In novel after novel, Iranian writers create and re-create two extreme and worn images of women, that of victims and that of bitches.  In both cases the possibility of a meaningful male-female relationship becomes a mere mirage.  With the exception of two novels written by women, no real attempt is made to untie the ropes of social protest from the captured images of women, to let the women lead to whatever buried treasure they have hidden in the depths of their shadowy existence.  But even the two well-known women writers, Daneshvar and Parsipur, are unable to represent the rich contradictions and inner complexities of their fictive characters.

In Simin Daneshvar's Suvashun (Tehran, 1969), the author tries to explore the sensibilities of a happily married woman, who nonetheless suffers from the uncompromising heroic stance her husband takes against the corrupt Iranian regime and its foreign masters.  Daneshvar's presentation of Zari creates some uneasiness in the reader; it seems as if beneath the straightforward and explicit descriptions of Zari's innermost feelings there exists some deep emotion which has found no expression, as if some deep resentment wishes to surface and mock Zari's most sacred loyalties.  but Daneshvar never dwells on this hidden and disturbing aspect of Zari.  At the end when her husband is killed, Zari takes up his political cause loyally and with conviction.  Daneshvar, like her equally famous late husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, makes social statements through her characters.  She, like him and a whole host of other writers, denounced ideology but followed Sartre's then popular dictum on the necessity of 'committed prose.'  She simplified her heroine's real suffering, Zari's agony over having to choose between a husband she loves and an independence of mind she so desperately needs.

Shahrnush Parsipur's first long novel, Sag va Zemestan-e Boland (The Dog and the Long Winter, Tehran, 1976) is a first-person narration about the trials and tribulations of a young middle-class Iranian girl.  In the first part she creates the illusory relations the girl is caught in.  But in the second part suddenly the narrative breaks down, it switches from realistic presentation and description to a stream of associations involving the girl's dead brother, his imprisonment and sufferings.  As in her later novel, Tuba va Ma'na-ye Shab, Parsipur begins with concrete images of a woman's life and then trails off into vague musings.

After the Islamic revolution, the formerly veiled and symbolic allusions to the political system and the government turned into overt and explicit criticisms of the Pahlavi era.  In Reza Baraheni's voluminous novel, Razha-ye Sarzamin-e Man (Secrets of My Native Land, Tehran, 1989), naive Armenian servant-girls and fully experienced wives of high Iranian officials are seduced by unfeeling and overpowering American soldiers.  to compensate for this symbolic seduction of Iranian women and equally symbolic cucholding of the Iranian men by the exploiting Americans, we have brave and heroic women such as Tahmineh, whose name is a reminder of the wife/mistress of Rustam, the unflinching Iranian legendary hero.  She becomes the symbol of uncorrupted Iran.

In Baraheni's Avaz-e Koshtegan (Song of the Murdered, Tehran, 1983), we have a rare attempt to portray a modern woman.  But alas, she is the wife of the hero, a writer and university professor who is constantly harassed and tortured by the Savak.  In response to his regrets over the insecure life he has made for his wife and daughter, the woman gives him, and the reader, a full lecture over three pages, in which she lauds him for exposing the Shah's regime to the whole world, while 'all were silent.'  Unlike most men, she says, who 'used their beautiful wives' to gain wealth and power, he has taught her to assist him in his perilous work.  She continues to eulogize him.  Quoting from the great Iranian poet, Sa'di, she calls him the 'voice of the murdered,'  She thanks him for 'granting' her the 'possibility' to 'wipe torture from the Iranian jails.'  Thus, a very complex social and political issue is turned into a lusterless version of 'Mission Impossible,' and a many-leveled, multi-dialogued relationship is turned into a banal monologue echoing itself, the wife doing what the husband cannot do directly: use their relationship to create him as a her.

Little wonder that the reader of these novels has an eerie feeling, as if the images avenging their mistreatment refused to come to life and refused to support their authors' claim that serious human issues are at stake.  Generally in novels several layers of relationships are created in the interactions among individuals.  The private world of these individuals becomes the flesh, the inner layer that gives substance to the other layers of social, moral, and philosophical matters.  The images in most of the Iranian novels lack flesh.  Their inability to have relationships turns the characters into mere echoes of one another and ultimately of their creator.

Esmai'il Fasih's Soraya dar Eghma (Soraya in Coma, Tehran, 1983) is one of the few Iranian novels that attempt, in the best tradition of popular fiction, to create the image of a modern independent woman.  It follows-in fact downright copies-Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in terms of plot, theme, characters, and events.  The romantically cynical hero leaves war-torn IRAN FOR Paris to visit his niece, Soraya, who is hospitalized and in coma.  There he meets several, mostly unsavory, Iranian exiles among whom he finds a very attractive, equally cynical, intellectual lady.  She is so overpowering that the man become metaphorically impotent.  All the other characters in the novel are like vague recollections of characters in Hemingway's novel. Neither the woman's showy and frustrated cynicism nor the hero's frustrated feelings for her create any deep or lasting impressions upon the reader.

In most of the novels written after the Islamic revolution, the images of women are continuations of the images in pre-revolutionary literature.  These novels lack active interaction between male and female characters.  Some, like Ahmad Mahmud's 'war novels,' have no main female character.  In many of the others, dialogue between men and women is avoided by the absence of the men or by their psychological, if not physical, impotence.  The young and controversial Mulim novelist and film maker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, dedicated his novel, Bagh-e Bolur (The Crustal Garde, Tehran, 1989) to 'the women, the oppressed women of this land.'  This novel is crowded with women whose men have either been killed in the war or will be killed by the end of the novel.  The novel ends with a strangely peaceful procession of widows and children with the only man left in the novel, one who has been castrated in the war.

Ami-Hosayn Cheltan's Talar-e Ayneh (The Hall of Mirrors, Tehran 1991), set around the time of Iran's Constitutional Revolution (1906), is again filled with women.  The novel's main point seems to be the relationship or, better, the non-relationship between Mirza, a 'revolutionary' from an upper-class family, and his sick and dying wife.  Their beautiful daughter is apparently an exact replica of her mother.  Mirza is vaguely blamed, perhaps, for neglecting his loved and loving wife.  This feeling, like all others, is never expressed concretely.  The novel ends with the death of the wife.  The grief-stricken husband is struck by the shadowy image of his daughter whom he mistakes for his dead wife.  Seldom has a writer offered the readers so many dangling, and at times dazzling, images without life or substance.

Thus, throughout the 1980s the Iranian novel vacillates between the ideological commitment and the obsessional male projections, leaving women characters shallow and intangible.  It is surprising and regrettable that such a sweeping generalization safely can be made about a major part of contemporary Iranian literature.

(3)