Northumbria University

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Department of Humanities

EL7022
MA English Literature Dissertation
2021

SEEKING IDENTITY IN THEOCRACY: A COMPARATIVE

ANALYSIS OF READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN
AND THE HANDMAID’S TALE

ANDREEA MIRICĂ

W20036989

KATHERINE BAXTER

16,382 WORDS

Module Tutor: Dr Rosie White

Email: rosemary.white@northumbria.ac.uk
SEEKING IDENTITY IN THEOCRACY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
OF READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN AND THE HANDMAID’S TALE

by

Andreea Mirică

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Department of Humanities

Northumbria University

In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Master of Arts

September 2021

Supervised by Prof Katherine Baxter

1
 Abstract

The main focus of this dissertation falls on showing the similarities

between a theocracy based on Islam and another based on Christianity. The

comparison seeks to clarify that Islamic and Catholic fundamentalisms are both

promoting a return to traditional patriarchal norms. Thus, the project begins

with the question of how totalitarian regimes attempt to ‘erase’ personal

identity in promoting uniformity. Chapter 1 shows that the real Islamic

Republic of Iran and the fictional Republic of Gilead are totalitarian systems

that make very similar use of ideology, propaganda and punishments in

controlling their citizens.

The choice to focus on Nafisi and Offred as the protagonists of Reading

Lolita in Tehran and The Handmaid’s Tale, respectively, allowed for the

exploration of how differences between public and private aspects of identity

are mediated. Chapters 2 and 3 look specifically at how the protagonists use

storytelling, other people’s life stories, literary references, and language in more

general terms, in order to place their experience within an oppressive regime

before the eyes of their audience. In telling their stories, the two women oppose

the state. Literary references, as Chapter 3 clarifies, are used to further

emphasise key themes, such as the male domination over women and the

protagonists’ struggle to maintain their individuality.

2
 Table of Contents

Introduction
Totalitarianism and Religious Fundamentalism
between East and West.........................................................................................4

Chapter 1
The State versus the Individual: Patterns of Subjection.....................................17

Chapter 2
Resisting Subjection: The Role of Storytelling and the Use of Language
in Negotiating Identity.......................................................................................35

Chapter 3
Art’s Higher Purpose: The Role of Intertextuality in Mediating
between Public and Private Identity...................................................................52

Conclusion..........................................................................................................69

Bibliography.......................................................................................................75

3
 Introduction

Totalitarianism and Religious Fundamentalism between East and West

Totalitarian regimes, real or imaginary, Eastern or Western, all share a

few common characteristics: ideology, propaganda, continuous surveillance,

and executions, all centred around the concept of power. According to Hannah

Arendt, ‘Power became the essence of political action and the center of political

thought when it was separated from the political community which it should

serve.’1 The kind of power described here by Arendt, who draws on the

philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (See Leviathan [1651]), is the accumulated

control over the community that grants individual advantages. In other words, it

is the power of the privileged ruling class, Party, or the dictator alone.

Dictatorships, such as those of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, deny citizens their

supposedly ‘inalienable human rights’.2 People are deprived of their

fundamental rights, such as the pursuit of happiness, the freedom of speech or

equality before the law. Significantly, Arendt points out that terror is used by

totalitarian regimes as ‘an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly

obedient.’3 Yet ideology precedes terror and it ‘must have won the adherence of

1
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin Classics, 2017), p. 179.
2
Arendt, p. 381.
3
Arendt, p. 7.

4
many’ before a reign of terror can be installed. 4 The masses do not simply have

to submit to the will of the rulers, but preferably truly believe in the ideology of

the state.

Ideology in theocratic states is equated with religious fundamentalism.

Erica Appleros argues that the term fundamentalism can be applied to any

religion or religious sects ‘that reject Western secular modernism, and that want

to return to a literal interpretation of the religious scriptures they abide by,

strictly following the moral code they find therein.’ 5 Appleros emphasises the

idea that religious fundamentalism has ‘patriarchal politics of identity’ at its

core, attempting to maintain male domination not only in the religious sphere

but in all socio-political spheres.6 This idea can be extended to both the Islamic

Republic of Iran in its revolutionary and postrevolutionary times, as described

by Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran7, and to the Christian

fundamentalism on which the Republic of Gilead – the fictional near future

New England created by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale8 – is based.

Like Appleros, Minoo Moallem deems religious fundamentalism ‘a

useful site for comparing unfreedom and freedom, with important implications

4
Arendt, p. 8.
5
Erica Appelros, ‘Gender within Christian fundamentalism – a philosophical analysis of
conceptual oppression’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 75.5 (2014), 460-
473 (p. 460).
6
See Appleros, p. 461.
7
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (London: Penguin Classics, 2015); hereafter RLT.
8
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 2017); hereafter THT.

5
for women’s movements.’9 Looking at both Moallem and Appleros, it becomes

clear that Christian and Islamic fundamentalism act upon women in a similar

way. Relatedly, Michel Foucault suggests the idea that power and knowledge

are deeply interwoven. Consequently, acquiring power does not mean losing

knowledge, but instead ‘the exercise of power itself creates and causes to

emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of

information.’10 Likewise, ‘knowledge constantly induces effects of power.’ 11 In

other words, Foucault argues that knowledge is power and vice-versa. This

point is invaluable in clarifying power relations between men and women as

they appear in theocracies based on either Islam or Christianity. Thus, men hold

both power and knowledge, while women are forcibly reduced to a status of

feminine ignorance masked as their proper, natural role.

However, power relations, such as those between men and women or

between religious and non-religious people within theocracies, are never

entirely straightforward. It is worth mentioning a difference at play within any

religious fundamentalist ideology, between what Herbert Helm Jr. et al. call

intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation. Thus, they claim that ‘An intrinsic

religious orientation is characterized by being involved in religion and

9
Minoo Moallem, Between warrior brother and veiled sister: Islamic fundamentalism and the
politics of patriarchy in Iran (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 16.
10
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed.
by Colin Gordon, trans. by Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 51.
11
Foucault, p. 52.

6
internally committed to it as ultimates, because one truly believes in one’s

faith.’12 By comparison, ‘A person with an extrinsic religious orientation is

characterized as using religion instrumentally or for personal social benefits.’ 13

On one hand, women who willingly submit to their lesser roles within a

religious community arguably have an intrinsic religious orientation. Appleros

equally points to the idea that ‘Christian fundamentalism maintains that women

are not oppressed when they have, for religious reasons, voluntarily chosen to

limit and subordinate themselves.’14 This might explain why in both the real

Islamic Republic and the fictional Republic of Gilead some women embrace

their natural roles as wives and mothers.

On the other hand, the differentiation between true believers and those

who use religion to gain and maintain power brings into focus how the mass

man functions, and how the masses are controlled. Thus, Arendt suggests the

idea that the mass man yearns ‘for anonymity’, that he wishes to be a mere part

of a much larger whole, either because he believes in the regime’s ideology or

out of self-preservation.15 As Mikhail Bakunin, on whose ideas Arendt builds

here, claimed in 1870, this is the mentality of a collectivistic society where the

12
Herbert W. Helm Jr., John M. Berecz, and Emily A. Nelson, ‘Religious Fundamentalism and
Gender Differences’, Pastoral Psychology, 50.1 (2001), 25-37 (p. 28).
13
Helm Jr. et al., p. 28.
14
Appleros, p. 463; emphasis in original.
15
Arendt, p. 431.

7
individual says ‘I do not want to be I, I want to be We’.16 Thus, ‘totalitarian

movements aim at and succeed in organising masses, not classes’, as Arendt

mentions, because the mass shares a common way of thinking, as opposed to

individuals with separate opinions.17 This collectivistic view implies the fact

that individualism is not acceptable in a totalitarian regime. Mass conscience

inevitably appears in both RLT and THT and will be further analysed in Chapter

1 in discussing the respective revolutions and the establishment of the

theocratic states.

As shown above, religious fundamentalism functions similarly in the case

of Islam and Christianity. But even so, a differentiation between the two

religions, and more generally between East and West, persists to this day. Thus,

Edward Said’s Orientalism becomes crucial in examining the centuries-old

East/West divide. Said argues that ‘The Orient was almost a European

invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings,

haunting memories and landscapes, [and] remarkable experiences.’18

Orientalism provides an academic and theoretical milieu first for Europeans,

then for Americans, to explain the Orient and its place within Western

experience. As described by Said, the Occident and the Orient ‘are man-

16
See Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution (Boston, 1993), p. 180; as cited in Arendt, p. 432;
emphasis in original.
17
Arendt, p. 403.
18
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Classics, 2019), p. 1.

8
made’.19 Orientalising the Orient means creating an arbitrary image based on

generalisations, and ultimately a dehumanisation of the Orientals.

This academic discipline is considered by Said no more than a tool used

to Other the East, providing a basis for the Westerners’ idea that ‘The Oriental

is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different” [while] the European is

rational, virtuous, mature, “normal”.’20 In line with Said’s idea, Moallem also

claims that ‘Islamic fundamentalism has become a generic signifier used

relentlessly to single out the Muslim other in its irrational, morally inferior, and

barbaric masculinity and its passive, victimized, and submissive femininity.’ 21

The differentiation between Easterners and Westerners functions on all socio-

cultural and political levels. But returning to the question of religion, Said’s

description of (perceived) differences between Islam and Christianity is

noteworthy. Said points out that ‘Islam was militant hostility to European

Christianity’ and that it has always been perceived as such by the Western

world.22 Islam is looked upon as failed Christianity during the earliest stages of

Orientalism’s development as a discipline, in the nineteenth century. 23 The

East/West divide provided several scholars with the grounds to criticise both

Nafisi and Atwood for their narratives, although from different standpoints.

19
Said, p. 5.
20
Said, p. 40.
21
Moallem, p. 8.
22
Said, p. 91.
23
See Said, pp. 103-4.

9
 Before moving on to look at critics’ different, and often completely

opposed opinions, I will briefly outline the main elements of both RLT and

THT. RLT is a memoir by Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi. The book is

divided into four sections, walking the reader through Nafisi’s experiences in

anachronical order. The first part, Lolita, begins with the author’s private

literature class, while also dealing with her resignation from the University of

Allameh Tabatabai. The second part, Gatsby, is set before Lolita and presents

Nafisi’s memories of going back to Tehran after her university student years in

America, and the first years of the Iranian revolution. The third part, James,

centres on the Iran-Iraq War and Nafisi’s expulsion from the University of

Tehran for refusing to veil. Finally, the fourth and last part, Austen, returns to

Nafisi’s private class, as she and her selected female students discuss the issue

of marriage in connection to women’s rights. The memoir, and its particular

focus on women, led to criticism of both the book and Nafisi personally.

By contrast, THT is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret

Atwood. The protagonist and first-person narrator is a woman named Offred,

one of the Handmaids, who are the few remaining fertile women in an era of

environmental pollution and radiation. Under the new law, based on ideas from

the Old Testament, they are forced to produce children for the Commanders, the

ruling class of men. The handmaids are assigned to a commander’s house and

10
subjected to the Ceremony – a reproductive ritual intended to result in

conception in the presence of the Wife, reiterating the biblical story of Rachel

and her maid Bilhah. Offred’s narrative presents the reader with an

anachronistic account of her present situation and her dreams and memories of

her previous life, including the revolution, her failed attempt to escape to

Canada with her husband and daughter, and her time at the Rachel and Leah

Re-education Center.

Turning now to analysing criticism, in an article on RLT, Coleen Clemens

points to the criticism of Hamid Dabashi, who calls Nafisi a ‘native informer’

and claims her memoir to be ‘partially responsible for cultivating the US (and

by extension global) public opinion against Iran’.24 In line with Dabashi’s

critique of Nafisi and her memoir, Mitra Rastegar gives an account of reviews

of RLT that argue how ‘Nafisi’s experience of teaching canonical Western

literature […] is understood to show how the “universal” values of these works

allow Iranian women a space in which to experience moments of liberation,

providing an alternative “liberation” narrative.’25 While this may be true, it is

too broad a statement. Nafisi does seek to provide an alternative liberation

through literature and imagination, as will become clear in Chapters 2 and 3 of

24
Hamid Dabashi, ‘Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire’, Al-Ahram
Weekly (2006), p. 3; as cited in Colleen Lutz Clemens, ‘Imagine us in the act of reading: a
resistant reading of Reading Lolita in Tehran’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50.5 (2004),
584-95 (p. 585).
25
Mitra Rastegar, ‘Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism, and “Liberating”
Iranian Women’, Women's Studies Quarterly, 34.1/2 (Spring 2006), 108-28 (p. 108).

11
this project, but she cannot do so for all Iranian women. She can only provide

such a refuge to herself and a few of her female students.

Nafisi is equally criticised for promoting an image of Iranian women as

oppressed victims and for accentuating the East/West divide. 26 From an

Orientalist perspective, this may be so. Nafisi does address the differences

between Iran and America, and by extension between a theocratic and a

democratic system. But in so doing, the focus falls on personal experience and

on mediating between public and private aspects of identity. The success of the

memoir can be argued to have prompted some Westerners to use the memoir

for further Othering the Orient. However, I would still argue that this was not

Nafisi’s intention, and how the readership interprets and uses her memoir is

outside her immediate control. Thus, I tend to agree with Clemens in

approaching Nafisi’s book not as a political work, not as a manifesto, but as a

work focusing on how oppression affects her and several other women’s sense

of self.

As far as Atwood’s novel is concerned, Gorman Beauchamp considers it

to be an implausible dystopian narrative. 27 While the reasons Beauchamp

provides are valid, I disagree with his approach, particularly because Atwood

herself justifies potential implausibility in claiming that the book is meant not

26
See Rastegar, pp. 108-9.
27
See Gorman Beauchamp, ‘The Politics of the Handmaid's Tale’, The Midwest Quarterly, 51.1
(2009), 11-25.

12
as a foretelling, but rather as an anti-prediction of the future. In an Introduction

to THT added in 2017, Atwood accounts for her sources of inspiration,

including the fact that in 1984, while she was writing the novel, she lived in

West Germany. Thus, the author visited a few of the communist countries on

the other side of the Berlin Wall, where she ‘experienced the weariness, the

feeling of being spied on, the silences, the change of subject, the oblique ways

in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what

I was writing.’28

The source of the religious fundamentalist ideas, she claims, is America’s

Puritanic past, as she sets the events in THT around Harvard University, ‘once a

Puritan theological seminary.’29 Beauchamp also points in his article to

important elements of the religious and political contexts in which Atwood

produced her controversial novel. Thus, during the time the author wrote her

tale, as well as afterwards, it appears that in the United States ‘the Religious

Right seems to have established a permanent caucus in the Republican Party’. 30

Noteworthy is ‘Pat Robertson’s characterisation of feminism as “a socialistic,

anti-family political movement’ encouraging divorce, abortion, homosexuality

and threaten to ‘destroy capitalism’.31 Needless to say, this is a critique rooted

28
Atwood, p. ix.
29
Atwood, p. x.
30
Beauchamp, p. 15.
31
Beauchamp, p. 15.

13
in Catholic fundamentalism, seeking to return to a traditional patriarchal system

where feminism threatens to overturn male domination.

As indicated previously, Nafisi’s RLT is a memoir and Atwood’s THT is a

dystopian narrative. To help explain this difference in genre, I rely on the

theory of Max Saunders. First, he points to the term autobiografiction, coined

by Stephen Reynolds, suggesting that this kind of life-writing ‘is “real”

autobiographical experience (the “spiritual experiences”) turned into fictional

form.’32 In autobiografiction, the author’s experience itself can be fictionalised

in terms of altering events or of attributing experience to someone else. In

Nafisi’s case, the experience is her own, but there are elements of fiction, such

as the changing of names, the appropriation or imagining of other people’s

experience, or the narrative control she holds over all the characters in her

memoir, at times including herself. Similarly, autobiografiction allows for a

life-writing to take a particular focus, such as ‘spiritual crisis, aesthetic

development, childhood, a friendship, and so on.’33 As far as Nafisi’s memoir is

concerned, she places the focus on women’s experience and academic life

under the Islamic Republic.

While the term autobiografiction sheds light on the few fictionalised

elements of an otherwise real life-writing, Saunders later points to another

32
See Stephen Reynolds, ‘Autobiografiction’, Speaker, 15.366 (1906), p. 28, 30; as cited in
Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 171.
33
Saunders, p. 171.

14
‘main way in which auto/biography and fiction might interfuse: that is, when,

instead of autobiographical spiritual experiences threaded onto a fictional

narrative, a writer presents fictional experience in auto/biographical form’. 34

Arguably, this is how Atwood attempts to present Offred’s narrative, which can

be seen as the imitation of a memoir. THT ends with an epilogue appearing

under the suggestive name Historical Notes and being presented as an

international conference, conducted by the Gileadean Research Association,

and taking place in the year of 2195. The keynote speaker explains that Offred’s

narrative, recorded on tapes, was found and transcribed by historians studying

the Gilead era.35 Thus, the author presents the narrative as a found document.

My subsequent chapters will focus particularly on the experience of the two

protagonists of RLT and THT, namely Nafisi and Offred, justifying the focus on

the similarities between the two through this idea that both are memoirs. As

stated above, Nafisi’s memoir is real, while Offred’s is fictional and made to

look real, but they share noteworthy stylistic similarities, such as the first-

person narrative, directly addressing a future audience, and high subjectivity

given by the fact that they write from memory.

This section has attempted to provide a brief overview of how theocracies

work, how totalitarian ideas intermix with religious fundamentalism, and how

34
Saunders, p. 208.
35
See Atwood, pp. 303-4.

15
religion serves to validate authoritarianism in the conscience of the masses.

Equally, the introduction endeavoured to provide a summary of the two books

that this dissertation focuses on, outlining their reception and concluding with a

clarification of how the difference in genre will be approached subsequently.

The chapter that follows examines the general theocratic characteristics

described here as they are reflected in RLT and THT.

16
 Chapter 1

The State versus the Individual: Patterns of Subjection

The 1970s are characterised by revolutionary thinking in both Iran and

America. For instance, in justifying the immediacy of the establishment of

Gilead in a near future New England, Beauchamp notes that ‘Atwood has

adduced the example of Iran under the ayatollahs as an instance of a society’s

performing such an abrupt volte-face’.36 This idea that Atwood was inspired by

the Iranian revolution, and subsequent establishment of the Islamic Republic,

allows for further comparison between the fictive Gilead and the real Iran of

Nafisi’s memoir. Indeed, both RLT and THT comment upon the divide between

the Christian and Muslim worlds, a divide that is closely connected to the

respective revolutions and the establishment of the new law.

In the case of the Islamic Republic, as Mark Haas notes, ‘Before the

revolution, Iran was one of America’s closest allies among Muslim-majority

countries; afterward, it was one of America’s bitterest enemies.’ 37 Haas

analyses the root causes of this enmity between the Islamic Republic of Iran

and the United States of America between 1997 and 2009. It must be noted that

the starting point of Haas’s analysis, the year 1997, is the year in which Nafisi
36
Beauchamp, p. 13.
37
Mark L. Haas, ‘Iranian Ideological Factions and International Policies, 1997–2009’, in The
Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), pp. 67-124 (p. 67).

17
and her family left Tehran. However, in terms of state ideology, it is useful to

mention that ‘From roughly 1997 to 2005, Iranian leaders were divided into two

main ideological groups, frequently labeled “reformers” and “conservatives.”’ 38

The conservatives are my main focus here, with their key role in preserving the

system established by Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution, ‘which

included rule by clergy based on a narrow interpretation of Islamic law’ and a

rejection of all previously accepted ideas, such as ‘materialism […] and the

separation of religion from politics.’ 39 Islam thus becomes antithetical to

Western liberalism, as the latter’s perceived decadence threatens to undermine

the Iranian state.

By comparison, in THT one notable instance in which the East/West

divide appears is ‘when they shot the president and machine-gunned the

Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the

Islamic fanatics, at the time.’40 It is the moment the new Republic of Gilead

starts to emerge, and the Muslim world acts as a scapegoat, a façade behind

which the new totalitarian regime hides the truth. Scapegoating the ‘Islamic

fanatics’ may be argued to stem from the influence the Iranian revolution and

postrevolutionary Iran under the ayatollahs had on Atwood, mirroring the

Iranian scapegoating of America.

38
Haas, p. 69.
39
Haas, pp. 69-70.
40
Atwood, p. 173.

18
 As suggested above, propaganda is one of the main elements through

which the Islamic Republic and Gilead promote their respective ideologies.

Propaganda in the Islamic Republic of Iran is conducted mainly through

slogans coined by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Party of God. As Clemens

points out, ‘By flooding the airwaves with images of western suffering, the

state of Iran attempted to dull the imagination of its people, so that they could

not imagine a different life for themselves.’41 Clemens’ observation exemplifies

the fact that propaganda is used to prevent free thinking. This idea reflects in

Nafisi’s representation of Iran in the second part of her memoir, where she

returns home from the States to be welcomed by slogans against America

painted on the airport walls, such as ‘AMERICA CAN’T DO A DAMN

THING AGAINST US! THIS IS NOT A STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE U.S.

AND IRAN, IT’S A STRUGGLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND BLASPHEMY.’42

The slogans, and the revolutionaries’ need to paint them on walls, imply

the idea that American influence is still present in Iran, that the ideals of

progress and modernity have not disappeared together with the Pahlavi dynasty.

The usual differentiation between East and West, where the Westerners are seen

as civilised and the Easterners as savage, is reversed by Iranian slogans like the

one mentioned above. Here, the Islamic Republic holds America as inferior, as

41
Clemens, p. 589.
42
Nafisi, p. 104; capitals in original.

19
decadent. Western decadence is a mere pretext, while the Iranian

postrevolutionary state arguably reiterates what Arendt expresses as one of the

key principles of totalitarianism – ‘whoever is not with me is against me’. 43 At

the same time, slogans like the one mentioned above seem to suggest that

behind the very declaration that America and its so-called decadent principles

are powerless when faced with Iranian people’s righteousness hides the fear

that liberalism might overturn Iran’s state politics.

Propaganda in THT appears under different forms, most notably at the

Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, meant to educate future handmaids in

the spirit of Gilead. Here, they are expected to renounce their former selves and

embrace their new roles under the guidance of the Aunts. Consequently, the

propagandist teachings of Aunt Lydia function like the Iranian slogans, in the

sense that Gilead too emphasises a differentiation between past and present,

between freedom seen as decadent and the new law seen as a righteous way of

life. About the previous American society, Aunt Lydia says that it was ‘a

society dying […] of too much choice.’ 44 The aim of both the Gileadean system

and the Iranian one is to limit choice.

And once the system is established, Arendt points out, propaganda is

directed more at the outside world than the already indoctrinated citizens of the

43
Arendt, p. 498.
44
Atwood, p. 25.

20
totalitarian state.45 This kind of propaganda meant for the outside world is

briefly mentioned in THT when a group of Japanese tourists visits Gilead. The

tourists are dressed ‘normally’, and Offred recalls that she ‘used to dress like

that. That was freedom. Westernized, they used to call it.’46 When asked if she

is happy, Offred replies in the affirmative; as she notes, what else could she

have said?47 This scene is in line with Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, and

particularly of a totalitarian state’s ‘front organizations [that] surround the

movements’ membership with a protective wall which separates them from the

outside, normal world’.48 They present a different, utopian image to the outside

world, very similar to how Gilead and the handmaids must appear to the

Japanese tourists.

Returning to how ideology functions within the state, it is worth

mentioning that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Gilead seek to

promote a collective conscience in the name of God. Linking mass conscience

with religion, Gregory Claeys builds on Freudian ideas, and particularly on

Freud’s ‘The Future of an Illusion (1928), the “illusion” being religion, [under

whose influence] the crowd reveals the primitive “memory traces of earlier

generations”, the instincts lurking beneath the thin veneer of everyday

45
See Arendt, p. 449.
46
Atwood, p. 28; emphasis in original.
47
See Atwood, p. 29.
48
Arendt, p. 479.

21
“civilised” life.’49 This is how so many people willingly submit to autocracy

and even support fundamentalist ideas. Correspondingly, Arendt argues that

mass conscience does not issue from ‘brutality and backwardness’, but from

‘isolation and lack of normal social relationships.’ 50 Individuals are severed

from each other in the state’s attempt to ensure total domination. Individuality

must be dimmed, while individuals must ‘be reduced to a never-changing

identity’ that would allow the forming of an undifferentiated mass.51

Similarly, in discussing revolutions, Darrow Schecter notes that

‘Somehow the modern revolutions championing individual rights and popular

or parliamentary sovereignty needed an ongoing series of consolidating

sequels.’52 By contrast, revolutions based on collectivist ideas seem not to need

the same kind of subsequent action. Fundamentalist ideas in both RLT and THT

are eventually accepted, either because there is no alternative or because there

are true believers among the masses. In the case of the Islamic Republic,

Moallem claims that the revolution and its subsequent new legislation divided

Iranian women, determining them to choose between ‘staying in the homeland

to either join or resist, or becoming diasporic.’ 53 Both Moallem and Nafisi

49
See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Anchor Books, 1964), p. 49; as cited in
Gregory Claeys, ‘Rethinking the Political Dystopia’, in Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 4-58 (p. 27).
50
Arendt, p. 415.
51
Arendt, p. 573.
52
Darrow Schecter, ‘Critical theory and mediated non-identity’, in Critical Theory in the
Twenty-First Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 95-130 (p. 104).
53
Moallem, p. 5.

22
inscribe themselves in the latter category. In THT, by contrast, leaving Gilead is

not an option. As Offred says, the state is not afraid they would run away, as

they have nowhere to go. Instead, the state fears ‘those other escapes, the ones

you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.’ 54 Even suicide is a choice that

is taken away from them.

While religious dogma acts as a powerful tool to manipulate the masses,

particularly in Iran, the respective theocratic states also ensure the citizens’

obedience with the help of the secret police or equivalent authorities. The

Revolutionary Guards in the Islamic Republic of Iran are very similar to the

Eyes of God, informally known as the Eyes, in the Republic of Gilead. But

while the Eyes are only mentioned in passing in Atwood’s novel, in RLT Nafisi

mentions that ‘The streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities are patrolled by

militia’.55 This, together with the house raids, make Nafisi state that the Iranian

people ‘were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that

constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives’.56

Closely linked to the raids are the so-called confessions – or as Arendt

later points out, totalitarian regimes’ replacement of ‘the suspected offense

[with] the possible crime.’57 This idea of confessing to a crime one did not

54
Atwood, p. 8.
55
Nafisi, p. 26.
56
Nafisi, p. 67.
57
Arendt, p. 558.

23
commit surfaces in both Atwood’s novel and Nafisi’s memoir. Where in Iran

women are forced to sign false confessions, in Gilead, at the Re-education

Center, also known as the Red Center, they are put through what is called

Testifying. This practice appears to be based on the Roman Catholic

confessional, which ‘was a means of regulating the sexuality of its believers’. 58

When one of the future handmaids, Janine, talks about the gang rape that she

went through at the age of fourteen, the others are encouraged to chant ‘her

fault’, and even Janine herself says, ‘It was my own fault. I led them on. I

deserved the pain.’59 Arguably, this scene can be equated with popular justice as

described by Foucault.60 Blaming the victim in Gilead and the unjust

punishments women are subjected to in Iran – for as much as showing a strand

of hair or painting their nails – are based on traditional popular justice that is

unregulated by the state. These punishments based on popular justice can be

seen as ‘profoundly anti-judicial’, but in Gilead and Iran the new law is deeply

rooted in tradition and justice becomes biased.61

As regards women’s status, theocracies appear to use religion as an

ambivalent ideology at once sexualising and desexualising them. Invisibility

and modesty are presented in both Iran and Gilead as a way for women to avoid

58
Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 72-3.
59
Atwood, p. 72; emphasis in original.
60
See Foucault, p. 1.
61
Foucault, p. 6.

24
the male gaze. As Corbella mentions in the case of the Islamic Republic, ‘The

patriarchy effects [women’s] objectification by confining their “essence” within

the body, controlling their sexuality and speech, and enforcing hejab – religious

modesty and veiling – even among non-religious women.’62 Moallem suggests a

similar viewpoint in linking the mandatory veiling to the Western perception of

Muslim women as passive and oppressed victims. From her viewpoint, ‘Both

pre- and postrevolutionary discourses commemorate specific bodies – through

gendered and heterosexist practices’.63 From Moallem’s perspective, Iranian

women have always been subjected to state regulations that imposed certain

practices on them. While the Pahlavi regime’s liberality enforced unveiling

even on religious women, Khomeini’s turned towards the other extreme,

namely piousness and traditionalism.

Relatedly, Kath Woodward points out how ‘Institutions like the state do

have the power to restrict individual or collective freedom to adopt some

identities.’64 The two pictures Nafisi describes at the beginning of her memoir

are key to understanding how women’s identity can be restricted by the Iranian

state. In the first picture, she and her ‘girls’ – the students chosen for her private

literature class – ‘are, according to the law of the land, dressed in black robes
62
Walter Corbella, ‘Strategies of Resistance and the Problem of Ambiguity in Azar Nafisi's
Reading Lolita in Tehran’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 39.2
(Jun 2006), 107-23 (p. 108).
63
Moallem, p. 59.
64
Kath Woodward, ‘Questions of identity’, in Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Ethnicity,
ed. by Kath Woodward (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 5-41 (p. 11).

25
and head scarves, covered except for the oval of their faces and their hands.’ 65

By contrast, for the second photograph, they take off the compulsory

hijab/chador, and thus ‘Splashes of color separate one from the next. Each has

become distinct’.66 Colour is equated here with each woman’s uniqueness, but

their individuality can only be expressed in private.

The compulsory coverings in RLT recall the modesty costumes from

Atwood’s novel. Western religion and iconography inspired the author to create

these costumes compulsory in Gilead. Thus, ‘the Wives wear the blue of purity,

from the Virgin Mary, [while] the Handmaids wear red, from the blood of

parturition, but also from Mary Magdalene.’67 Significantly, Offred highlights

the idea that the handmaids must both be invisible and prevented from looking

anyone in the eye. Thus, she describes her red costume, with its ‘ankle-length

[skirt], full, gathered to a flat yoke that extends over the breasts […] The white

wings [covering the face] too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from

seeing, but also from being seen.’68 Nafisi equally emphasises the invisibility of

women wearing their veiling, saying that ‘Sometimes, almost unconsciously, I

would withdraw my hands into my wide sleeves and start touching my legs or

my stomach. Do they exist? Do I exist?’ 69 Thus, she feels as if she disappears

65
Nafisi, p. 4.
66
Idem.
67
Atwood, p. xiii.
68
Atwood, p. 8.
69
Nafisi, p. 168.

26
behind the black cloth. And where both women suggest a physical

disappearance, from the point of view of identity a psychological disappearance

is also implied.

Nafisi equally recalls the pride with which her grandmother used to wear

the chador, as a symbol of faith. But after the Islamic Republic made it

mandatory, ‘the chador was forever marred by the political significance it had

gained.’70 Nafisi presents the veil as a way to silence women and to

defamiliarize their own body, their movement, their agency. While having

autonomy over one’s own body seems only logical, in RLT the female body

seems to disappear, to be reduced to a state of invisibility bordering on

uselessness and in THT the female body becomes a national resource, a

commodity to be used by the commanders. What happens to women’s bodies in

both books is that the ‘body is to be given over to others’. 71 Offred also notes

she ‘used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of

transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.’ 72 Personal

will represents exactly what she loses the moment her body – or rather just her

womb – becomes a national resource.

Closely connected to the subjection of the female body is the issue of sex

and how it becomes a political tool in both RLT and THT, at once rejected and

70
Nafisi, p. 192.
71
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 20.
72
Atwood, p. 73.

27
ever-present. Thus, Nafisi mentions how the Iranian ‘culture shunned sex

because it was too involved with it. […] We had always segregated sex from

feeling and from intellectual love’.73 Sex is equally segregated from love, and

even from physical desire, in THT. When Offred describes the Ceremony, she

mentions that it ‘is not exciting. It has nothing to do with passion or love or

romance or any of those other notions we used to titillate ourselves with. It has

nothing to do with sexual desire’.74 Similarly, Offred mentions that ‘nobody

dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.’ 75 She reiterates this idea

when Commander Waterford asks her what the Republic of Gilead has

overlooked, and she replies simply ‘Love.’ 76 Further emphasising Offred’s need

for human connection is the fact that something as simple as a game of Scrabble

with her commander gives her a sense of freedom, because as she says, what

was once a mere game played by the elderly, ‘Now it’s dangerous. Now it’s

indecent. […] Now it’s desirable.’77 She can enjoy a taste of normalcy in a

forbidden place – the commander’s office, behind closed doors. Or at least what

‘looks like normal life.’78

The fact that Offred rejoices in this connection can be explained through

the term ‘secondary gain’, used by Patrick Hogan and ‘introduced by Freud
73
Nafisi, p. 304.
74
Atwood, p. 95.
75
Atwood, p. 103.
76
Atwood, p. 221.
77
Atwood, p. 139.
78
Atwood, p 137.

28
[…] to account for a patient’s attachment to his or her symptom.’ 79 The

oppressed begins to get used to his/her new (lesser) role and starts to embrace

it. In Hogan’s words, the ‘secondary benefits have become for the patient more

certain, more palpable, more reliable than the merely promised direct benefits

of the cure.’80 In Gilead, pregnancy acts as such a secondary gain for all

handmaids. A pregnant woman becomes ‘a magic presence […] an object of

envy and desire’, because even if she only acts as a surrogate, she will never be

declared an Unwoman and sent to the Colonies – a counterpart of forced labour

concentration camps.81 Similarly, Nafisi is ‘given the choice of either veiling or

being jailed, flogged and perhaps killed’ if she kept refusing it. 82 Part of her

choice to veil is indeed prompted by her fear of punishment. Part of it, however,

is because accepting the veil means being able to continue teaching, and thus

preserving an important aspect of her public life.

While women in general – and the two protagonists in particular – finally

appear to submit to their new fate, in reality, they can be argued to perform a

role at odds with their private lives. As Arendt argues, ‘Each society demands

of its members a certain amount of acting, the ability to present, represent, and
79
See Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’, in General Psychological
Theory, ed. by Philip Rieff, trans. by Joan Riviere (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 59; as
cited in Patrick Colm Hogan, ‘Dominations and Problematics: On Accepting Oppressive
Ideologies’, in The Politics of Interpretation: Ideology, Professionalism, and the Study of
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 140-73 (p. 141).
80
Hogan, p. 141; emphasis in original.
81
Atwood, p. 26.
82
Nafisi, p. 152.

29
act what one actually is.’83 Critics discussing the concept of identity from

interdisciplinary perspectives all point towards the central idea that identity is

socially formed and unavoidably involves mediation between its private and

public aspects. Arendt’s idea is particularly in line with Steph Lawler’s

approach to identity. Thus, Lawler claims that ‘When a gap is seen to exist

between doing and being – or semblance and substance – then the person is

liable to be accused of pretension, inauthenticity or “acting a role”.’ 84 However,

there are situations in which people must perform a certain identity in order to

fit into society, and such situations occur in the public sphere in both Iran and

Gilead. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argues that the idea of performing

one’s gender is not an individual, personal choice but a normative act that

attempts ‘to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the

service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative.’ 85 In other words, a

natural difference in biological sex serves to impose certain gender norms on

the body. Equally, public aspects of identity arguably issue from

acting/performing in a socially acceptable manner.

Looking in more detail at the way Butler approaches the difference

between sex and gender, it is worth noting that she claims the ‘sexed body will

83
Arendt, p. 109.
84
Steph Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), p.
116.
85
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge,
2014), p. 2.

30
not be a set of actions performed in compliance with the law; on the contrary,

they will be a set of actions mobilized by the law.’ 86 In other words, the state

dictates how gendered identity must be performed, and this is how in both RLT

and THT the female gender becomes a symbol of passivity. Even if Jennifer

Gove and Stuart Watt rightly note that ‘Behind the apparent simplicity of two

genders, there is a diversity of gender characteristics’, the theocracies here

analysed seek to overlook the unique characteristics of individuals, alternatively

basing their gendered classifications on religious, fundamentalist ideas. 87 These

stereotypical ideas ‘do not just shape the way we perceive other people, they

also shape the way we behave.’88 When negative stereotypes based on gendered

roles become lawful norms, people have to identify as strictly male or female.

Kath Woodward’s idea that people ‘choose to identify with a particular identity

or group’ is true in a society where the individual is allowed to construct his/her

identity actively, but in the case of Nafisi and Offred, agency is diminished. 89

Looking at the work of Judith Butler inevitably brings into focus issues of

feminism. Thus, Atwood shows how elements of 1980s feminism, ‘such as the

anti-porn campaign and greater safety from sexual assault’, can be twisted into

political tools.90 The Gileadean society sees the Women’s Liberation movement
86
Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 12.
87
Jennifer Gove and Stuart Watt, ‘Identity and gender’, in Questioning Identity: Gender, Class,
Ethnicity, ed. by Kath Woodward (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 43-77 (p. 44).
88
Gove and Watt, p. 53.
89
Woodward, p. 6; emphasis in original.
90
Atwood, p. xii.

31
and their sexual revolution ‘as excesses to be eliminated’. 91 Similarly, Sayyed

Moosavinia and Tayyebeh Yousefi significantly argue how ‘Offred, as a

woman who was born and raised during women's liberation movement, finds

herself in a situation where she is expected to embrace her invisibility as a

natural dimension of her gender.’92 The same can be argued about Nafisi, taken

into consideration her time spent in the US, and the independence she must

have rejoiced in during pre-revolutionary times even in Iran.

As opposed to feminist claims to independence and equality, in Gilead,

the property of women, their money, everything passes to their closest male

relatives, as they are fired from their workplaces.93 Offred recalls that she felt

‘as if somebody cut off [her] feet’; she felt useless, erased. 94 She loses her

independence and becomes an object, belonging to her husband. Similarly,

Nafisi mentions ‘the struggle to preserve democratic rights, including women’s

rights and freedom of the press.’95 Later on, she mentions the 1979-1980 battles

‘over women’s rights: from the very start, the government had waged a war

against women, and the most important battles were being fought then.’ 96 Nafisi

91
Erika Gottlieb, ‘Dictatorship without a Mask: Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Vonnegut’s Player
Piano, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, in Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of
Terror and Trial (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), pp. 88-112 (p. 105).
92
Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia and Tayyebeh Behvand Yousefi, ‘New Norms of Gender and
Emergence of Identity Crisis in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale’, 3L: The South East
Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 24.1 (2018), 162-74, p. 163.
93
See Atwood, pp. 176-7.
94
Atwood, p. 178.
95
Nafisi, p. 92.
96
Nafisi, p. 111.

32
herself gets involved in protests against mandatory veiling, unaware that she

began to develop ‘two different ways of life.’ 97 But ultimately, like in Gilead,

Iranian women in Nafisi’s memoir are also objectified, to the point where they

become invisible to the society at large.

Where women’s rights are erased by the state, in public they are bound to

perform ‘for an audience, and the private self knows that such performances are

essential to identity and to the maintenance of respect and trust in routine social

interaction.’98 But where the state continuously tries to impose the public status

of objects on women, or make them invisible, Nafisi and Offred try to maintain

that other way of life, the colourful and personal one. The following chapter

moves on to describe in greater detail the tools both protagonists employ in

their attempt to preserve their personal identity, such as storytelling, which

inevitably links to the use of language.

97
Idem.
98
Elliott, p. 340.

33
 Chapter 2

Resisting Subjection: The Role of Storytelling and the Use of Language

in Negotiating Identity

Storytelling is the key tool used by Nafisi and Offred in preserving the

private aspects of their identities. A key idea in Lawler’s analysis of storytelling

is how people can be ‘producing an identity through assembling various

memories, experiences, episodes, etc., within narrative.’ 99 She puts emphasis on

‘identities as “made up” through making a story out of a life.’100 In other words,

identities can be negotiated and displayed before others through storytelling,

which is what Nafisi and Offred do in RLT and THT, respectively. Returning

99
Lawler, p. 24; emphasis in original.
100
Idem.

34
momentarily to Butler’s theory, she mentions that ‘It was Spinoza who claimed

that every human being seeks to persist in his own being’. 101 However, as Butler

points out, self-persistence is not something that can be attempted outside

society and interrelations. Instead, she claims that personal ‘reflexivity is not

only socially mediated, but socially constituted. I cannot be who I am without

drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me.’ 102 Elliott

makes a similar point in noting that, ‘As directors of our own lives, we draw

upon emotional frames of memory and desire, as well as wider cultural and

social resources, in fashioning the self.’ 103 What both Butler and Elliot’s ideas

clarify is that even the story of one’s private life cannot be constructed outside

society, and that interrelations inevitably become part of the narrative.

Relating one’s story can thus be argued to have both elements of

subjectivity and objectivity, both personal perspective and generally accepted

facts. Equally, a story is a construction, or as Offred says about her narrative, ‘a

reconstruction’ because ‘what you say can never be exact, you always have to

leave something out’.104 This is another point of comparison with Nafisi, as she

too writes her memoir as a reconstruction, based on things she can remember,

which to the reader never appear to be exact. 105 Lawler equally suggests that

101
Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 31.
102
Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 32.
103
Elliott, p. 12.
104
Atwood, p. 134.
105
See Nafisi, p. ix.

35
‘As the past is remembered, it is interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of the

person’s knowledge and understanding.’106 Previous events are also interpreted

from a new, present perspective. This explains in part why both Offred and

Nafisi reimagine the past where memory alone cannot account for everything

they wish to tell, and why their memories of a previously freer life gain new

meanings under oppressive regimes.

As Karen Stein points out, storytelling links with feminism because

‘women have often been the objects rather than the creators of narrative: their

stories have often been untold.’107 Both Nafisi and Offred tell stories that have

their status as women in a male world, or of objects in a male narrative, at their

core. And even as narrators, they cannot escape objectification. For instance,

towards the end of her narrative, Offred says, ‘I wish this story were different. I

wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier,

then at least more active’.108 These ideas are in line with the theory of feminist

writer Hélène Cixous, and particularly with the concept of écriture feminine. In

the essay ‘Castration or Decapitation?’, Cixous argues that in a men’s world

based on strict rules and regulations, ‘Women have no choice other than to be

decapitated […] if they don’t actually lose their heads by the sword, they only

keep them on condition that they lose them – lose them, that is, to complete

106
Lawler, p. 31.
107
Stein, p. 269.
108
Atwood, p. 269.

36
silence, turned into automatons.’109 While literal decapitation can be equated

with the unjust punishments highlighted in Chapter 1, metaphorical

decapitation is represented by losing fundamental human rights, by being

confined to traditional gender roles, and by being deemed naturally ignorant.

Particularly of interest is Cixous’s idea that ‘everything that’s organised

as discourse, art, religion, the family, language, everything that seizes us,

everything that acts on us – it is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that

come back to the man/woman opposition,’ to a differentiation between activity

and passivity argued to stem from nature or else from God’s will. 110 This

categorisation is used to account for women’s silencing. Cixous also points to

an equally patriarchal differentiation between speaking and talking, in arguing

that philosophical texts present the word as ‘women’s weapon […] because

they talk, talk endlessly, chatter, overflow with sound, mouth-sound: but they

don’t actually speak, they have nothing to say.’111 Only men speak, in the sense

that their word, their discourse holds power, while women merely talk – they

chatter – because they either do not have the power to change the laws men

create or they are simply never listened to.

109
Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’, trans. by Annette Kuhn, Signs, 7.1 (Autumn
1981), 41-55 (p. 42-3); emphasis in original.
110
Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’, p. 44.
111
Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’, p. 49; emphasis in original.

37
 As opposed to women’s objectification within male discourse, Cixous

proposes ‘a feminine Imaginary, the site, that is, of identifications of an ego no

longer given over to an image defined by the masculine’. 112 This is how Nafisi

and Offred write: they are both women writing about women’s experience and

arguably having a female readership in mind. They address a future, invisible

reader who might understand their struggle with oppression and with defining

and keeping a sense of their selves, of their individuality. Nafisi links this

dialogue with her audience to the power of imagination, highlighting the

importance of imagination throughout her memoir. She repeatedly calls for the

reader’s attention, saying that ‘I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we

won't really exist if you don't.’113 Similarly, Offred tells her story to a ‘Dear

You’114, to a reader or thousands of readers whom she ‘believe[s] into being.

Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you

are.’115

In addressing their readers, both protagonists also display a wish to tell a

different story, or rather tell the same story differently. As previously

mentioned, Offred says that she wished her narrative were different, that she

wished for more agency, and she equally says she is ‘sorry there is so much

112
Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’, p. 52.
113
Nafisi, p. 6.
114
Atwood, pp. 39-40.
115
Atwood, p. 269.

38
pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or

pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.’ 116 Similarly,

when Nafisi decides to leave Iran and move to America with her family, she

mentions that she needs to ‘leave and write my own story and teach my own

class.’117 In the epilogue, Nafisi tells her readers that she ‘left Tehran on June

24, 1997’, finally able to take action to change the course of her narrative,

unlike Offred who only has the prospect of escape with the help of Mayday,

Gilead’s resistance.118 Offred’s fate remains ambiguous to the reader.

In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous takes up the question of women’s

writing from where she left it in ‘Castration or Decapitation?’. Here, she argues

from the start that ‘Woman must write her self: must write about women and

bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as

from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal

goal.’119 Because by writing herself, Cixous seems to suggest, woman can tell

her story from her perspective, using her language and subjectivity, thus

breaking with objectification. Indeed, a female discourse like that of Nafisi and

Offred seeks to break with male domination, but such narratives within a

totalitarian regime are often seen as a crime and punished accordingly. Unlike

116
Idem.
117
Nafisi, p. 317.
118
Nafisi, p. 341.
119
Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs,
1.4 (Summer 1976), 875-893 (p. 875).

39
Nafisi’s narrative, which is written from outside the oppressive regime,

Offred’s story is in itself ‘a criminal act, performed in secret and lost for many

years.’120 That is because, while in Iran women are not allowed to speak with

men outside their family, in Gilead language is made taboo for most women,

both in public and in private.

Language is a central part of any individual’s life because, as Elliott

argues, ‘Without access to language there is no access to the symbols necessary

for thinking and acting as a self in a structured world of symbolic meaning.’ 121

This idea is particularly meaningful when looking at societies that ban the use

of language for women. In Gilead, publicly, the use of language is reduced to a

few phrases bearing religious connotations. As Offred mentions her first

meeting with her neighbour, Ofglen, she is greeted with ‘Blessed be the fruit’,

to which she gives the accepted reply, ‘May the Lord open’. 122 This is also one

of the instances in which the handmaids’ interchangeability is noted. This

Ofglen is a ‘new one’, as Offred says that she does not ‘know what happened to

the one before. On a certain day she simply wasn’t there anymore, and this one

was there in her place.’123

120
Karen F. Stein, ‘Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Scheherazade in Dystopia’,
University of Toronto Quarterly, 61.2 (Winter 1991/92), 269-79 (p. 269).
121
Elliott, p. 30.
122
Atwood, p. 19.
123
Idem.

40
 This interchangeability emphasises the objectification of the handmaids,

along with the fact that they are ‘Forbidden to acknowledge their names, their

selves’.124 Their names are the last shred of private identity that is confiscated

by the state. The handmaids receive new names meant to objectify them to an

extreme, showing that they belong to their respective commander (i.e., of +

Fred = Offred). When recalling how she and her family tried to escape Gilead

in its first days after the effects of the republic’s establishment began to appear,

Offred mentions that her ‘name isn’t Offred’, that she used to have another

name, which in Gilead acquires ‘an aura […] like an amulet, some charm that's

survived from an unimaginably distant past.’125 The name belongs to a past

identity that she might never regain. But at the same time, she appears to rejoice

in remembering her past name, in visualising it, and in being able to mention it

to the only person she trusts, Nick – Commander Waterford’s chauffeur, with

whom she has an affair.

Returning briefly to Lawler’s theory, she mentions that identity ‘becomes

[more] visible when it is seen to be missing.’ 126 In other words, an identity crisis

makes people aware of certain aspects of their identity. Crisis in both RLT and

THT arguably issues from an acute differentiation between public and private

identity aspects, between past and present situations, and in the case of Nafisi,

124
Stein, p. 271.
125
Atwood, p. 84.
126
Lawler, p. 1.

41
between Western and Eastern ideas and values as well. Where Chapter 1

discussed the political and propagandist implications of the East/West divide,

here the focus is on how cultural differences affect identity. Interestingly, Said

notes that his personal experience made him write Orientalism, since ‘The life

of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening.’ 127

He implies that being a cultural Other ‘always involves being a consciousness

set apart from, and unequal with, its surroundings.’128 However, in her memoir,

Nafisi presents America as a refuge from her oppressive native land. The idea

that ‘Nafisi experiences life in Iran as a state of homelessness’ because of the

state’s oppression which is alien to her suggests that is not just Iran that

changes into an unrecognisable image – Nafisi changes too.129

Consequently, going back to Iran from America to see slogans such as

‘DEATH TO AMERICA! DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM & ZIONISM!

AMERICA IS OUR NUMBER-ONE ENEMY!’ painted on all the airport

walls, the cultural shock she describes in those pages, suggest that Nafisi’s

American self is at odds with the new reality of Tehran. 130 She is forced to find

a way to mediate between her idealised image of home and this new reality.

Faced with the oppressive theocratic regime Nafisi finds upon her return to

127
Said, p. 27.
128
Said, p. 157; emphasis in original.
129
Corbella, pp. 111-2.
130
Nafisi, p. 81.

42
Tehran, she mentions that a few things saved her from feeling lost and alienated

as an individual: ‘my family and a small group of friends’, to which I would

add her teaching, together with all the Western books she discusses with her

students and all the ideas that issue from these discussions. 131 The few things

that give her a sense of home arguably link to the fact that Nafisi’s private

identity is formed within a liberal family and in America, during her studies.

Recalling the airport scene, Nafisi mentions the Guards looking through her

personal belongings, ‘my diploma, my marriage license, my books—Ada, Jews

Without Money, The Great Gatsby’, with disdain.132 All the things she mentions

here are symbols of her personal identity, of those aspects of identity she holds

most dear: her marriage, her education, and her teaching. In two lines, Nafisi

summarises the beginning of her identity crisis, in saying that the guard ‘did not

confiscate them – not then. That came sometime later.’133

The novels she mentions – Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada (1969), Mike Gold’s

Jews Without Money (1930) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925)

– have symbolic meanings. Thus, Nafisi recalls her student years in America,

giving a new meaning to the importance of Nabokov in her life. She mentions

her ‘true love, who introduced me to Nabokov when he gave me Ada, in whose

131
Nafisi, p. 47.
132
Nafisi, p. 82.
133
Idem.

43
flyleaf he had written: To Azar, my Ada, Ted.’134 Given that Ada narrates the

tumultuous love affair between Van Veen and his sister Ada, it can be argued

that in RLT this shadowy figure, Ted, is Nafisi’s own tragic love story. Jews

Without Money is a semi-autobiographical novel set in a New York slum

populated mainly by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. This can be seen

as a recalling of Nafisi’s life in America, which she leaves behind when

returning to Tehran, or as a foreshadowing of her future migration to the States

in 1997. Finally, The Great Gatsby centres around the American dream, a set of

ideals – such as democracy and equality – in which freedom grants the

opportunity for success and upward social mobility, achieved through hard

work in a liberal society. For Nafisi, as will be emphasised in the following

chapter of this dissertation, Gatsby is equally centred around empathy. All of

these values appear as integrated parts of her identity throughout the memoir.

Turning now to THT, the differentiation between past and present ways of

life is similar to the one in RLT. As Moosavinia and Yousefi note, ‘Offred is a

member of one of the transitional generations of Handmaid women who try to

survive. […] Throughout the novel she vacillates between her present

indoctrination and her former ideology.’135 Thus she resembles Nafisi, as both

compare their present selves, forced into submission, to a formerly free self.

134
Nafisi, p. 84; emphasis in original.
135
Moosavinia and Yousefi, p. 164.

44
Yet, when contemplating what she calls the ‘time before’, Offred seems to

consider both the good and the bad aspects. For instance, she mentions how

‘Women were not protected then’, how they would not open a door to strangers

or walk the streets alone at night.136 As opposed to this dangerous aspect of her

past life, she recalls the ‘laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans,

jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own

money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.’ 137 She

recalls everything that is taken away from women in Gilead: property, agency,

free will; even motherhood, in the normal way it used to be.

Offred seems to struggle with preserving a sense of self more than Nafisi

does. The protagonist of THT is confined to a room, a minimal space

resembling – at least metaphorically – a prison cell, which at the beginning she

calls ‘the room – not my room, I refuse to say my’.138 But Offred’s ambivalence

between past and present makes her rejoice later in calling the room hers and in

having ‘some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.’ 139 Her

refusal to say my can be equated with a refusal to submit to her fate, to her

imprisonment. However, as she becomes alienated, as she starts forgetting her

past, she yearns for something that allows her to replace her lost former self and

136
Atwood, p. 24.
137
Atwood, p. 24.
138
Atwood, p. 8; emphasis in original.
139
Atwood, p. 50.

45
former sense of home. The moment she first says ‘my room’ appears as a slip

of the tongue, but it can be seen as the moment her alienation reaches a peak,

and she loses hope of ever being freed, accepting her life in the Waterford

house as her new reality.140

As shown above, some degree of ambivalence characterises both Nafisi

and Offred. However, in the following section, I argue that the two protagonists

tend towards maintaining their former sense of self and some autonomy,

seeking refuge from the limitations imposed on them by the respective

theocratic states. Consequently, in RLT Nafisi’s living room, where she teaches

her private class, becomes a sanctuary, a safe place that is at odds with the other

‘far-off place, a place whose persistent hum was our only link to the world we

refused, for those few hours, to acknowledge.’ 141 The momentary escape in RLT

acts as a necessary refuge for Nafisi and her students to reflect on that public

life and mediate between the idealised West of the literary works they discuss

and the real East they live in. However, later on in the memoir, it becomes clear

that this refuge can only be temporary. Nafisi notes how ‘in some ways our

readings and discussions of the novels in that class became our moment of

pause, our link to that other world of “tenderness, brightness and beauty.” Only

eventually, we were compelled to return.’ 142 Nafisi and her students might

140
Atwood, p. 49.
141
Nafisi, p. 8.
142
Nafisi, p. 57.

46
repudiate the outside theocratic world for a few hours, while they escape into

fiction, but the return to public life and the public aspects of identity cannot be

avoided, or as Lawler points out, the public and private aspects of identity are

different but always interdependent.143

By comparison, Offred cannot escape in a personal space or in reading.

The sole refuge she can take is in her thoughts and memories. However, her

narrative emphasises her struggle with maintaining the memories of her past

life. In speaking about her husband Luke, her daughter, and her friend Moira,

she oscillates between the past and present tense. This oscillation points to the

fact that Offred starts to lose the sense of what normalcy used to be like, and of

how she used to be, the roles she had – as a wife, mother, and friend – in the

time before. For instance, when seeing the bodies of doctors hanged on the

Wall, she half hopefully says none of those men can be her husband, because

‘Luke wasn’t a doctor. Isn’t.’144 Of her daughter, she says that ‘She fades, I

can’t keep her here with me, she’s gone now.’ 145 She does the same when

recalling moments passed with her college friend Moira. Offred says that Moira

‘was still my oldest friend’, then corrects herself, adding ‘Is.’ 146 She admonishes

herself for ‘forgetting too much’, for being unable to hold on to the memories

143
See Lawler, p. 9.
144
Atwood, p. 33; emphasis added.
145
Atwood, pp. 63-4.
146
Atwood, p. 171.

47
forever, as years pass between the moment Gilead was established and the

moment she starts recording her story.147

As mentioned before, the key refuge for both Nafisi and Offred is their

writing, their narratives encompassing and setting before the reader all the other

ways in which the protagonists seek to resist subjection. Narrating one’s life

implies, as Silke Schmidt points out, a ‘process of invention – the invention of

the self and the invention of the other.’148 Where Schmidt’s idea is reflected in

both RLT and THT, it is Offred that pointedly mentions how she must compose

herself, how her self ‘is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a

speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.’ 149 It must be

noted how Offred seems to take refuge not only in telling her story, in recalling

and reimagining the past, but also in her word games. In the abovementioned

quotation, compose means construct, but at the same time Offred needs to

compose herself in the other sense of the word – she needs to be calm and

collected. At one point she mentions that some people call the dresses ‘habits’

(French for clothes). However, in Offred's mind the word gains a new meaning.

She deems it an appropriate word, since ‘Habits are hard to break.’ 150 At

another point, at night, when she can think freely, she plays with the words lie
147
Atwood, p. 193.
148
Silke Schmidt, ‘Life Writing Theory: Constructing Life, Claiming Authenticity’, in
(Re-)Framing the Arab/Muslim: Mediating Orientalism in Contemporary Arab American Life
Writing (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014), pp. 47-136 (p. 48); emphasis in original.
149
Atwood, p. 66.
150
Atwood, p. 24.

48
and lay. As she says, ‘Lay is always passive’, just like she is always passive in

her role as a handmaid.151 The word games emphasise the fact that Offred’s

refuge is limited to her own mind, to her ability to detach, even if only

momentarily, from the Gileadean reality.

Returning briefly to the idea of storytelling, what might strike the reader

is that not only do the protagonists preserve a sense of self through telling their

own story, but also by incorporating or rewriting other people’s stories. Thus,

storytelling and imagination become closely connected in both RLT and THT.

For example, Nafisi writes, ‘I even remember the events people have written or

told me about since I left. Strangely, they too have become my own

memories.’152 She appropriates the stories and memories of others making them

her own, or rather embedding them in her own experience. Similarly, Offred

tries to tell the story of others, of Luke and Moira in particular, but these parts

of the narrative appear to the reader as more fragmentary than her own story.

Yet in appropriating someone else’s experience, she gains some courage and

feels less lonely. In telling their story, she brings her family and friend closer.153

Narratives gain a new valence when the main storyteller makes use of

other people’s stories in recounting their own. In the case of Nafisi and Offred,

this focus on other people might be seen as a means to avoid speaking too much

151
Atwood, p. 37.
152
Nafisi, p. 74.
153
See Atwood, p. 128.

49
of their personal experience. But as Lawler explains, ‘in producing a life story

(one sort of text) we are always, implicitly or explicitly, referring to and

drawing on other texts – other life stories, fictional and nonfictional, as well as

a range of different kinds of texts.’ 154 She equally emphasises the idea that

narratives mediate between writer and readership. It is a two-way process that

implies interpretation and reinterpretation of the events in a story on both

sides.155 Thus, selected events in both Nafisi and Offred’s narratives gain new

meaning when they are analysed as memories that are highly important to the

teller, or that serve best the purpose of their story. In the chapter that follows,

the focus falls on intertextuality, recalling the way both Nafisi and Offred

ingrain other people’s stories in theirs.

154
Lawler, p. 27.
155
See Lawler, pp. 28-9.

50
 Chapter 3

Art’s Higher Purpose: The Role of Intertextuality in Mediating

between Public and Private Identity

Literary references in both RLT and THT, whether explicit or implicit,

link back to the ambivalence between the totalitarian state versus individualism,

between the public and private aspects of identity, and, in Nafisi’s case,

between East and West. Literature constitutes a key part of Nafisi’s memoir,

while the few veiled literary references in Offred’s narrative seem to have a

more symbolic role. The central question Nafisi and her students look at in

discussing literature is ‘how these great works of imagination could help us in

our present trapped situation as women.’ 156 They discuss One Thousand and

One Nights first, a collection of Persian folktales and a frame story that centres

on women’s situation. Nafisi puts particular focus on the storyteller,

Scheherazade, who is able to change her fate through her narrative abilities.

Looking back on the importance of storytelling emphasised in the previous

chapter, it can be said that Nafisi and Offred act as a kind of contemporary

Scheherazades. Their narratives help them avoid a different kind of death – that

of their individuality and personal will.

156
Nafisi, p. 19.

51
 Folktales are alluded to in Atwood’s narrative as well, having a key,

albeit different role. While Nafisi is openly discussing works of literature and

their meaning for her, Atwood’s choice to allude to popular fairy tales can be

clarified by taking a closer look at the author’s background. As a child, she did

not pursue formal education, but instead ‘learned through literature, reading far

above her age level, […] from fairy tales (in their original and harsher

versions), to myth and legends from a variety of cultures.’ 157 It is equally

important to look at the inspiration behind the title of Atwood’s novel. She

claims that she chose it ‘partly in honor of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but

partly also in reference to fairy tales and folktales’. 158 With these ideas in mind,

it can be said that the author’s interest in folktales accounts for the few

references to such stories in Offred’s narrative, which Atwood chooses to

connect to central aspects of her protagonist’s identity.

Early in THT, Offred notes how she perceives her reflection in a mirror,

‘like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy-tale figure in a red

cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as

danger.’159 Here, she makes reference to Little Red Riding Hood, or rather she

becomes this folktale character, struggling against a metaphorical Gileadean

wolf represented by Aunt Lydia, her commander and the commander’s wife,
157
Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 2.
158
Atwood, p. xi.
159
Atwood, p. 9.

52
Serena Joy, as representatives of the state, while attempting to reach her

grandmother, generally represented by her former life, her family and friend,

and particularly represented by her daughter. Gilead figuratively eats Offred’s

past like the wolf literally eats Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in the

folktale. Another notable reference to fairy tales appears towards the end of the

narrative. When commander Waterford takes Offred to Jezebel’s – Gilead’s

brothel – she half-jokingly says, ‘I must be back at the house before midnight;

otherwise I'll turn into a pumpkin, or was that the coach?’ 160 She is referring

here to Cinderella, but it seems that the story fades from her memory.

Forgetting details of the Cinderella tale can be equated with her alienated sense

of motherhood discussed previously in Chapter 2. Referencing fairy tales

suggests her role as a mother telling her daughter bedtime stories. But when

something as essential as her sense of motherhood is taken away, her memories

of her daughter fade along with details of the folktale.

Like Offred, Nafisi also appears to translate her struggles against the

Islamic Republic in the discussions of a few selected authors and their most

notable works. Thus, apart from the one Persian work mentioned above, Nafisi

teaches Western classics – Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald,

and Henry James being the key figures – that through their narratives suggest or

promote liberal ideas that enable her to express resistance to theocracy. These
160
Atwood, p. 256.

53
Western values and ideas centred around individual rights are in opposition

with the Islamic Republic’s collectivistic and religious ideology. Consequently,

Western authors are gradually banned until their books are no longer available

in any bookstore.161 Emphasising her role as a literature professor, Nafisi

expresses her anxieties through overt literary references. She tries to restore the

aesthetic role of literature ‘in a culture that denied any merit to literary works,

considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something

seemingly more urgent – namely ideology.’162 She works against the blind

censor – here, the ‘chief film censor’ who is physically ‘nearly blind’, but also

metaphorically blind as he constrains imagination and alters works of art out of

recognition.163

However, in opposing censorship, Nafisi too is ‘rearranging and

reshaping reality’.164 For instance, in a discussion about Fitzgerald’s The Great

Gatsby, she refers to the difference between East and West that this book seems

to point out, claiming that ‘We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess

over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the

promise of the future.’165 On one hand, what she seems to do is to idealise the

American dream and to suggest that the East has either lost or never had the

161
See Nafisi, p. 91.
162
Nafisi, p. 25; emphasis added.
163
Nafisi, p. 24.
164
Nafisi, p. 25.
165
Nafisi, p. 109.

54
ability to dream and plan for the future, opting instead to maintain

traditionalism. On the other hand, she highlights the idea that ‘Empathy lies at

the heart of Gatsby’ and that ‘the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems

and pains.’166 She deems the Islamic Republic guilty of this sin, of lack of

empathy, perhaps even of inflicting pain on a gendered Other. The private

literature class she creates might be seen as Nafisi’s way to promote empathy

and trust, trying to lead her students to have open relationships and to share not

only a passion for literature, or their interpretation of the respective texts, but

also personal experiences.

In a later discussion about Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1879), Nafisi

mentions that in teaching it she put emphasis on ‘the ways in which the novel,

as a new narrative form, radically transformed basic concepts about the

essential relationships between individuals, thereby changing traditional

attitudes towards people’s relationship to society, their tasks and duties.’ 167 She

particularly highlights how the book challenges typical ‘relations between men

and women’, questioning courtship and marriage, and placing at its core a

‘defiant heroine’ similar to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte’s

Katherine Earnshaw and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet. 168 But novels like The

Great Gatsby and Daisy Miller can be misinterpreted in a place where America

166
Nafisi, p. 132.
167
Nafisi, p. 194.
168
Nafisi, p. 194.

55
is seen as ‘the land of [...] the Great Satan!’ 169 For some students, these books

promote sin, such as adultery and prostitution, but to Nafisi they are presenting

the complexity of human nature, the multiple facets of personality which the

theocratic regime seeks to reduce to a one-dimensional identity through strict

gender roles. In connection to these ideas, Nafisi confesses that ‘If I turned

towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I

needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in

constant retreat.’170 It is the best medium for her to maintain a sense of her

private identity and ideals.

In her memoir and in her academic career, Nafisi turns mostly towards

Vladimir Nabokov’s works. Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and Lolita are

thus essential to understanding the memoir.171 In discussing Western literature

with her selected group of students, she says she wants ‘to borrow from

Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be

transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.’ 172 An oppressive,

totalitarian regime is present in both of Nabokov’s texts, but while Invitation to

a Beheading centres on a protagonist that seeks ways to maintain his

individuality, Lolita serves more as a point of comparison with regards to

169
Nafisi, p. 127.
170
Nafisi, p. 170.
171
See Nafisi, p. 3.
172
Nafisi, p. 8.

56
women’s situation within an authoritarian system. Nafisi claims that Nabokov

manages to capture the essence of totalitarian societies, the false promises

collectivistic communities make, arguably in both his Invitation to a Beheading

and Lolita. In opposition to the constraints of totalitarianism, Nabokov’s novels

put emphasis on what Nafisi terms ‘the shadow of another world, one that was

only attainable through fiction.’173

Looking first at Invitation to a Beheading, it shows a protagonist,

Cincinnatus C., condemned to death for being opaque in a transparent world. In

other words, he is persecuted for being different, for being his unique self. He

resembles Nafisi in being unable to fit into society, and because he must ‘feign

translucence’ in order ‘to conceal a certain peculiarity’ in a similar way to

Nafisi, who must accept compromises in order to avoid punishments. 174 In

discussing Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading with her students, Nafisi

mentions how, ‘In this staged world, Cincinnatus’s only window to another

universe is his writing.’175 As shown in Chapter 2, writing is similarly used by

both Nafisi and Offred. They seek refuge in writing, but they also seek a sense

of purpose in writing for future audiences.

Like the protagonists of RLT and THT, Cincinnatus wishes to keep ‘a

record of verified thoughts’ as opposed to ‘indulg[ing] in banal senseless

173
Nafisi, p. 32.
174
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (London: Penguin Classics, 2016), p. 11.
175
Nafisi, p. 22.

57
dreams of escape’.176 The belief that ‘Some day someone would read it and

would suddenly feel just as if he had awakened for the first time in a strange

country’ gives Cincinnatus a sense of purpose. 177 As mentioned above, Nafisi

and Offred share the same sense of purpose, arguably given by the idea that

their female audience would benefit and learn from the story of their

experiences. As opposed to the real and practical implications of purposeful

writing, Nabokov’s protagonist says that ‘The thought, when written down,

becomes less oppressive’.178 This idea seems to suggest that storytelling may

also act as a means to detach from the oppressive regime, to perceive it merely

as a story of a past reality, not of present constraints.

Another point of comparison between Nafisi and Nabokov’s narratives is

that imagination plays an important role in the Russian author’s work, being

closely connected to writing. Thus, Cincinnatus escapes into a ‘dream world’

consisting of both dreams and imagination.179 Imagination and writing make his

life in prison more bearable. Cincinnatus notably escapes in reading too and has

faith in his refuge as Nafisi believes in her idealised Western world, to which

she eventually does escape. Cincinnatus also mentions that he has ‘time allotted

to thinking; the furlough I allow my thoughts for a free journey from fact to

176
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, pp. 34-5.
177
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 34.
178
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 156.
179
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 69.

58
fantasy and return …’180 Like him, Nafisi and her students must create a

fictional world in which to escape, or rather to regain their individuality that is

otherwise confiscated by the regime.

However, despite these momentary escapes, the idea that Cincinnatus

submits to his fate for most of the novel because he is ‘powerless anyway’ is in

line with the ambivalence between resistance and submission noted in Chapter

2 in the case of both Nafisi and Offred.181 Nafisi alludes in her memoir to a

scene from Invitation to a Beheading, where Cincinnatus waltzes with Rodion,

his jailer.182 It is worth noting that Nabokov’s protagonist is depicted here as

‘much smaller than his partner’ and ‘light as a leaf.’ 183 In Nabokov's novel,

every aspect of the society his alienated hero lives in, and of prison life, seems

to be expressed in metaphors. The fact that Cincinnatus is smaller than his

jailer, or indeed smaller than any other person around him, can be seen as such

a metaphor. The oppressed is seen as, and might also feel, smaller, less

significant than their oppressor. The sense of helplessness in Cincinnatus’s case

also stems from the way he is tormented by his jailers, whom he compares to

‘senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares’ – all

the peculiar things supposed to pass in prison ‘for real life.’ 184 The torments

180
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 67.
181
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 48.
182
See Nafisi, p. 77.
183
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, pp. 2-3.
184
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 21.

59
Nabokov’s protagonist goes through in prison, in a place that seek to control

even his dreams, are interestingly more similar to Offred’s situation in THT

than with Nafisi’s, as Offred too is confined to a prison cell-like space. Yet, the

idea that Nafisi chooses this book as one of her earliest references suggests she

too feels like a prisoner in her own country, which – as shown in the previous

chapters – has changed out of recognition.

Turning now to Nabokov’s Lolita, Nafisi claims that the novel essentially

tells the story of ‘the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.’185 What

Nafisi arguably means to say is that Lolita appears in Humbert Humbert’s

narrative as his creation, or rather the re-creation of his childhood love,

Annabel. Humbert recalls Annabel, saying that she ‘haunted me […] until at

last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.’ 186

When describing the first moment he sees Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita,

Humbert seems to compare her to Annabel, while checking all of Lolita’s

features ‘against the features of my dead bride.’187 As Nafisi mentions, like

Iranian women, ‘Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life

through her prison bars.’188 The fictional dictator of Nabokov’s novel acts in a

similar way to the real-life ayatollahs, considering that ‘Humbert […] was

185
Nafisi, p. 33; emphasis in original.
186
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London, Penguin Classics, 2015), p. 15.
187
Nabokov, Lolita, p. 39.
188
Nafisi, p. 37.

60
interested only in his own vision of other people.’ 189 Dolores Haze has no voice

of her own, as the reader hears only of and from Lolita, the fanciful creation

whose words are never left unfiltered by the narrator. The centrality of Lolita to

Nafisi’s memoir suggests that for Nafisi, women in Iran are equally voiceless.

Relatedly, Humbert’s constant attempts at justifying his crimes may be

equated to the way Iranian state ideology functions to justify crimes and

discrimination against Iranian women. As far as Lolita is concerned, he seems

to be blaming her like theocracies blame the victims. Humbert claims that ‘it

was she [Lolita] who seduced me.’ 190 He voices the fundamentalist belief that

women are the root of all evil, an idea going back to the Biblical story of Eve

and Adam’s fall from Eden. Counter to this, Nafisi believes that ‘Those who

tell us Lolita is a little vixen who deserved what she got should remember her

nightly sobs in the arms of her rapist and jailer’. 191 Lolita is (for the most part)

just her oppressor’s own perception of ‘this mixture […] of tender dreamy

childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity [...] this Lolita, my Lolita, has

individualized the writer’s ancient lust, so that above and over everything there

is – Lolita.’192 Although he does admit Lolita is only his creation, he seems to

rejoice in his gradually increasing power over her. The comparison imbedded in

189
Nafisi, pp. 48-9.
190
Nabokov, Lolita, p. 132.
191
Nafisi, p. 36.
192
Nabokov, Lolita, pp. 44-5; emphasis in original.

61
Nafisi’s memoir from its title onwards – between Humbert and Khomeini, and

between Lolita and herself and her students – suggests that Iranian men,

favoured by Khomeini’s laws, equally rejoice in their power over women.

Despite the fact that Nafisi puts emphasis on the idea that they ‘were not Lolita,

the Ayatollah was not Humbert, and this republic was not what Humbert called

his princedom by the sea’, she creates parallels that suggest otherwise.193

After her mother’s death, Humbert takes Lolita on a trip equating both

characters’ doom. Significantly, in connection to the power relations between

the two at the earliest stages of this trip, Humbert mentions that ‘At the hotel

we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into

mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else

to go.’194 Like Lolita, Nafisi and Offred also have no place else to go, and thus

they are all compelled to submit or to accept compromises when offered more

frightening alternatives. In Lolita, Humbert threatens the eponymous character

with a grimmer alternative than her situation as his youthful mistress. He tells

her that, were she to go to the police, he would go to jail, but ‘if we two are

found out, you will be analysed and institutionalized’. 195 She would lose the

little freedom Humbert can grant her, like Nafisi temporarily loses the right to

teach for refusing to veil. ‘By rubbing all this in, [Humbert] succeeded in

193
Nafisi, p. 35.
194
Nabokov, Lolita, p. 142; emphasis added.
195
Nabokov, Lolita, p. 151.

62
terrorizing Lo’, just as the Islamic Republic of Iran frightens women with

prison sentences and beatings, or even death if they do not submit to veiling and

modest behaviour.196 However, submission only takes place in the beginning,

since Lolita eventually finds a way to escape her oppressive rapist-lover. And

like her, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Nafisi and Offred also find their

escape by the end of RLT and THT, respectively.

Like Nabokov’s work proved to be crucial to understanding Nafisi’s use

of literature in clarifying both the oppressive totalitarian regime and the means

to escape oppression, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four becomes essential

to understanding Atwood’s dystopia. Orwell’s book is likely to be one of the

main inspirations behind THT, as the author herself suggests in her 2017

introduction. She mentions that in high school and ever since she ‘read

extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias’. 197

There are differences between the two narratives, Erica Gottlieb mentioning a

key one, namely that THT narrows its scope to the United States as opposed to

a world-wide narrative like Nineteen Eighty-Four.198 But even if Gottlieb begins

her analysis of Atwood’s dystopia by pointing out this central difference

between the two novels, she nonetheless makes reference to the influence of

Orwell on THT. Thus, she points out how in both novels ‘the act of memory is

196
Idem.
197
Atwood, p. x.
198
See Gottlieb, p. 88.

63
an act of resistance against the totalitarian state with its insistence on changing

history […] because knowledge of history would form the basis for a fair

comparison between the past and the new regime’. 199 Atwood’s novel shares

many common points with Orwell’s, and she seems to use covert allusions to

Nineteen Eighty-Four to suggest that autocratic regimes are all based on terror,

on shunning individualism, and equally on isolating people from each other,

encouraging distrust.

The constant surveillance the protagonists are subjected to is one of the

key similarities between THT and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thus, when describing

her room, Offred mentions that ‘Like other things now, thought must be

rationed.’200 Winston Smith, Orwell’s alienated protagonist, equally suggests to

his readers the idea that the state knew not only what the citizens said or did,

but also what they thought.201 These ideas suggest that totalitarian states seek to

impede free thinking, taking away even something as personal as thought and

leaving people like Offred and Winston with no refuge. Like the Eyes in THT,

which are only a shadowy figure but a frightening one for those who are against

the regime, in Nineteen Eighty-Four the Thought Police has the role to arrest

and torture anyone who disobeys, or as much as thinks of disobeying Big

Brother and his state regulations. Big Brother, an alternative figure suggesting

199
Gottlieb, p. 104.
200
Atwood, p. 7.
201
See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2008), pp. 4-5.

64
continuous surveillance, is everywhere, on ‘coins, on stamps, on the covers of

books, on banners, on posters and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet –

everywhere.’202 In THT, the only furtive scene in which the Eyes appear is when

Offred mentions seeing a van pull up in front of her, as ‘Two Eyes, in gray

suits, leap from the opening double doors at the back. They grab a man who is

walking along [...] What I feel is relief. It wasn’t me.’ 203 The protagonists of

dystopian literature are characterized by an inner battle, between the wish to

challenge the system and a more primal instinct of survival prompted by fear.

And being constantly under surveillance suggests that there is virtually no

escape for either Winston or Offred.

Despite a sense of hopelessness and submission displayed by the majority

of Oceania’s citizens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston begs to differ and he

shows traces of what is termed ‘ownlife’, meaning individualism and a wish for

solitude.204 Emphasising the importance of storytelling, both Winston and

Offred keep a secret diary, hoping that their tales will reach a future generation

that would benefit from knowing the truth. Otherwise, language is rationalised

by the state in both THT and Nineteen Eighty-Four, like any other material

good or human right. The fact that Gilead limits the access to language for

women can be thus equated with Orwell’s invented Newspeak – a new dialect

202
Orwell, p. 29.
203
Atwood, pp. 168-9.
204
Orwell, p. 85.

65
that attempts to control Oceania’s citizens by making ‘the range of

consciousness always a little smaller.’ 205 The difference between the two ways

in which the use of language is regulated by the state in Gilead and Oceania

recalls Gottlieb’s idea that while Orwell’s narrative is global, Atwood’s is

localised. Gilead’s rationalisation of speech targets only women as the inferior

class, while Oceania’s suggests that every member of the society has to become

part of the same, uniform whole.

Both Winston and Offred find solace in believing in a more public kind of

resistance. The resistance in THT, Mayday, recalls the resistance Orwell’s

protagonist believed in. In Atwood’s novel, Mayday seems to be helping Offred

escape at the end of the story. She is incredulous when Nick tells her it is

Mayday who came to take her, not the Eyes, but she also says ‘I snatch at it,

this offer. It’s all I’m left with.’206 The resistance Winston has only the illusion

of joining in Orwell’s dystopia, the Brotherhood, is described as a ghost

organisation that ‘cannot be wiped out because it is not an organisation in the

ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is

indestructible.’207 Not knowing the identity of other members means you cannot

betray them when questioned by the Ministry of Love. Similarly, in THT Offred

learns that Ofglen, her neighbour, is part of Mayday, but neither of them knows

205
Orwell, p. 55.
206
Atwood, p. 296.
207
Orwell, p. 183.

66
any other member. The mysteriousness of the respective resistances, which can

easily be termed ghost organisations, further emphasise the fact that in either

dystopian story there is little hope of having meaningful interrelations. Even

existing interrelations, like the friendship between Offred and Ofglen or her

love affair with Nick, mirroring Winston’s friendship with O’Brien and his love

affair with Julia, are questioned by the end, seemingly having been illusory.

The literary references discussed in this chapter show how neither Nafisi

nor Atwood attempt to equate the fictional with the real. Instead, both authors

employ certain themes and aspects of literary works that help convey ideas

about the status of women in oppressive regimes, about mediating between past

and present, between private and personal aspects of identity, and about the

centrality of preserving individuality.

Conclusion

I hope to have shown throughout this dissertation that despite a difference

in genre and in cultural backgrounds, Nafisi’s RLT and Atwood’s THT share

many similar characteristics. Some of the common points between the Islamic

Republic of Iran and the Republic of Gilead might indeed be the result of the

Iranian Revolution’s influence on Atwood as stated in Chapter 1. In this

chapter, my analysis of the way in which the Islamic Republic and Gilead were

67
established, as well as the means through which they maintain state power,

sought to clarify that theocratic systems – as a sub-category of totalitarian

regimes – want to limit their citizens’ free will. Ideology and propaganda go as

far as determining people to give up their individuality in favour of

collectivism, to give up the power to choose for themselves and let the state do

so in their place. Equally, despite the collectivistic societies’ apparent striving

for the greater good, in reality it seems that individuals are driven away from

each other, isolated, and thus made easy to manipulate.

The first chapter of this project also showed the essentially patriarchal

nature of theocracy. The law is made by – and acts in favour of – men, while

women have to keep within their natural limitations. Consequently, women

have to maintain their modesty, their purity, and to avoid the male gaze.

Equally, their roles within society are limited to those of wives and mothers.

Thus, the theocratic state dictates women’s proper gender roles and how they

are to be performed. In both RLT and THT the female gender comes across as a

symbol of passivity, of quiet submission, rather than a symbol of purity and

religious righteousness as the state intended them to be. The mandatory veiling

in Iran and the modesty costumes in Gilead are both meant to ensure women’s

invisibility. But this hiding away of women’s bodies has a double negative

connotation. Firstly, it appears to derive from the Biblical figure of Eve and

68
from the idea that women are temptresses, and the root of all evil. Secondly, it

defamiliarizes women’s bodies to such an extent that the body and its

movements seem almost alien in the absence of the veil.

Women in both narratives are silenced and denied even the most

fundamental human rights. But as opposed to this, the two protagonists seek

ways to maintain their individuality. Chapter 2 focused primarily on showing

how Nafisi and Offred employ storytelling and language as ways to resist the

uniformity promoted by the respective theocratic states. In telling their stories,

Nafisi and Offred resist the idea that language is made taboo for women.

Particularly in Offred’s case, under Gileadean law crossing this boundary is a

criminal act. Yet, as the analysis of storytelling shows, when the two

protagonists suddenly find themselves under a new law, narrating their

experiences is the best way for them to mediate between their past freer lives

and their new and lesser status, while also helping them to preserve certain key

aspects of their identity. In Nafisi’s memoir, her teaching appears to be the most

important aspect of her identity, one that she ultimately can maintain only in

establishing a private literature class where imagination can flow freely. In

Offred’s case, motherhood appears to be a central aspect of her self, although it

is never openly addressed. In Gilead, after the state takes everything away from

women – property, agency, and even their families – Offred’s narrative

69
continuously goes back to memories of her daughter. It is only through memory

that she can maintain a sense of what motherhood, or her roles as wife, daughter

and friend, used to be like.

Another idea that this chapter wanted to explain was the centrality of

feminism, as both stories are written by women, about women and for women.

The centrality of women’s status in a male world suggests that both Nafisi and

Offred try to oppose the masculine narrative in which they are objectified by

becoming the subjects of their own stories. The focus on the protagonists

inevitably implies a heteronormative approach to gender roles, overlooking the

existence of queer identities, such as Offred’s friend Moira in THT. While

Moira’s character alone can make the subject of further inquiry into Atwood’s

novel, for the scope of this project, looking at heteronormative relations

between men and women, with their implied male domination and female

inferiority, was key in understanding how theocracies act on women and their

need to escape into fiction, or a mental space that the state cannot reach.

The use of language, particularly the word games in Offred’s narrative,

along with the emphasis Nafisi places on imagination in her memoir, brought

the discussion in Chapter 2 towards the symbolic role of the personal space

both women’s private selves are limited to. It is worth noting that in both books

the private aspects of identity are equated with or can only be displayed in

70
certain spaces. Nafisi’s living room in RLT is a private and safe space for her

and her students to show their uniqueness and share experiences. In THT,

Offred’s refuge is not a physical space, but rather the confines of her own mind,

and her subconscious coming forward in dreams. The role of space was only

briefly mentioned, however, due to the wordcount limit. Thus, I would like to

mention that the symbolism of objects in both Nafisi’s living room and Offred’s

room in the Waterford household can make the object of further analysis.

The concluding ideas from Chapter 2, emphasising how both Nafisi and

Offred inevitably encompass other people’s stories in theirs, bring us to the

main focus of Chapter 3. This chapter discussed the relevance of literary

references in both narratives, linking the centrality of intertextuality to elements

of state politics and the protagonists’ private refuges analysed in the previous

two chapters. This third and last chapter’s purpose had been to show how both

Nafisi and Offred make use of literary references to address thematic issues that

are raised throughout their narratives. Thus, Nafisi’s reference to Scheherazade

is a means to point to the importance of female narrators and their power to

change their fate, while her reference to Gatsby points to her belief in the

American dream, in freedom, as well as in empathy. By comparison, Offred’s

references to folktales appear as a reminiscence of her motherhood, which she

fights to preserve all throughout the narrative.

71
 The chapter equally makes clear that both authors, this time referring to

Nafisi and Atwood rather than Atwood’s fictional protagonist, make use of

specific instances of intertextuality, allowing for comparisons between

common, similar struggles and highlighting key themes in a symbolic way.

These central instances of intertextuality are between Nabokov’s Invitation to a

Beheading and Lolita compared to Nafisi’s narrative and the Islamic Republic,

and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four compared to Offred’s story and to Gilead. It

is worth mentioning that parallels could be drawn between all five novels. For

instance, the refuge in writing and into a world of imagination is a characteristic

shared by four protagonists: Nafisi and Offred, as shown throughout this

dissertation, but also Nabokov’s Cincinnatus C. and Orwell’s Winston Smith.

Equally, parallels that can be drawn between all the totalitarian regimes

portrayed by the five books show how autocracies are all based on terror, on

discouraging meaningful, private relations outside one’s family, and on

punishing displays of independence and uniqueness. The protagonists

mentioned above, along with Lolita, the fifth protagonist, all share a sense of

helplessness when faced with oppression. They feel small, weak and

insignificant in front of the respective dictators. Storytelling can thus also be

seen as a means to detach, even if only momentarily, from the constraints of the

totalitarian regime.

72
 I should like to end this project by pointing out, once again, that

totalitarianism acts in similar ways and is based on the same central principles

in all corners of the world, as well as in any period of time, from the

dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin to the more recent ones, like that in Iran.

Equally, I wish to remind the reader that perceived cultural differences between

Islam and Christianity appear to be erased when religion is used as ideological

basis for state regulations. Both essentially mark a return to traditional

patriarchy erasing centuries of women’s fight to gain and maintain rights. By

comparing the real situation in Iran with the fictional, yet plausible situation in

Gilead – Atwood’s near future New England – I hope to have made clear these

similarities, and to have shown that totalitarianism, and more particularly

theocracy, could be instated virtually anywhere.

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