Behind the Veil: Finding Feminism in Persepolis

The graphic novel Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, tells the story of a young girl, Marji, coming of age during the Iranian revolution in the 1980s. Although not explicitly a memoir, the book is nevertheless highly autobiographical and is told in a series of chapters through pen-and-ink drawings with minimal text. Although the book has a female protagonist, and women occupy many of the important roles in the book, Satrapi has adamantly defined her book as not “feminist,” and in fact has claimed she is not a feminist: “ I am absolutely not a feminist, I am against stupidity, and if it comes from males or females it doesn't change anything. If it means that women and men, they are equal, then OK, certainly I am a feminist” (Ghadishah). Satrapi’s claim here is paradoxical: she avows herself as “absolutely” not a feminist, then continues to say she supports equality for men and women, which is commonly accepted as the very definition of feminism.

In fact, despite the attention to female characters and themes, Satrapi rejects a feminist interpretation of her book: “It happens that I am a woman, so it becomes a ‘woman coming of age story.’ I think if I was a man it wouldn't change so much, they never call it a ‘man coming of age story.’ It is a human coming of age story, let's go for the humanity and humanism, it's a much better thing than this ‘womanhood’ and ‘manhood’ and I don't know ‘hermaphrodite-hood,’ and etc., etc.” (Ghadishah). Once again, Satrapi reveals an attitude toward feminism that is problematic. It is true that her story is a coming-of-age story, and it is a female’s coming-of-age story, and this marks it as different from a male’s coming-of-age story. Women’s voices have traditionally been marginalized or absented entirely, especially from coming-of-age stories, a variant of the “hero’s journey” described by Joseph Campbell. So remarking that the story is a female’s coming-of-age story does not exclude it from being a human story, nor marginalize it as women’s writing or the often-maligned genre of “chick lit”; rather, it celebrates an integral part of the story. Furthermore, Satrapi’s contention that the book is “human” eclipses the importance of it as a cultural feminist narrative. It is appropriate and just to apply a feminist lens to Persepolis; to not do so masks some of the important themes of the book, as well as the form of the book itself.

Although Satrapi has been discouraging of a feminist lens, she has openly courted a postcolonial reading of the text. According to Satrapi, Persepolis is intended to provide humanity to a group of people often reduced to a set of cultural stereotypes, or “... some abstract notion, when you call a whole country ‘axis of evil,’ or fanatics, or terrorists or whatever, after a while, people forget that these are people you are talking about, they are human beings” (Ghadishah). Again, Satrapi shows her interest in treating people as humans, above gender consideration. However, just as one’s race or national origin is an inseparable part of one’s identity, so too is one’s gender.

Critics have praised Satrapi’s ability to literally “lift the veil” on a part of the world that is often held in ignorance by the Western world. “Its complicated personal portrait makes it impossible to think of Iran as the monolithic fundamentalist terror state of our fears” (Couser 44). Certainly, Persepolis is an important vehicle for dispelling Western stereotypes of Iran as a land full of terrorists, fanatics, and camels. However, it is also an important vehicle for allowing a reader a firsthand look into the thoughts, feelings, and day-to-day existence of women living in a Muslim country. Marji, as the main character, goes through many of the things a Western girl worries about when growing up: she rebels, smokes a cigarette, listens to rock music, and chafes against the strictures of her parents. She is also chided for wearing her headscarf incorrectly and her jeans too tightly, by members of a group, “The Guardians of the Revolution,” loyal to the repressive regime. The experiences of Marji as an Iranian citizen and Marji as an Iranian woman are intertwined and inseparable; why then, would Satrapi encourage readers to respond to her nationality, but not her femininity? Satrapi may encourage this kind of response because she is overtly writing for the Western world; however, by not acknowledging that part of this “human” story is that it is a female story, Satrapi contributes to the silencing of women’s voices across the globe.

Alongside Marji’s story, many other women have important roles in Persepolis. Marji’s mother, grandmother, and even the family maid all contribute to Satrapi’s portrayal of Marji’s world, and their stories are impacted by their gender. For example, the section “The Letter,” tells the story of the family’s maid, Mahri. Mahri falls in love with a boy who at first loves her back, but their relationship is condemned by Marji’s father, “[b]ecause in this country you must stay within your own social class” (Satrapi 37).

Although this story is told to reveal Marji’s growing understanding of the injustice between social classes in Iran, it is also a story of gender injustice. Seeing his maid displaying “inappropriate” behavior, the father figure must intervene, as he is considered the moral center of the family. Even though Marji’s parents are “very modern and avant-garde” (Satrapi 4), they must preserve the structure of the society in which they live. Marji’s mother and Marji herself are also caught between the expectations for women in Iranian society and their personal values. Marji struggles with wearing the veil and attending segregated school; her mother and grandmother risk imprisonment for enjoying “decadent” Western pleasures like drinking wine and playing games. When an increasingly rebellious Marji revolts and is expelled from school, the possible consequences terrify her mother: she may be raped and killed. These penalties do not exist for men engaging in the same action. Again, the character’s gender is inextricably entwined with her fate. When a bomb strikes Marji’s neighbor’s house, their daughter is killed. First Marji sees a turquoise bracelet, then gradually realizes it is attached to a dismembered body. The next panels illustrate the horror Marji experiences as this revelation strikes her: she covers her face with her hands; the subsequent panel is all black, with the text, “No scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and anger” (Satrapi 142). The neighbor girl acts as a stand-in for a fate that could have befallen Marji herself, and the emotional power of the scene comes from the fact that the girls are mirrors for each other; Marji remembers that the bracelet had been a present for the girl’s fourteenth birthday. The bracelet marks the arm as a distinctly female body, a victim of the regime’s policies. Although the neighbor was not killed for being female, she is a female who was killed, and therefore a foil for Marji.

For all these women, there is a conflict between their personal lives and the political necessity of not arousing suspicion. A major feminist idea is, “the personal is political.” This idea, taken from the title of an article by Carol Hanisch, expresses the fact that the personal struggles a woman faces in her life often mirror the need for political action on women’s issues. Rather than marginalizing personal problems, they should be recognized as functions of an overall oppressive, patriarchal society. For the female characters in Persepolis, the personal is very much political, and vice-versa. Failure to acknowledge that their problems are specific to their gender does not marginalize the characters for being female, but instead ignores an essential part of their experience.

It is also important to recognize that Marji is not the traditional protagonist of a novel. She is from three marginalized groups: young, female, and Middle Eastern. Therefore, her journey from innocence to experience will be essentially different from those of her male counterparts, such as Harry Potter. In Persepolis there is no Dark Lord to defeat, no ring to capture, no sword to pull from a stone. Rather than impose a narrative such as a quest or an epic battle, Persepolis presents scenes and stories and leaves the reader to interpret their meanings. This function is related to the form of the book as a graphic novel, a form that Satrapi manipulates to balance between letting words or pictures convey the meaning. There is an emphasis on humility in the book, self-reflection and self-criticism. Early on, young Marji fancies herself a prophet, seeking to bring justice to an inherently unjust world. Later, a story is told about a man who dies from cancer, who is falsely declared a martyr for the regime. People are often shown in the book to be weak, susceptible to outside influences or downright hypocritical, a nuanced understanding of human nature that sets this book apart from black-and-white tales of good and evil.

In Persepolis, people, including the main character, are both good and evil, full of compassion one moment and hubris the next. This nuanced kind of storytelling is largely absent from typical “hero’s journey” narratives; Marji is at times both hero and anti-hero, and a large part of the book is merely her recounting other people’s stories. Because Marji is young and female, she is not allowed to protest or have the same kind of access to direct action that a typical male hero would have. Therefore, much of the book’s plot relies on Marji’s ability to communicate the stories of others and her reaction to them. For example, one of Marji’s relatives was jailed by the Shah in a water cell; Marji’s response to this is to sit in the bath and think about it. Because of her age and gender, she does not have access to the same kind of story as her relative; she can only shadow his actions by sitting in a tub of water and reflect upon what has happened. Hence, self-reflection and self-criticism is an important part of the book out of dramatic necessity, and it shapes Marji’s story differently than if she were a male protagonist. Overall, this multi-voiced approach to telling the story is especially suitable for the subject matter of Persepolis and its themes of violence and trauma and adds narrative authenticity to the book. “Like adults who experience trauma and then struggle to recall and recount it, there is no adequately authoritative angle of vision” (Gilmore 159). Marji’s voice tells the story, but it is informed by other “angles” and points of view, creating a collective history that is only possible because of the narrator’s position as a young female who more often hears stories than experiences them. The subtitle of Persepolis is: “The Story of a Childhood”; even in the subtitle, Satrapi emphasizes that this is one story among many. However, it may be more accurate to subtitle the book “The Story of a Female Childhood.”

To consider Persepolis without considering a feminist perspective is not only limiting; it is impossible. The story would simply not be what it is Marji was a “human” instead of a “female human.” Satrapi professes a desire to humanize those who are often dehumanized, and yet rejects classifying herself as a feminist. Women are dehumanized every day, however, in ways both obvious—such as repressive laws in Middle Eastern countries, or outright sexist jokes told on cable “comedy” shows—and more covert ways, such as advertisers subtly placing women in subservient roles to men. It is disappointing that Satrapi, who has written a book that “lifted the veil” from a culture often misunderstood and maligned in the West, cannot also acknowledge that this same book lifted the veil off the faces of individual women by telling their stories and honoring their voices.

Works Cited

Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2012.

Gilmore, Leigh. “Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony.” In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison, WI: University of Madison Press, 2011.

Ghadishah, Arash. "Questions for Marjane Satrapi." ABC News. ABC News Network, 22 Feb. 2008. http://abcnews.go.com. Accessed 16 Mar. 2014.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.