Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The ayatollahs are

Two dazzling new books take the reader into the hidden spaces of freedom carved out by courageous Iranian women.

By Michelle Goldberg

May 5, 2003 | Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" and Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" are two very different sorts of masterpieces that tell similar stories about being young, gifted and female in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both are memoirs that transcend the facile confessionalism that plagues the genre: "Persepolis" is a literary comic book in the tradition of Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Joe Sacco's "Safe Area Gorazde," while "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is the story of a literature professor who held private classes where seven female students suffocating under Ayatollah Khomeini's religious fascism could escape into banned books. Each is a poignant, searing tale about the secret ways Iranian women defy the regime. In Iran, the rulers have thrown a chador over the public realm, and real life happens in private places, hidden from the ayatollah's thuggish morality squads and from outsiders. These books take you inside that life.

In some ways, "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and "Persepolis" are such dazzlingly singular achievements that it feels wrong to compare them or group them together simply because their authors are from the same part of the world. Though their milieus are nearly identical -- both Satrapi and Nafisi are daughters of Tehran's intellectual and political elite, and both Satrapi's family and Nafisi fought for the revolution that turned on them -- the books belong to different traditions and triumph in different ways.

Satrapi, beyond being an astute storyteller, is a fantastic comic artist. Her stark images appear disarmingly simple, but she has an amazing way of conveying sanctimony, fury or desolation in the spare lines of her characters' faces. Just glance at the glum, veiled girl on the book's cover and you can feel her disgust and the germ of her rebellion.

Satrapi's skill at capturing huge, tumultuous events in a few pen strokes allows her to weave a lot of background into her story without slowing it down. She outlines Iran's "2500 years of tyranny and submission" in one marvelous frame showing various despots and armies marching back and forth. On a few pages set during the Iran-Iraq war, as one middle-class young man plans a party while poor conscripts prepare to hurl themselves onto minefields, she underlines the regime's hypocrisy as well as the surrealism of living an ordinary life during wartime. Striking a perfect balance between the fantasies and neighborhood conspiracies of childhood and the mounting lunacy of Khomeini's reign, she's like the Persian love child of Spiegelman and Lynda Barry.

"Reading Lolita in Tehran" is a tale of Islamist oppression and feminist defiance, but it's also a superb work of literary criticism, a meditation on some of the great works of the Western canon, including Nabokov's "Lolita" and "Invitation to a Beheading," Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," Henry James' "Daisy Miller" and "Washington Square," and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Teaching, Nafisi says over and over, is her calling and her passion, and she's clearly a natural at it -- reading her makes you want to rush back to all these books to experience the hidden aspects she's elucidated.

Her zeal for these books is untarnished by politics -- indeed, she often warns against looking for moral fables in literature -- yet she also presents literary humanism as a defense against totalitarianism. This theme is both explicit in her discussion of fiction and implicit in the risks she and her students took to meet secretly on Thursdays and immerse themselves in contraband genius.

These works are more than forbidden pleasures to them -- they're keys to understanding, and ultimately escaping, their own unhappy situation. Without trying to force any of the novels to symbolize her own experiences, Nafisi draws a parallel between books like "Lolita" and life in Iran, and it's a testament to her power that by the end of her book this improbable connection seems obvious.

For example, in her imagination, Lolita's Humbert becomes a metaphor for the ayatollahs' solipsistic indifference to women's individuality. "The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a 12-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another," she writes at one point, while later she says, "Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people."

Later, reading about the hysterically self-righteous men who insist that women taunt them by showing an arousing strand of hair or patch of naked throat beneath their scarfs, her point strikes home. "I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me," says Humbert, having kidnapped his orphaned obsession. He brutalizes Lolita both because he claims to love her and because, through her, he wants to recapture his childhood love, Annabel. The regime also brutalizes its women in the name of chivalry -- "A woman in a veil is protected like a pearl in an oyster shell," says one revolutionary slogan -- and in a doomed effort to recapture some lost medieval paradise.

Next page: The growing obsession with Western culture in Tehran in the 1990s