also in order to pursue higher education and careers. These studies, undertaken on anecdotal and statistical levels, respectively, are significant. For anecdotal accounts, see Kousha (2002); for a study that combines the anecdotal with statistical evidence, see Kurzman (2008). This is a paraphrase of Hegel’s position on what civil society entails (Canovan, 121). See Sanasarian 2000, pgs. 78–79 for a description of one such case (2002a). I am referring to Ziba Mir-Hosseini (2002a) and Osanloo (2009). Interestingly, the novel has been translated into German, Greek, and Turkish, and a French translation is forthcoming. When I asked Pīrzād if an Armenian translation was forthcoming, Pīrzād said she did not know of one (private correspondence with author, November 2008). Pīrzād protests that her work is not intended to evoke Savūshūn in any way. In reply to my inquiry regarding their similarities, she replied, “Cheragha [sic] has nothing to do with Souvashoun [sic]. The existence of the twins in both novels is mere coincidence. I surely am influenced by anything and everything that I have read from the age of six” (private correspondence with author, November 2008).

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Notes

Conclusion 1. Sāʿedī had been imprisoned under the Shah as a dissident; he had welcomed the revolution, but would eventually flee the revolution and its animosity toward intellectuals to end his days in Paris, having drunk himself to death out of sadness. 2. The problems entailed by this vigorous return to realism has not been adequately addressed in the critical scholarship. Hamid Naficy (1994) and Negar Mottahedeh (2008a) both believe that the compulsory veiling enforced by the regime had the simultaneous effect of putting the lie to the façade of realism the regime sought to create. In their view, there was perhaps no better way to remind viewers of the irreality of what they were watching than to enforce veiling even in the private sphere, where not even the most devout Muslim would veil herself—for example, in the company of just her husband, or just her children.

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Index

Ābādān, Iranian city of, 120–21, 126 adultery: in postrevolutionary fiction, 99; sanction of murder for, 24 Afary, Janet, 141n3, 142n6 Afshar, Haleh, 59–63 Ahl-e gharq (The Drowned) (Ravānīpūr), 98 Ākhūndzādeh, Marāghe’ī, 140n26, 140n30 ʿĀlam-e nesvān (Women’s World) (journal), 45 ʿAlavī, Bozorg, 16, 29–30, 33–34, 37, 67, 99–100, 142n12, 143n13 Āl-e Ahmad, Jalāl, 57, 95, 100, 137n3, 146n10 Amin, Camron, 6–7, 24, 46, 137n10, 138n11, 138n16, 144n2 Amin, Qasim, 7 Anderson, Benedict, 13–15 Anīran (Non-Iranian), 29 “Anīs” (Dāneshvar), 18, 67, 70–83, 150nn18– 19 anti-civil societ, as trope in Iranian fiction, 116–126 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 13–14, 65 ‘Aql-e ābī (Blue Logic) (Pārsīpūr), 101 Arab influences on Persian literature, 30, 139n22, 140n29 Armenian Christians in Iran, 118–26 arranged marriage, in Iranian fiction, 44–50, 52–56, 104, 144n6 ʿArūsī-ye khubān (The Marriage of the Blessed) (film), 133 ‘āsheq (lover), 31–32, 56–58 ‘Azādārān-e bayal (The Mourners of Bayal) (Sāʿedi), 132–33

Āzhāns-e shīsheh (The Glass Company) (film), 133 Baji, Sonbol, 59–63 Bāmdād, Badr al-Molūk, 17, 41–46, 104 Bāmdād-e khomār (The Morning After), 19, 101, 116–26, 154n6, 155n7 “Banafshehhā-ye sefīd” (White Violets) (Pīrzād), 100 bandeh use of term, 140n23 Banī-Eʿtemād, Rakhshān, 133–34 Barthes, Roland, 141n33 Bausani, Alessandro, 143n15 bāz gasht (return) movement, 30, 143n15 Beard, Michael, 23–24, 27–29, 33, 35–36, 142nn8–11 Beeman, William O., 69–70, 150nn15–16, 152n33 beloved (maʿ shūq): in Iranian lyrical tradition, 3–4, 31–32, 137n7; lover and, 31–32, 56–58 Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister (Moallem), 142n5 bewilderment (sargardānī), postrevolutionary literary theme of, 97 Bhabha, Homi, 13 bodies, burial and movement of: hypercultural importance in Iran of, 1–3; in postrevolutionary fiction, 107–11 Brennan, Timothy, 13 bridal consent, in companionate marriage, 44–50, 52–56 British women’s rights, history of, 63–64 Brontë, Charlotte, 63

175

176

Index

Brooks, Peter, 11, 39 Buddhism, Iranian literature and influence of, 22 Būf-e kūr (The Blind Owl) (Hedāyat), 2, 16– 17, 21–29, 32–38, 142nn8–11; conflation of women as nationalist symbols in, 67; narrating women in, 39–40, 45; postrevolutionary fiction and influence of, 98–99, 104, 106–7, 155n11

4–5; nationalist conflation with, 46–50, 64, 67; in postrevolutionary fiction, 102–3, 119–26; Reza Pahlavi’s reforms and, 24, 40, 138n11; women’s rights in Iran and, 44–46 Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, 6, 30, 60, 126 cultural practice, legal and literary reform and, 11–19

Censoring an Iranian Love Story (Mandanipur), 130–132, 135–36, 153n11 Cherāgh-hā rā man khāmūsh mīkonam (I’ll Turn Out the Lights) (Pirzād), 19, 116–27, 140n28, 155nn11–12 Cheshmhāyash (Her Eyes) (ʿAlavī), 16–17, 32–40, 45, 67 child custody reforms in Iran, 43, 115–16 child-marriage, fictional depictions of, 46–50, 104–5, 144n6 cinema, Iranian literature in relation to, 131–36; global circulation of Iranian literature and cinema, 19 citizenship, enfranchisment of Iranian women and, 67–83 Civil Code: gender behaviors in wake of, 23–24; marital law reforms under, 4–5, 21–29, 42–46, 56, 141n4; recodification of femininity and, 23–24, 39–40, 145n7 civil society: anti-civil society trope, postrevolutionary fiction, 116–26; indigenization of Iranian civil society, 113; Middle East, 114–15; in postrevolutionary fiction, 112–16, 154n1 class divisions: in Iranian prose fiction, 66–67; perceptual equals and nonequals and, 69 common memory, prose fiction’s reliance on, 22 companionate marriage: domestic servants as threat to, 64–67, 81–83; fictional companionate wife-protagonist and, 51–56, 146n16; legal and literary reform and, 12–19, 137n10; modern concept of,

Dabashi, Hamid, 141n34 Dāneshvar, Sīmīn, 3, 146n13, 147n21, 147n23, 153n12; companionate wifeprotagonist in fiction of, 51–58, 104; domestic servant in stories of, 68–83, 92–93, 148n3; educated wife in fiction of, 45–46; in postrevolutionary Iran, 97–101; short fiction of, 61, 64–65, 67; women’s status in fiction of, 17–18, 127 Dante Alghieri, 21–22, 28, 142n8 “Dar īn bonbast” (In This Blind Alley) (Shāmlū), 95–96 Dashnakism (Armenian nationalism), 125–26 Dashtī, ʿAlī, 140n26, 146n16 “Dāstān-e ghamangīz-e ʿeshq” (The Sad Story of Love) (Ravānīpūr), 103 “Dāstān-e reqqatangīz” (A Pitiful Tale) (Dawlatābādi), 17, 45–58, 104, 135 “daughter of the vine” topos, in classical Persian poetry, 23 Daw donyā (Taraqqī), 99 Dawlatābādi, Sadīqeh, 17, 45–50, 67, 99, 101, 104, 135, 137n5, 144n6, 145n8 Dehkhodā, ʿAlī, 140n26 Del-e fūlād (Heart of Steel) (Ravānīpūr), 98 Deleuze, Gilles, and “minor literature” theory, 120 dismemberment of beloved: in The Blind Owl, 22–29; marriage in modern Iran and, 21–29; in postrevolutionary fiction, 98–99, 106–11; transnational context in modern literature and,

Index 129–36; in twentieth century prose fiction, 4 divorce in Iran: legal reforms concerning, 44, 67, 115–16; in postrevolutionary fiction, 99 domestic servant (kolfat): foreign domestics, 83–93, 148nn1–4, 149nn8–9; illegitimacy, in modern fiction and theme of, 73–83; in Iranian prose fiction, 18, 65–83, 148n5, 149n12, 150n14. See also slavery in Iran droit du seigneur, aspects of, in modern Iranian fiction, 81–83

ʿEbādī, Shīrīn, 115–16 educated housewife: domestic servants as threat to, 81–83; modernized Iran and ideology of, 45–46, 48–50 Egypt, civil society in, 114–15 Emile (Rousseau), 14 Encyclopedia Iranica, 143n15 Enlightenment tradition, Iranian encounter with, 14 epic poems, prose fiction influenced by, 53–54 Eʿtessāmī, Parvīn, 1, 141n32 European culture: civil society in, 112–14; influence on The Blind Owl of, 27–29; Iranian fiction and influence of, 14, 87–93, 140n29, 141n33 face veil, removal of, 7 family: civil society and role of, 115, 125–26; domestic servant’s role in, 73–83, 148n5, 149n8 Family Protection Law of 1967, 17; amendments to, 59, 144n4, 154n4; companionate marriage and, 43–44, 46, 55–56; domestic servants overlooked in, 73 farāgh-o vassāl (separation and reunion), in lyric poetry, 4 Farhangestān (language academy), 8–9 Farrokhzād, Forūgh, 109–10, 153n12

177

“Farsī shekar ast” (Persian is Sweet) (Jamālzādeh), 139n20 Farūq (King), 2 Farzād, Mas’ud, 143n13 Farzāneh (journal), 115 Fātemeh Fātemeh ast (Fatima Is Fatima) (Sharī ʿatī), 96 “Fath-e bāgh” (Triumph of the Garden) (Farrokhzād), 109 Fawziyeh, Princess, 138n11 feminism: civil society and role of, 114–15; educated housewife ideology in, 45–46; in Iranian literature, 11–19; in postrevolutionary fiction, 100–102; Reza Pahlavi regime and, 23–24 Ferdawsī, Abū al-Qāsem, 8 “Fifty Three” (activist group), 29, 142n12 First Congress of Iranian Writers, 30 Fischer, Michael M. J., 21–22 folklore, Iranian intellectuals’ fascination with, 146n10 forced marriage, Civil Code reforms against, 42–46 Foucault, Michel, 102 Franco, Jean, 1–3 free indirect discourse, use of, 53–56 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 143n22 Friedl, Eria, 11–12 From Darkness into Light, 56 Ganjavi, Nizami, 153n5 garden as trope in Persian storytelling, 108–11 Gāv (The Cow) (film), 132 “Gawhar” (Khānlarī), 17, 45–50, 52–56, 127 gender ambiguity: in early Persian literature, 31–38; role of women in Iran and, 10 Gīlāneh (film), 133–34 Gīlān province, 129 Gilbert, Sandra, 63 Golshīrī, Hūshang, 95–96, 147n21, 155n3 Golshīrī Award, 119 Gramsci, Antonio, 112, 114

178

Index

Great Britain, Iran and, 129 Guattari, Felix, 120 Gubar, Susan, 63 “Gūsh-e māhīhā” (Seashells) (Pīrzād), 100 Hafez, 30 Haft paykar (The Seven Beauties), 153n5 Hājjī Bābā Espāhāni (Morier), 30 Hājj Vakīl al-Ruʿāyā, (Hājī Shaykh Taqī Īranī), 9 harems, reforms and demise of, 59–63 “Hasteh-hā-ye ālbalū” (Sour Cherry Pits) (Pīrzād), 100 Hatakīmīā, Ebrāhīm, 133 Hedāyat, Sādeq, 1–2, 16, 21–24, 28–29, 137n1, 137n4, 143n13; interest in folklore, 146n10; interest in poetry of, 143n14; nationalist conflation of women in fiction of, 67; postrevolutionary fiction and influence of, 99, 104, 107, 153n11, 154n14; sexuality of, 141n3, 142n6; social realism in work of, 29–30, 33, 39–40 Hedayat’s “Blind Owl” as a Western Novel (Beard), 23–24, 142nn8–11 Hegel, G. F. W., 112 Hejāzī, Mohammad, 140n26, 146n16 heteronormativity, public discusion of, 45–46 heterosexuality: civil code reforms and, 31–34, 40; legal and literary reform and, 12–19; Pahlavi vision of modernity and, 3, 7–10 heterotopia, literary space as, 102–11 hierarchy, role in Iranian fiction of, 69–70, 76–77, 112 hierogamy (sacred marriage), in early Iranian prose fiction, 34–35 Hillmann, Michael, 15–16 Hinz, Evelyn J., 34–35 Hobbes, Thomas, 112 homosexuality: in Iranian prose fiction, 36– 38, 137n10; in premodern Perso-Islamic elite culture, 31

human rights, modern Iranian fiction and discourse on, 119 In the Eye of the Sun (Soueif), 145n9 Iranian Civil Code, 6 Iranian Revolution of 1979, 66–67; lawlessness in wake of, 94–95; women’s fiction in response to, 71–83, 88–93, 153n9 Iran-Iraq War, 120, 133–34 Ishaghpour, Youssef, 137n1 Islamic law and custom: bridal consent in, 47–50; civil society and, 112–14, 154n1; as ideology of resistance in Pahlavi Iran, 55; indigenization of Iranian civil society including, 113; Iranian nationalism and resistance to, 139n22; postrevolutionary reforms in conformity with, 96–98 Islamic Republic of Iran: dismemberment metaphor in relation to, 130–36; mandatory veiling practices under, 138n15; reconfiguration of women’s status in, 67–68, 96–98 Jamālzādeh, Mohammad, 8, 13, 30, 104, 139nn19–20 Jameson, Frederic, 14, 94, 101, 146n18 Jane Eyre (Bronte), 63–64, 149n10 Javādī, Fatāneh Hājj Sayyed, 19, 116–17, 125–126 Jāyī dīgar (In Another Place) (Taraqqī), 99 Jefferson, Thomas, 147n17 Jens-e dovvom (The Second Sex) (journal), 115 “Jomeʿeh-ye khākestarī” (Gray Friday) (Ravānīpūr), 102–3 Kafka, Franz, 21 Kanīzū (Ravānīpūr), 102 Kār, Mehrangīz, 115–16 Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad, 152n2 Kasravī Ahmad, 11–13, 21, 141n32 Katozian, Homa, 136n4

Index Kayhān (newspaper), 94–95 Ketāb-e Ahmad (Book of Ahmad) (Tālebāf), 14 Khān, Malkom, 140n30 Khanlarī, Parvīz Nātel, 46–50 Khānlarī, Zahrā, 17, 45–46, 67, 99, 104 Khātamī, Mohammad, 112–17 Khāterehhā-ye parākandeh (Scattered Memories) (Taraqqī), 99 Khayyam, Omar, 22 “Khedmatkār” (The Servant) (Taraqqī), 18, 151nn22–25; foreign domestics in, 83–93; social order and domestic servants in, 66–83 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 2, 94–95, 132–33 Kiarostsami, ‘Abbas, 131–32 King of the Benighted (Golshīrī), 95–96, 153n5 Kiss of the Spiderwoman (film), 135 komīteh, 151n27 Kristeva, Julia, 32, 143n20 language reform: Iranian contemporary fiction and, 118–26, 151n33; Iranian lyric poetic tradition and, 12–19; linguistic politesse technique and, 68–69; modernity and role of, 8–10, 139nn21–22 Latin-American literature, in Cold War era, 1 learning, modernity and role of, 8–10 Lebās-e taqvā (The Gown of Piety) pamphlet, 139n19 legal reform: postrevolutionary lawlessness and demise of, 94–96; realism and, 11–19 legitimacy, as theme in modern Iranian fiction, 67–83 “Ligeia” (Poe), 26 linguistic politesse (taʿārof ), reference to in Iranian fiction, 68–69, 71, 76–77, 150n17 Literacy Corps, 146n11 Locke, John, 112 Lorde, Audre, 60 Lotman, Yuri, 22 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 14 lyric poetry: influence in Iranian literature

179

of, 30, 140n31; separation and reunion in, 4 Maggi, María. See Perón, Eva (Evita) magical realism: Iranian prose fiction reaction to, 64–65, 153n10; postrevolutionary Iran and, 98, 100–101 Makhmalbāf, Mohsen, 133 Mandanipur, Shahriar, 130–32, 135–36 Mandatory Unveiling Act of 1936, 6–7, 19, 23–24; feminism and, 32, 138nn15–16, 139nn17–18; prose fiction impacted by, 37–38 Manūchehrī, 22, 28–29 Marāgheʾī, Zayn al-ʿAbedīn, 14, 30 marriage: companionate wife-protagonist in fictional depictions of, 51–56, 67; compulsory status of, 140n27; dismemberment and, in twentieth century prose fiction, 4; in early Iranian prose fiction, 34–35, 127; Iranian cinema portrayal of, 133–36; in Khātamī period, 112–16; Pahlavi reforms and modernization of, 24, 41–42, 137n10; in postrevolutionary fiction, 18–19, 98–99, 116–26; as social metaphor, 4–6; state and society in relation to, 116–26; temporary marriage, 150n20 Marriage Laws (1931-1937), 4–5, 16, 24, 42–46, 137n8, 138n11, 141n4 ma’shūq (beloved). See beloved “Mehrangiz’s Wedding,” 57, 147nn19–20 Mehregān Prize, 119 Mehrjūʾī, Dārīyūsh, 132 Metamorphosis (Kafka), 21 Milani, Abbas, 152n3 Milani, Farzaneh, 139n18, 147n21 Minovi, Mojtaba, 143n13 Mīr-ʿAbedīnī, Hassan, 14–15, 64, 98, 101, 115, 147n21 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 11–12 Mīrzā’ Abū al Qāsem Qāʾem-maqām Farāhānī, 1 Mīrzā Āghā Khān Kermānī, 4

180

Index

Mīrzā Fath ʿAlī Ākhūndzādeh, 4, 137n9 Mirzai, Behnaz, 148n4 Mirza Kuchek Khan, 129 Mīrzā Taqī Khān (Amīr Kabīr), 1 Mīrzā Yusef Khān Mostashār al-Dawleh, 140n30 misogyny, in Iranian prose fiction, 32–34 Moallem, Minoo, 24, 32, 142n5 Modārres, Ayatollah, 9 modernization in Iran: companionate marriage as symbol of, 46–50; historiography of, 3, 141n34; Pahlavis and narrative of, 6–10; risks in Iran for advocates of, 1; role of marriage in, 5, 43–46; women’s bodies as locus of, 7 Mohebiyan, Amir, 154n1 al-Molk, Eʿtessām, 7 al-Molk, Zokʿā (Mohammad Alī Forūghī), 9 Monleon, José, 21 Moretti, Franco, 13 Morier, James, 30 Mossadeq, Mohammad: coup against, 46, 110–11, 155n4; nationalization efforts of, 152n4 mostazeffin (dispossessed), 66–67 motherhood in Iran, feminist discussion of, 115–16 Mottahedeh, Negar, 156n2 Muslim influences on Persian literature, 30, 88–93, 121–26 muwashsha poetic form, 143n16 Nabavi, Negin, 144n4 Naficy, Hamid, 133, 156n2 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 4, 31, 137n10, 138n16, 140n24, 143n17, 145n8, 146n14, 147nn19– 20, 149n12, 151n29, 154n7 Nargess (film), 134–35 Nāteq-Nūrī, ʿAlī Akbar, 113–14 nationalism: Civil Code consolidation of, 8–10, 36–38; language reforms and, 139n22 neorealism: anti-civil society trope and,

116–26; in Iranian prose fiction, 64–65, 115, 153n6 New Yorker magazine, 131–32 “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault), 102 One Word (Yek Kalameh), 140n30 “Operation Ajax,” 152n4 Osanloo, Azadeh, 12 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, 2; departure of, 94–95; Literacy Corps of, 146n11; marriages of, 138n11; Mossadeq coup and, 152n4; narrative of modernization and, 6, 99–100, 146n13; women’s rights under, 43–46 Pahlavi, Reza Shah (Reza Khan), 8; body of, 2; civil code created by, 23–24; consolidation of nationalism under, 8–10, 36–38; fiction as criticism of, 22; language reforms under, 139n21; marital law reforms under, 4–5, 21–29, 42–46; marriages of, 144n2; prose fiction in reign of, 17; women’s rights co-opted by, 6–7, 23–24, 41–46, 92–93, 126 Pahlavi monarchs: bodies of, 2; marriage reforms under, 144n4; modernization narrative of, 6–10; writers’ services in, 140n26 Paidar, Parvin, 43–44, 141n4, 148n1 Pārsīpūr, Shahrnūsh, 3, 18, 59, 96–98, 100– 101, 104–11, 153n11, 154n14 Partaw, Shīrāzpūr “Shīn,” 29 Pāyām-e Hajār (Hajār’s Message) (journal), 115 Pāyām-e zan (Women’s Message) (journal), 115 “Pedar” (Father) (Taraqqī), 69–70 Penal Law of 1940, 24 perceptual equals and non-equals, Iranian sociolinguistic interactions and, 69 Père Lachaise Cemetery, 2 Perón, Eva (Evita), 1–2 Persian language: exiled Iranian writers’

Index use of, 130; in Iranian fiction, 118–26, 139nn20–22, 140nn28–29 Pīrzād, Zoyā, 19, 98, 100–101, 116–26, 140n28, 155nn11–12, Poe, Edgar Allen, 23, 26, 28, 142n8 poetic topoi, Persian tradition in context of, 31, 141n35 poetry: narrative poetry, 141n31; “new poetry” in Iran, 141n35 politicization of realism, prose fiction and, 15–19 postmodern Iranian fiction, women’s narratives in, 101–2 postrealism: Appiah’s definition of, 14; in Iranian prose fiction, 65 postrevolutionary literature, modern Iranian woman in, 18 prose fiction: anti-civil society trope in, 116–26; companionate wife-protagonist in, 51–56; by exiled Iranian writers, 130–36; legacy in Persian literature of, 29–38; literary space as heterotopia in, 102–11; modernity in Iran and, 6–10, 13–19; narrating women, 39–40, 71–83; novel writing, postmodern manifestations of, 13–19; sexuality of domestic servants in, 72–73, 78–83; Iranian modernity linked to sexuality in, 56–58 paintings as influence on, 143nn17–18 protagonist, companionate wife as, 51–56 Puig, Manuel, 135 Qājār, Mozaffar al-Din Shah, dynasty of, 60, 62, 83, 107 Qājār, Nāsser al-Dīn Shāh, 1 Rābeʿ (the Four) group, 143n13 racism in Iran, slavery and, 60–63, 84–93, 152nn31–32 Rahimieh, Nasrin, 142n8 Rastegar, Kamran, 140n29 Ravānīpūr, Monīrū, 18, 98, 100–111 realism: ideal of, 11–19, 141n33; legal

181

and literary reform and, 11–19; postrevolutionary co-optation of, 96–98, 156n2 recognized religious minorities, in postrevolutionary Iran, 100–101 Recoleta Necropolis, 2 re-memberment, in Iranian prose fiction, 31–32 revolutionary committees, emergence of, 95 Rex Cinema fire of 1978, 120 Rhys, Jean, 63–64 al-Refā’ī Mosque (Cairo), 2 Rilke, Ranier Maria, 22 Robbins, Bruce, 82–83, 149n10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14, 112 Rubaiyat (Khayyam), 22 Rumi, 30 Sabaʿ (the Seven) group, 143n13 Sadat, Anwar, 2 Sāʿedi, Gholam-Hosayn, 95, 97, 132–33, 156n1 “Safar-e bozorg-e Amīneh” (Amīneh’s Long Journey) (Taraqqī), 16, 67–83, 87–93 Salih, Tayyeb, 142n7 al-Saltaneh, Tāj, 62, 140n27, 151n28 sarnevesht (destiny), 96–97 Savūshūn (Dāneshvar), 3, 17, 45, 51–58, 127, 147n21, 155n12 Schirazi, Asghar, 154n1 Sedghi, Hamideh, 24 Shāhnāmeh (Book of Kings) (Ferdawsī), 8, 53–54, 139n22, 141nn31–32, 146n15 “Shahrī chawn behesht” (A City Like Paradise) (Dāneshvar), 18, 61, 64–87, 91–93, 148n3 Shāmlū, Ahmad, 95–96 Sharī ʿatī, Alī, 95–97, 137n3 Sherkat, Shahlā, 113–14 Shīʿī law, 56, 94–95, 112, 121–22, 141n4, 150n20, 155n1, 155n33 Simidchieva, Marta, 23, 28–29 Singerman, Diane, 114–15 Sīyāhatnāmeh-ye Ebrāhīm Bayg (The

182

Index

Travelogue of Ibrahim Bayg) (Marāgheʾī), 14, 30 slavery in Iran: in modern Iranian fiction, 83–93, 148nn1–4; women’s rights reforms and, 59–63. See also domestic servant social realism: domestic servants in prose fiction and, 73–83; in Iranian prose fiction, 29–40; in postrevolutionary Iran, 98 Sokhan (Logos) (journal), 46 Soueif, Ahdaf, 145n9 “soul-making,” Spivak's interpretation of Hegelian notion, 63, 149n10 Soviet Union, 129 Spivak, Gayatri, 55, 63–64, 149n10 Sufis, beloved as metaphor for, 31 Sunnism, 152n1 Tabātabāī, Nāhīd, 98 Tāhereh Qorrat al-’Ayn (Barāghānī, Fātemeh), 1–2 Tahrīr al-marāʾ (The Liberation of Women) (Amin), 7 Tālebāf Abd al-Rahīm Tlebf, 14 Tālefāf (Tālebzādeh), 140n26 Taraqqī, Golī, 18, 64–65, 68–83, 93, 98–101, 149n11, 150n13, 151nn22–25 Tarbīyat-e nesvān (The Education of Women) (al-Molk), 7 Taste of Cherry, The (film), 132 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohammad, 139n22, 143n18 “Tavallod-e dīgar” (Another Birth) (Farrokhzād), 109–10 ta’ziyeh plays, 146n12 “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (Spivak), 63 tribe as repudiated social other, in modern Iranian fiction, 75–83, 101 troubadours in Iran, 143n16 Trumpener, Katie, 13 Tūba and the Meaning of Night (Pārsīpūr), 3, 59, 98, 101, 104–5

Tūdeh Party, 29, 140n25, 142n12 Twelfth Imām, prophecy of, 95 Varaq pārehhā-ye zendān (Notes from Prison) (‘Alavi), 142n12 Varzi, Roxane, 133 virginity, in postrevolutionary fiction, 108 Vita nuova (Dante), 21, 28 voting rights for women: parliamentary debate in 1911 over, 9–10, 140nn24–25; “White Revolution” and, 17 Watt, Ian, 13–15 wedlock, in early Iranian prose fiction, 34–35 White Revolution, 17, 43, 46, 73, 146n11 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 63–64 widows in Iran, lack of protection for, 55–56 Wilde, Oscar, 23 wine ritual poems, paralells in The Blind Owl with, 28–29 “Women or Wives of the Nation?” (Najmabadi), 146n14 Women’s Awakening movement, 46 women’s rights in Iran: British women’s rights history compared with, 63–64; in Khātamī period, 112–16; legal reforms for improvement of, 59, 138n11; Pahlavi’s co-optation of, 6–7, 23–24, 41–46, 138n11; postrevolutionary civil society and role of, 113–14 women’s status in Iran: in The Blind Owl, 23, 33–38; companionate marriage and, 4–5; companionate wife-protagonist as symbol of, 51–56; conflation of nationalism with, 46–50, 64, 67; laborers and, 148n1; legal reforms for improvement of, 59; narrative of modernization and, 6–10, 140nn23–24, 146n14; prose fiction as reflection of, 33–34; reconfiguration during Islamic Republic of, 67–68; reforms of 1960s and, 17–19

Index Wood, James, 131–32 Yaldā Prize, 119 Yekī būd o yekī nabūd (Once upon a Time) (Jamālzādeh), 8 Yek rūz māndeh beh ʿayd-e pāk (One Day Left to Easter) (Pīrzād), 100 Yūshīj, Nīmā, 141n35 Zanān (women’s magazine), 113–15, 154nn2–3

183

Zanān bedūn-e mardān (Women Without Men) (Pārsīpūr), 96–98, 101, 107–11 “Zanān’s Unanswered Questions to Presidential Candidate Nāteq-Nūrī”, 113–14 Zan-e Irānī: Az enqelāb-e mahrūţīyat tū enqelāb-e sefīd (The Iranian Woman: From the Constitutional Revolution to the White Revolution) (Bāmdād), 17, 41–46