For decades, inequality amongst men and women has continually been a barrier that has limited the progress in society. First explained in an article by Barbara Welter in 1966, the idea of the Cult of True Womanhood, more commonly known as the Cult of Domesticity, was understood as a number of views that correlated with being a woman and merely controlling the private sphere. It was understood that while society outside the home, the public sphere, was controlled by men, the private sphere was a sanctuary for women that reflected her husband’s success in the public sphere. Society believed that putting women in the public sphere could ruin their “true womanhood.” While the Cult of Domesticity is meant to produce accommodating and skilled wives, women often stated that they felt confined within the home and within societal expectations set ahead by their husbands, fathers, and brothers.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, the concept of the cult of domesticity is shown through each character and how their lives are constrained in the private sphere by either male or governmental authority figures. Women have been revolting the patriarchal society that they have been put into for a long time and a particular way that Nafisi and her students take on this action is by using literature to escape the reality of the Islamic Republic. No matter how innovative and advance society has become, women are oppressed and seen as second-class citizens around the world.
Nafisi discusses her experience of teaching forbidden Western literature in post-revolution Iran. She indicates how the universal values of these literary works enable Iranian women a place in which to experience bits of freedom, with each novel representing escapism and freedom from the government and from male authorities. The Iranian government has limited women to what they can and cannot do, bringing back the concept of the Cult of Domesticity to the twenty-first century. Iranian women form the part of the society of the dispossessed, adopting a position of otherness in a feudal and traditional culture that has “reinforced male domination,” “comprised women’s autonomy,” and “created a set of gender relations characterized by profound inequality.”[1] Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination states that female writers frequently apply feminine objects, such as “veils,” “mirrors,” and “cabinets,” to represent their imprisonment within the confines of their home and of society (Gilbert & Gubar 115). One of the first thing that Nafisi mentions in her memoir is the description of her six students as individuals as they enter her home for their first session. For example, Nafisi mentions how Mahshid, one of her students, voluntarily covered herself before the revolution, and though after it became a regulated law for all women, it seemed oppressive to her. In making it compulsory for all women, the personal importance of it, in her life, as a choice, had been invalidated. No one could tell when looking at her, if it was her want to veil or if it were solely the law that made her. This caused much self-doubt, misery, and self-loathing among many women. Unlike another one of her students, Azin, who was shown as wearing a kimono-style robe and wearing large gold earrings and pink lipstick. The distinction between these two women proves that a vast deal of heterogeneity amongst Iranian women’s apparel, characters and opinion yet predominate, despite the government’s efforts to distinguish them solely as Muslim women. Patriarchy affects their embodiment by limiting their individualities, regulating their femininity and communication, and implementing the practice of the hijab even amidst non-Muslim and non-religious women.
According to Nafisi, “As their bodies are concealed, they lose sight of themselves and they appear to live in a disembodied state of suspension” (Nafisi 58). Women become foreigners to their individual bodies, not being able to adjust their physical and emotional wants with what society expected. Nafisi displays an illustration of veiled women whose public censorship ensures the security and continuation of a way of life endangered by the dangerous impact of Western values.
The feeling of disappointment, outrage, and failure in the face of such injustices of government would be intolerable if it were not for the freedom brought by literature.
Nafisi and her six students attempt to escape and connect their everyday lives with western literature. The first, of many, texts that the six of them tackled was Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and Lolita. Beginning the texts, Nafisi makes an implicit and explicit link between both of the novels and the lives of women living in Iran, which examines the connections linking literature to reality. Since the transformation of the Islamic Republic is a tyrannical regime, Nafisi and her students are observant when reading Nabokov’s book. They underwent relatable features of a controlling dictatorial government and gained a sense of comfort when reading of other similar experiences.
The feeling of disappointment, outrage, and inability would be intolerable if it were not for the freedom in literature. This brings up the theme of the connection between literature and reality. Although it is accurate that literature grants contentment, freedom, and pleasure it also drives back to the reality. Nafisi asserts, “Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities about which we felt to helplessly speechless” (Nafisi 38-39). Therefore, literature not only served to improve the lives of each of Nafisi’s students, but the experience of harmony supported them to experience their own realities. Considering that the Islamic Republic is a totalitarian administration, the students and Nafisi were passionate readers of Nabokov and each found comfort in the reading of such occurrences.
Literature is a way for both of the authors to creatively illustrate the pain and suffering that manifests women throughout time and throughout different cultures. Nafisi tried to lead her students away from conventional characters, and rather have them concentrate on the idea of the dream. When reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scotts Fitzgerald, the theme of the dream is ultimately an American reference, however, Nafisi describes the connection between Gatsby’s dream to the loss of the revolutionary dream of the many Iranians, especially Iranian women.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was the last primary novel the girls read. The interpretation of Pride and Prejudice gave compelling perspective toward the nature of love and expression, as Nafisi and her students coped with the difficulties uncommon to women living under the government’s tyrannical understanding of Islamic tradition.
The feeling of disappointment, outrage, and failure in the face of such injustices of government would be intolerable if it were not for the freedom brought by literature. Although it is true that literature presents a sense of freedom and happiness it further inevitably leads back to reality, “Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities about which we felt so helplessly speechless” (Nafisi 38-39). Therefore, literature not only helps to improve life through the merit of knowledge and the concept of the Cult of Domesticity, but it serves to allow one to understand one’s own reality.
