Images of Women in Literature (II)
By: Dr. Azar Nafisi
The beautiful lady in Nezami's tale makes an important point about all the other images: they all are part of the poet's vision, a vision which in essence negates and defies external 'reality.' These images feel real to us not because they are portrayed realistically, but because their texture fits well the fictional reality created through the narrative. This fictional reality is created only as a backdrop to their mystical and transcendental identity; in a sense it is an extension of that identify. Within the context of a transcendent world, the women in the classical Iranian narrative either create love and peace in their men or taunt and tempt their men. Either way they disturb the present state of affairs, opening a path to a different world.
The images of women characteristic of the classical Iranian narratives have persisted down to the period when Iranian society as well as its literature were changed fundamentally. Of the few long narratives in Persian written after the introduction of the novel form in Iran in early 1900s, the one in which the women are most central is Mohamnmad-Baqer Mirza Khosravi's three-volume romance-novel, Shams va Toghra (Shams and Toghra, Tehran, 1910).
In one scene the hero, Shams, relates to his mistress, Queen Abesh, his feelings about the three women in his life. Toghra, his first love and wife, is his favorite, if for no other reason than that of seniority. Mary the 'Venetian,' a foreigner who acts like a typically shy and submissive Iranian girl, is so good and correct that he cannot help but love her. The Queen herself is irresistible because she is so skillful in the carnal arts. The serene and integrated image of the women in the classical tales is now divided into three. The hero's love does not make him concentrate on one woman; rather, it directs him toward different women. Shams va Toghra thus shows the Iranian narrative at a transition point. The story, with its tedious digressions, vacillates between a novel and a romance. As such, it makes a number of interesting cultural points. It is again a variation on the Romeo and Juliet theme. But Shams is luckier than Romeo; he marries his Juliet halfway through the second volume and continues to marry other women with the consent and blessing, nay, the insistence of his beloved.
The world of Shams va Toghra is still a masculine world, but it has lost its previous cohesion, and the men have lost their self-assurance. The women in classical Iranian literature were a part-a very central part- of the narrator's world view, which in essence moved against the dictates of its world. In Shams va Toghra the narrator no longer has a coherent world view; nor does he have a sense of himself, his world, or the new fictional form he is working with. In other words, he is constantly vacillating between the old and the new ways of appraising 'reality' as well as fictional reality.
The women in Shams va Toghra have kept the guile of the women in earlier tales, but do not use it to subvert the hero's attitudes, or to defy the conventions of their world; guile is used as a means of survival in a world where submission has more worth than imagination, where no man would listen for one out of thousand nights to the tales of a woman. The women in earlier tales used guile in order to survive as well as to subvert and change their men. In Shams va Toghra the women no longer subvert; they only submit.
Like the female images in the classical tales, the women in Shams va Toghra are idealizations. But unlike the earlier images, Khosravi's women characters are empty of connotations and meaning. They lack the luminosity and circularity of the women in the classical Iranian narratives, who feel more real to us even though their creators paid no homage to 'reality' or to what we call realism. Toghra and her female companions are mere figments of the narrator's imagination, products of a divided mind which is constantly confused by the new order of social and personal relations imposed upon it.
As the images of women within the Iranian narrative change from vision to daydream, their active and subversive function is turned into a passive and submissive one. The divided mind of the male narrator no longer can create a whole vision: it divides the whole image into fragments. None of the women in Shams va Toghra is rounded and complete; each of them represents a part of the complete woman; body, mind, and soul are disconnected. As Shams explains to the Queen, he needs three different women to satisfy his different needs.
As the mind discovers the roundness of the earth, as it begins to lose its own identity without gaining a new sense of wholeness (or roundness) of the self, it begins a process of disintegration in which it can no longer handle and control the 'reality' around it. This is the reason why these fictional women are not complete in themselves. They have moved away from the transcendental and unreal world of the earlier narratives to the concrete and 'earthy' world of the novel without gaining the individuality and particularity needed to illuminate and activate their presence. Without a private, individual self, without some 'interiority,' these images become orphans left in someone else's story. The women ruling with wit and majesty over the fertile land of classical Iranian literature are stripped and divided in the later romance-novels, and mutilated and murdered as in Hedayat's Buf-e Kur (The Blind Owl, Bombay, 1936). From then on, they wander around in the deserts of contemporary Iranian fiction, homeless, shadowy, and weightless.
The introduction of the novel in Iran coincides with many profound social changes which Tuba's father had the foresight to predict. One of the most important of these changes is the creation of new images for women, especially during Reza Shah's reign. The unveiling of women decreed by Reza Shah, like the veiling several decades later, caused an upheaval, and symbolically expressed conflicts and contradictions that ironically made women, without any major action or decision on their part, the center of hot and violent controversy.
During this period, almost simultaneously both 'realistic' and 'psychological' fiction started to be written. In both of these genres the role of women and women's relationships or lack of relationships with men are central. The images of women in these novels almost always become identical with, or symbolic of, the novel's central 'message.'