Urban Space and the Cultural Construction of Modern Subjectivities: Tehran’s Women in Novels

Abstract

Exploring Tehran’s urban modernity through the Iranian novel, this paper argues that the identities of modern urban space and modern female subjectivities are constructed in an intertwined relation. Focusing on two novels that depict life in Tehran in the early twentieth century, I investigate the idea of the street as a new urban space, and wandering on the street as a new urban practice, particularly as understood by the novels’ female characters. The portrayal of the “modern woman” through her practices of using urban space, her visibility on the street - or the lack of it - and her relationship to the consumption of commodities presents two contrasting modes of Iranian modernity, one intellectual, the other concerned with the liberation of the body. I suggest that these novels both identify and help to create versions of “desirable” and “undesirable” modernity that remain relevant in the Iran of today.

Keywords:

• urban space
• modernity
• Tehran
• street walking
• gender
• cultural productions
• novels

Introduction

This paper examines the construction of two modes of modernity in cultural representations of Tehran. It does so by studying the depiction of women in two novels written in the early twentieth century: Tehran-e Makhuf (Dreadful Tehran, 1924) by Morteza Moshfegh Kazemi and Ziba (a woman’s name meaning “beautiful,” 1931) by Mohammad Hejazi. In these works, both written by men in similar social and political circumstances, modernity is constructed through the interrelations between Tehran’s urban spaces, public and private, and the two very different female characters that inhabit them. I rethink the complexities of Tehran’s emerging urban typologies through these gendered fictional subjects, and, reciprocally, explore how modern female identities are constructed through new meanings invested in urban space.

Mohammad Hejazi has been described as one of Iran’s “most famous” and “popular” male novelists during the early twentieth century whose stories “gained popularity with young, upper-middle-class Iranian readers, particularly women, from the late 1920s on.”¹ His written works include essays, translations, novels, and short stories many of which have women’s names as their titles. Educated in telegraph engineering in France and Germany, Hejazi held different governmental positions in Iranian ministries for several decades. Despite being denigrated by critics who have described his literary work as weak in style and idea to the extent that it “fails to evince any definite principles or to take up a position,”² there is a consensus that it nevertheless carries “a special significance in modern Persian literature.”³ Ziba is regarded by scholars in literary studies as one of his best novels. Initially published in installments in a newspaper, the novel describes the interactions between Huseyn (the male protagonist), Ziba (his lover), and Tehran as a city of new urban public spaces and new kinds of institutions, their administrative reach country-wide. The city and Ziba are together depicted as “spider-nets” that have trapped Huseyn through the excitement they provoke and their apparent beauty.⁴

The novel Dreadful Tehran has been acknowledged by literary critics as the first Iranian social realist novel.⁵ Its author, Morteza Moshfegh Kazemi, was educated at Dar al-Fonun, Tehran’s first explicitly “modern” school, and at the Tehrani Alliance Française, where he was exposed to nineteenth-century French literature.⁶ Dreadful Tehran describes a city of love, greed, and prostitution – the social sensibilities of the modern urban middle class of its time.⁷ The novel is about a love affair between Farrokh, a “moralist,” and Mahin, the educated daughter of one of the city’s nouveau riche – a social stratum that is depicted in the novel as a “manipulative and deceptive, guileful class … .”⁸ Resisting her father’s patriarchal ideologies, Mahin enjoys reading books, and advocates for marriages of love. In the novel, she is the symbol of a “modern” and desirable woman. A characteristic of Dreadful Tehran is its detailed descriptions of the city’s newly emerging urban spaces, systems of transportation, and modes of public social behavior. Similar to Hejazi, Kazemi was a novelist-journalist who constantly transgressed “the dividing line between social science and artistic invention,” using new literary forms to engage with Tehran’s new social and physical urban structures.⁹

The Novel and the City of Modernity

Whether in Tehran or elsewhere, with the advent of modernity came the realist novel, focusing its attention on the sensations and behaviors experienced in the metropolis. The novel became an index of changes in passions, esthetic values, and conceptual constructs.¹⁰ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, literary critic Robert Alter tells us, the “moment-by-moment experience – sensory, visceral, and mental – of the main character or characters” began to dominate the narrative.¹¹ Alter calls this “experiential realism,” deployed to chart the “emergence of a new order of urban reality.”¹²

Realist literature is a source, not just of descriptions of modern life, but also of the sensations which constituted it and the qualities it embodied.¹³ Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, for example, has been widely cited for its definition of modernity and the experience of modernity as concerned with “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent.”¹⁴ His work offered new lenses through which the beauties of a rapidly modernizing Paris could be glimpsed, despite its urban ills, as he highlighted the opportunities the modern city offered for experiencing unique forms of mental excitement. Baudelaire drew on the works of Honoré de Balzac, who used the literary figure of the flâneur, the urban wanderer, to reveal changes taking place in both city and society. For the young Karl Marx, Balzac, writing in the 1830s and 40s, was strangely prescient about “the future evolution of the social order” and seemed to prefigure the radical transformation of Paris after the revolutions of 1848 and 1851.¹⁵ His Comédie Humaine “‘anticipated’ in uncanny ways social relations that were identifiable only ‘in embryo’ in the 1830s and 1840s.”¹⁶

The quotations above are from cultural geographer David Harvey and indicate a shift in scholarship during 1980s that came to see representations such as those of the realist novel not just as mirrors of reality but as constitutive themselves of new realities.¹⁷ As cultural products, novels inject the imagination into everyday sensibilities, which, says Harvey, “must have consequences, perhaps unforeseen, for social action.”¹⁸ They develop didactic and socially transformative images of the city by re-deciphering and re-articulating its urban life, thereby transforming the way people see both themselves and their settings. In this way, they can reformulate or foresee new social relations, becoming the very instruments of modernity.¹⁹ Recent research in human and literary geography continues to assert that “representations do things – they are activities that enable, sustain, interrupt, consolidate or otherwise (re)make forms or ways of life” in cities; they “make, remake, and unmake worlds,” and thereby co-produce the city of modernity.²⁰

Despite the active role of literature in the production of modernity through its conceptual constructs and affects, the novels depicting modern urban life in Tehran remain largely unexplored.²¹ One exception is a paper by anthropologist Shahram Parastesh and sociologist Samaneh Mortavazi Gazar, which studies four novels on Tehran from the early twentieth century – Dreadful Tehran (Kazemi, 1924), Ziba (Hejazi, 1931), together with Memoire of a Night (also by Kazemi, 1925), and Nightlife (Mohammad Masud, 1931).²² Drawing on Lefebvre’s theories on the production of space through particular temporal rhythms, Parastesh and Gazar’s paper focuses on the novels’ depiction of urban spaces, functions, and spatial behaviors to reflect on early twentieth century urban life.²³ Another is an article by Rasmus Christian Elling, a social historian studying modern Iran who takes Dreadful Tehran as both a reflection of and a catalyst for the emergence of a new urban public, one which “comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation.”²⁴ He explores the “overlapping of text and context,” emphasizing that Tehran is “both subject matter and contextual frame of reference, ‘defining the terms for the text’s production and reception’.”²⁵

In this paper, I focus on the modern female subjects constructed in Dreadful Tehran and The Beautiful to argue that they reveal two modes of modernity constructed in the interrelations between urban space and urban female identity – modes of modernity that generate different forms and extents of freedom and dependency in the Tehran of the early twentieth century. Iranian literary scholars Shamsi Aliyari and Leyla Noohi Tehrani, analyzing the social role of Mahin in Dreadful Tehran, see little conflict in the way her personality is portrayed; in her relations with her overbearing, patriarchal father, for instance, they see her depicted as mediocrely liberal in both her ideas and her actions.²⁶ I suggest instead that there is a tension in her character which is connected to the unevenness of the construction of modernity in the everyday life of the city, a construction which involved a gradual redefinition of the past, creating new urban identities within the persistence of the old. This paper is a study of the creations of new meanings and experiences of urban space that can be seen to form genealogies of Tehran’s burgeoning modernity. Starting with an investigation of the historical and political context of the novels, I describe the new esthetics of Tehran’s new urban spaces (of Lalehzar Street in particular) before elaborating on the novels’ two female subjectivities that the spatial urban practices reciprocally help to form.

Tehran in the Early Twentieth Century: Politics and Esthetics

The early decades of the twentieth century were particularly significant in Iran’s modern history. It was in these years that modernization took hold – modernization of administrative systems, the arrival of modern infrastructure, and the appearance of new built forms.²⁷ In the second half of the nineteenth century, the country was “semicolonial,” not officially colonized by other powers but subsumed within the voracious capitalist systems of Europe.²⁸ Neither a colonial city nor free from imperial interference, Tehran was developing and modernizing in the midst of a maelstrom of diverse and contradictory forces, national and international. Opposing interests led to an atmosphere of political unrest, which erupted in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, a messy series of events that ultimately led to the establishment of a parliament and the adoption of a formal constitution in Iran to mitigate the power of the king, or Shah. The Constitutional Revolution marked an important moment in the political, social, and administrative modernization of the country.

During the years of the Revolution, the presence of the imperial powers of Russia and Britain in Iran increased systematically. This presence was felt largely through economic concessions – the Shah granted foreigners control of the extraction of resources, for instance, or over the tobacco industry, in exchange for revenue – and resulted in wide dissatisfaction among people from variety of social, intellectual, and financial backgrounds.²⁹ A coup against the government in 1921 eventually led to the founding in 1925 of a new dynasty, the Pahlavi dynasty, to replace the former Qajar Shahs.³⁰ The revolutionaries sought to establish accountable legal systems, representative government, and to introduce ideas of social justice. They also hoped to resist the encroachment of imperial powers (Britain in particular) as well as the power of the conservative religious establishment. They actively encouraged nationalism, popular activism, and the ideal of Iranian economic independence.³¹

The early twentieth century also witnessed the beginning of Persian women’s “awakening” when an increasing number of women’s social and political movements emerged in the country. The Nationalist Women’s League of Iran (Jameeyat-e Nesvan-e Vatankhah-e Iran), for example, was founded in 1922 to engage women “in the project of the state to eliminate seclusion and veiling and to direct [their] … efforts toward programs of social services and bring them into civic life.”³² Women’s magazines that questioned the social limitations placed on women in Iranian society had begun to appear as early as 1910,³³ magazines which sought not only to discuss women’s household responsibilities, childcare, and health, highlighting their role in bringing up future generations, but also to educate their readers in the history of women’s struggles elsewhere, and to give them “insights on how to empower themselves.”³⁴ The women who founded and edited these magazines had already been active during the Constitutional Revolution, advocating women’s rights and encouraging women to be more politically active.³⁵

Tehran’s spatial layout in the early twentieth century was mainly the result of large-scale urban transformations begun in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tehran became Iran’s capital in 1795, and in the 1850s only about one-third of the area inside its walls was built up – the rest was filled with plane trees. Yet the city was beginning to expand rapidly, and in 1868 Naser al-Din Shah called for a new urban plan to be drawn up.³⁶ The result was a new city wall with twelve gates enclosing a city much larger than before, in the shape of an octagon (see Figure 1). Several new streets, concentrated mostly to the north and west of the older center, facilitated new transport systems such as coaches, carriages, and later cars. The streets were beautified by water courses and lines of trees.³⁷ New palatial aristocratic residences were built in this part of the city, along with a number of foreign embassies, creating an upper-class district within the expanded walls.³⁸ A central square, a hospital, the headquarters of the Imperial Bank of Persia, and the arrival of infrastructural systems such as a networked gas supply (later replaced by electricity) for lighting both streets and interiors made this new district an imagined “centre of modernity” for the whole country.

Figure 1 The spatial expansion of Tehran during the Naser al-Din Shah era included a number of new streets, particularly to the north and west of the old city. (Mohsen Habibi, Bernad Hourcade, Atlas de Téhéran Métropole, Tehran and Paris: Tehran Geographic Information Center and CNRS, 2005. Public domain).

American linguist William Jackson, who visited Tehran in 1903, writes of this new district – which was rapidly replacing the old city center – as follows:

“East and West combine imperfectly in the mixed civilization, with a far greater preponderance of the Orient, as is natural. Landau carriages in the public square, a post office with bilingual notices in Persian and French, well-equipped telegraph headquarters, an imposing Imperial Bank, a so-called Boulevard des Ambassadeurs, along which the ministers of the foreign legations ride in official dress, not to speak of shops with European goods, two hotels, a claim to the use of gas, and a pretence of having a jingle bell tramway, all these tell something of the influence of the Occident.”³⁹

The spatial heart of the new district was Lalehzar Street, characterized by its elegant shops (see Figure 2). At the end of the nineteenth century, as the city became a peripheral node in the network of global markets, Tehran had opened up to new economic and cultural patterns of shopping imported from the West.⁴⁰ There were beauty salons, and dressmakers and tailors where one could get the latest Persian or Paris fashions made to the highest standards.⁴¹ The first Iranian department store was built on Lalehzar Street. The shops sold luxury goods, from silks and woolen fabrics, or perfumes, colognes, and soaps to modern gadgets like phonographs, radios, cameras, and fancy cigarettes.⁴² On this street, shopping came to be seen as a leisure activity in which merchandise was elaborately displayed for the “visual pleasure of shoppers and passersby.”⁴³ Lalehzar also became a center of culture, the place to go to see modern art and later film – it was here that a number of new cinemas opened in the 1920s and 30s.⁴⁴ In the early twentieth century, Lalehzar was synonymous with everything considered modern, and therefore prestigious and glamorous.

Figure 2 An early twentieth-century view of Tehran’s first modern hotel, constructed on Lalehzar Street during the early 20th century. Jafar Shahri, Tarikh-e ejtemaee Tehran [Social History of Tehran], Tehran: Entesharat Esmaeelian, 1989.

Ziba: The Illegitimate Joy of Urban Visibility

Lalehzar Street is key to the character of Ziba. Hejazi casts her as a passionate consumer of all that Lalehzar has to offer. She visits and revisits as a wanderer and a shopper, expressing joy and excitement about “going there as a pastime and shopping almost every day.”⁴⁵ Like most middle-class women of the time, Ziba has no specific occupation. Her morning routine is to go to Lalehzar, but otherwise she spends most of her time at home.⁴⁶ In the novel, whenever we see Ziba, she is at home, and it is from the privacy of her home that she speaks about Lalehzar, voicing enthusiasm for the street as a new stage for women to be seen in public: “It is like heaven when a handsome young man chases and compliments me [on Lalehzar Street] or when I see wealthy men craving to catch a glimpse of me there.”⁴⁷ Lalehzar was known as a place where women wore looser veils, easier to maneuver in their interactions with men, and hence a place where new forms of encounter between the sexes could emerge.⁴⁸

The new fashions available on Lalehzar Street were displayed not only in the shops, but also on the bodies of those who wore them.⁴⁹ Ziba, a lover of fashion, is thrilled by what Lalehzar’s luxury boutiques have to offer, most of it imported from abroad.⁵⁰ “I might give up on love, and even my life,” she says, “but I would never give up on wandering on Lalehzar and its silk stockings and Coty perfume ….”⁵¹ To borrow from feminist literary critic Rita Felski, for Ziba “the mundane activity of shopping” is a “sensuous and enjoyable experience.”⁵² Hejazi depicts Ziba’s pleasure in the modern city as being dependent on material goods and men’s attention. She is also dependent on her lover’s earnings to satisfy her desire to see and to be seen on Lalehzar Street and her lust for its commodities.⁵³

In Hejazi’s novel, Ziba’s neediness is portrayed as a kind of corruption, a corruption which spreads to become the decadence of Tehran’s society as a whole. Before coming to Tehran, Ziba’s lover Huseyn was educated in a religious school in his provincial hometown. He moved to the capital, “the center of civilization,” in order to attend “the best schools in the country.”⁵⁴ Once there, he met and became obsessed with Ziba. To become her lover, he needed to be wealthy enough to pay for her extravagant lifestyle. He joined the Ministry of Finance where he was quickly caught up in the shady financial deals of the new administrative class, and the turbulent confusion of dishonesty, manipulation and subservience that they involved. He senses that he has lost his “humane” side in which he had invested during his early years of education and piety. Instead, he is “trapped in the spider’s web of Tehran’s insincerity.”⁵⁵

Ziba’s decadence is depicted not just through what she does, but also through what she does not do. She appears to be ignorant of the activities of those women who engage with the socio-political concerns of the country. In Iran, women’s organizations that were established during the Constitutional Revolution banned the use of cosmetics and the wearing of dresses manufactured abroad as a prerequisite for membership.⁵⁶ This was not just disapproval of unnecessary luxury, it was active protest – the hope was that the “boycott of European textiles in Iran would free the nation from its dependence on European merchants and manufacturers.”⁵⁷ Ziba, with her desire for Lalehzar Street and its display of Western commodities, represents all those who imitate and consume foreign culture (farangi) and therefore harm Iranian society as a whole.

Sometimes the decadence is seen to emanate from women like Ziba, and sometimes it seems to come from Tehran itself. Towards the beginning of the novel, we are fleetingly introduced to a father from a provincial town who is worried that his son will be seduced by Tehrani women. “May death be upon all Tehranis … What a city it is that it cannot control its women!” he says.⁵⁸ In this way, we realize that Huseyn’s story is not specific to him, it is understood to be the fate of any young man who moves to Tehran. Later, when Huseyn is asking where he can find Lalehzar Street, a shopkeeper warns him: “be watchful, as Lalehzar has beautiful women!”⁵⁹ Tehranis themselves are divided into two groups, categorized as Lalehzar-goers and non-Lalehzar-goers. When Huseyn wants to denigrate Ziba he calls her “a woman who has gone everywhere and has wandered on Lalehzar.”⁶⁰ And at the end of the book, when Ziba decides she must behave like a “good” and “well-born” lady, she condemns Lalehzar, saying: “May God demolish Lalehzar! May my legs break if I walk on Lalehzar again. I used to be virtuous, I was not the type who would wander in Lalehzar …;”⁶¹ “I want to be like virtuous and good women, sit within the four walls of my home and not go to Lalehzar anymore.”⁶² Ziba’s views have come to align with the message of the novel named after her: walking on Lalehzar has become a measure of female sexual immorality. As writer and professor of nineteenth-century literature Wendy Parkins puts it, “[a] woman free to ‘gad about’ would possibly be inclined to take other liberties as well.”⁶³

In Hejazi’s novel, Ziba and Tehran are intertwined. For Huseyn, there is no city outside Ziba – he would leave Tehran if Ziba did not exist⁶⁴ – and Ziba cannot live anywhere except Tehran.⁶⁵ Both Ziba and Tehran represent modernity, beautiful and exciting, but also insincere and superficial. For Ziba, to experience modernity is to experience freedom. On Tehran’s Lalehzar Street, she can mix with people of the opposite sex, and of different socio-economic classes. This new urban space, culturally allocated to the upper or middle class, came to provide freedom of mobility for all those prepared to explore it.⁶⁶ Traversing class geography, Ziba creates a wider spatial framework for herself in the city. Yet the novel depicts Ziba/Tehran as deceitful, loose and money-loving, together turning Huseyn’s life upside down. Female subject (and, by extension, female subjectivity) and city represent a modernity full of “dark inextricable labyrinthine tunnels” that is not so much freedom as a dangerous trap.⁶⁷

Dreadful Tehran: Spatial Confinements of a Desired Modernity

If Ziba represents one version of the female subject as agent of modernity, Mahin, the protagonist’s lover in Kazimi’s Dreadful Tehran, represents another. Mahin is a culturally and politically enlightened woman, but her movement around the city is limited by the cultural expectations to which she conforms. From a nouveau riche family, she is portrayed as an “intellectual;” rather than being educated at home by a private tutor, as would have been the case for most upper-class women in Qajar Iran, she has attended “New Schools” and acquired the “New Education” that was considered a “manifestation of women’s awakening consciousness” at the time of the Constitutional Revolution.⁶⁸ Unlike Ziba, Mahin reads contemporary novels, and supports the ideas of the socio-political women’s groups that had become active during the Revolutionary years.⁶⁹ With a modern self-awareness, she dares to explore and express her emotions, and is prepared to confront her overbearing, patriarchal father by rejecting the marriage he has arranged for her – a bold move which aligns her with those who argued for women’s emancipation as a key aspect of a new, independent Iran.⁷⁰ Mahin considers that “women in Iranian society are ill-fated,” and will be as long as their rights are ignored.⁷¹ “[D]espite all that has been said about women’s rights in society, judgments about women are still unjust,” she declares.⁷²

While Ziba’s character is defined by her consumption in and of Lalehzar Street, where she flaunts her body, Mahin is physically almost absent from public urban space. She is largely confined to her house, which is surrounded by a garden and enclosed by walls. When she speaks to her lover, Farrokh, she does so by climbing the wall from the garden side, while he climbs from the street. She leaves the house only to attend gatherings of all-women political clubs. Although she believes that women have the right to transcend the traditional boundaries of the home, her own movement in the city is restricted to specific journeys, made always in the company of a male guardian. Mostly, she uses small, privately hired coaches, accompanied by her family’s servant. Occasionally she travels on a public tram accompanied by her lover, in the knowledge that, provided they behave undemonstratively, others will simply assume he is her guardian. Historian Jafar Shahri is able to tell us that Tehran’s tramcars in the early twentieth century were not open; they had three parts, and the central part, allocated specifically to women, was obscured and closed off from either end by opaque sliding doors (Figure 3) – we must assume that this is where Mahin traveled.⁷³ Mahin does not wander the streets seeking pleasure; she does not go shopping or sit in cafés. She never talks about the public spaces of the city nor shows any enthusiasm for them. Her deep involvement in furthering Tehran’s emerging political and social openness is purely through ideological discussion with her female colleagues. Throughout Dreadful Tehran, Mahin is described with approval, as if it is clear that she – unlike Ziba – is a representation of what the ideal modern woman should be.

Figure 3 A horse-drawn public tram in Tehran during the early twentieth century. The middle part with sliding doors was allocated to women. Jafar Shahri, Tarikh-e ejtemaee Tehran [Social History of Tehran], Tehran: Entesharat Esmaeelian, 1989.

Together, Mahin’s physical invisibility within the city and Ziba’s exhibitionism identify the importance of the issue of visibility in public space to the experience of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth century, women were largely hidden from public view, “confined in the home or under the veil and the cloak.”⁷⁴ They were “rarely seen in public places, [and] spent the majority of time in their homes, or andaruns [the parts of the home reserved for women].”⁷⁵ They were able to go out in public only when accompanied by a male guardian, in order to protect the reputation of the family – it was sexual morality that was being so closely circumscribed.⁷⁶ When they did go out they remained again within the “women’s realm,” visiting female friends and relatives, going to the bathhouse, or attending a religious gathering. A woman who did appear on the streets “was expected to keep her head down, go about her business meekly, and hurry back home to the four walls of a house that was more like a prison ….”⁷⁷

With the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11, women did become more publicly visible. For some women’s groups, being unveiled while out on the streets was an important political act.⁷⁸ But their demand to be seen was controversial, a manifestation of the tensions that endure in cultural constructions of Iran’s modernity, among them the modern novel. Ziba and Dreadful Tehran articulate – that is, they help to produce and reproduce – the idea that women’s visibility in the city is related to their propriety, and that to exhibit oneself in public is a sign of having abandoned one’s cultural roots.

Rasmus Elling writes that Kazemi puts “the restrictions on women’s mobility on display as a socio-spatial manifestation of patriarchal norms.”⁷⁹ He believes that in Dreadful Tehran, there is an attempt “to turn traditional patriarchal notions of shame and honor … into ‘modern’ virtues – not to destroy them.” Elling accuses Kazemi of “want[ing] to be a voice for women, but on his terms … It appears then that not even in his most important political message was [he] … wholeheartedly radical.”⁸⁰ Yet Elling’s interpretation, which directly links Kazemi’s depiction of women’s movement across the city to his patriarchism, can be disputed if we consider that the magazines initiated and edited by women in the same era encouraged a similar approach. These magazines encouraged women to withdraw from any kind of triviality, including aimless wandering on Tehran’s streets, so that they could concentrate on “recreating the nation into its glorious time.”⁸¹ The social-political dynamics of the era, a blend of anti-colonial tendencies and modernizing forces reproduced in both novels and magazines makes dualities such as patriarchism versus democracy seem simplistic.

Marshall Berman’s account of the making of modernity in All That is Solid Melts into Air (1988) is instructive here. Through him, we might say that the figure of Mahin constructs a mode of modernity that “intellectually [detaches] from the traditional world … but physically [is] still in its grip.”⁸² She is not “tätig-frei,” free for action, able “[t]o walk on free ground with people who are free!”⁸³ Berman returns to the modernizing metamorphosis of Wilhelm von Goethe’s Faust, who was growing intellectually but remained physically trapped in his small town.⁸⁴ Yet in the case of Mahin, the entrapment is not because there is no access to the spatial openness of the city. It is because she feels herself culturally obliged not to use Tehran’s public urban spaces. Instead, she “connects … [her] personal drives with the economic, political and social forces” that are propelling the country as she expands “the horizon of … [her] being from private to public life, from intimacy to activism ….”⁸⁵

Concluding Remarks

Literary works can bring into the foreground those urban realities that remain unseen in conventional urban history studies, studies largely focused on understanding historical developments through the planning, design and policy structures of cities. Works such as novels can help determine the ideals and norms of what a city could or should be. They are themselves part of urban modernity, catalyzing the creation of new affects and ideas, new approaches to the city and urban space. To interrogate the complexities of the production of modern urban space in Tehran, I have explored Dreadful Tehran and The Beautiful as “forces” that contribute to the deconstruction and reconstruction of spatial and social meanings in the contemporary public sphere, creating new cultural-spatial norms.⁸⁶

The novels portray two contrasting versions of modern female subjectivity in relation to modern urban space, space which becomes a stage for the liberation of women and is constitutive of their identities, just as they help to determine its character. For Ziba, the liberation in question is the sheer pleasure of being out and about in the public realm. For Mahin, it is the possibility, however circumscribed, of traversing the city to be involved in open discussion with friends and peers.

In these novels, both written by men, a moralizing narrative of women’s urban practices is used to construct both modern subjects and modern spaces. For a woman, a passion for walking on Lalehzar Street is portrayed as immoral, illegitimate, even dangerous because it encourages self-exhibition in the public realm. Through Ziba, Lalehzar becomes a place of excessive consumerism and obsession with imported commodities, and those who frequent it become people who have forgotten their roots and become “loose,” whether in morals or desires. The importance accorded to cultural expectations in these representations of Tehran’s urban life in the early twentieth century makes clear the persistence of the “old,” of traditional practices, in the creation of the “new.” The moralizing stance of both novels sets out a distinction between desirable and undesirable modernities that is still familiar in today’s conceptions of the modern in Iran. Lalehzar Street and the women who walk there are relegated to the category of the undesirable – superficial imitations of Western modernity. Mahin’s urban practices, in contrast, represent the desirable face of modernity, respectful of long-standing social norms while allowing for new, supposedly unthreatening freedoms.

The first Iranian novel written by a woman, Suvashun, by Simin Daneshvar, published in 1961, adopts the same moralizing stance. Its main female protagonist, Zari, is politically active yet, like Mahin, she confines herself to her house. Portrayed as a “household angel,” Zari insists that “the whole country is my house” or “my house is the whole country.”⁸⁷ This is very different from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels written by women authors in other parts of the world, which often cast female protagonists who walk freely in the city and enjoy new spatial-psychological experiences. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), for example, or her essay “Street Haunting” (1927), shows women taking quiet and legitimate pleasure in walking the streets of London.⁸⁸ The heroine of Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1945) comes to love walking through Barcelona in the years just after the Spanish Civil War.⁸⁹ And in Cora Sandel’s Alberta and Freedom (1931), Alberta takes pleasure in discovering the streets and boulevards of Paris.⁹⁰ Each of these authors writes of the experiences of the female urban walker or flâneuse.

To draw this distinction between female literary practices in Iran and the West is not to say that Iranian women writers were non-existent before Daneshvar, nor that they were unconcerned with the public realm. It is simply that the public realm, for them, was not spatial, and the novel was not their chosen literary form. In the early twentieth century, many female authors were involved in setting up journals, initiating and editing the magazines that engaged with women’s cultural and political affairs. Magazines such as Danesh (Knowledge) and Shokoofeh (Blossom), edited by women and started respectively in 1909 and 1912, began to advocate for the emancipation of women in a version of the public realm that we might call discursive – the public realm of journalism. They aimed to empower women through educating them and making them aware of their role in “bringing the country toward civilization.”⁹¹ Like Ziba and Dreadful Tehran, they expressed a preference for keeping women spatially confined and they condemned women who interacted freely with men on Lalehzar.⁹² Similar ideas were reproduced in later magazines edited and largely written by women, such as Peyk Saadat Nesvan (Women’s Welfare), its first issue published in 1926.

After the 1979 revolution in Iran, a shift in women’s literary work was evident. Feminist issues and gender relations became the central themes of women writers. This shift was evident not only in works of new authors such as Moniroo Ravanipour, but also in Simin Behbahani and Simin Daneshvar’s post-revolutionary works.⁹³ Iranian women’s battle to claim the streets is more recent, gaining its most tangible form in the Women, Life and Liberty movement that emerged in 2022. A novel of female flânerie in Tehran has still to be written.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Matthew Gandy and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Special thanks to Diana Periton for profound support in developmental editing of this article. I am thankful to Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge and the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship Programme. The contents of this paper reflect only my views and not the views of the University of Cambridge or the European Commission.

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This work was supported by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship Programme [EC Grant Agreement Number: 893749-Hybridities-H2020-MSCA-IF-2019].

Notes on contributors

Somaiyeh Falahat

Somaiyeh Falahat is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, and a senior consultant at Arup. With a PhD in Theory and History of Architecture, she has previously held an Alexander von Humboldt Research Grant and a German Federal Ministry of Education and Research postdoctoral fellowship, and has taught at the University of Greenwich and TU Berlin. Her research engages with ways we can rewrite architectural and urban histories from specific cultural-spatial perspectives; Somaiyeh has published Cities and Metaphors (Routledge 2018) and papers in Planning Perspectives, Urban History, International Journal of Architectural Research and The Planning Review on these themes. Her current research project, “Hybrid Modernities,” funded by the European Commission, critically engages with contemporary theories on the “modern city,” investigating cultural modernist products from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Notes

1. Manoocher Aryanpur, “Retrospect and Progress: A Short View of Modern Persian Literature,” Books Abroad 46, no. 2 (1972): 201, https://doi.org/10.2307/40126072; Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1966), 7;

M. R. Ghanoonparvar, In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993), 50.

2. Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature, 84.

3. Ibid.; Aryanpur, “Retrospect and Progress."

4. Mohammad Hejazi, Ziba [The beautiful] (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1931), 79, 133, 152.

5. Aryanpur, “Retrospect and Progress"; Ali Beh-Pajooh, “Parisian or Persian? An Introduction on the French Roots of the First Iranian Social Novels,” in Iran and the West : Cultural Perceptions from the Sasanian Empire to the Islamic Republic, eds. David Bagot and Margaux Whiskin, (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

6. Ḥasan Mirʿābedini, “Moshfeq-e Kazemi, Sayyed Morteza,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2011.

7. Houra Yavari, “Fiction ii (b),” in Encyclopædia Iranica, 1999, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/fiction-iibthe-novel; Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer, second edition (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2022).

8. Mirʿābedini, “Moshfeq-e Kazemi, Sayyed Morteza.”

9. Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity, Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 80.

10. See Dennis, Cities in Modernity; David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York, London: Routledge, 2006).

11. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), x.

12. Ibid, x.

13. Scholars of modernity have widely used novels as sources for their understanding of modernity. For example, Karl Marx draws on Balzac; David Harvey makes references to texts from Benjamin, Flaubert and Baudelaire; and Marshall Berman explores Faust. See Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).

14. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2012), 12.

15. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 17.

16. Ibid, 17, original emphases.

17. See, for example, James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 1-26; Trevor J. Barnes, James S. Duncan, eds., Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992).

18. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge MA., Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 115.

19. See, for instance, Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 14-16 and 25.

20. Ben Anderson, “Cultural Geography II: The Force of Representations,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 6 (December 2019): 1120; see also Gillian Rose, “Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City: Exteriorization, Individuation, Reinvention,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 4 (4 July 2017): 779-793.

21. The urban modernity of Tehran has been known to us largely through investigations of transformations in architectural details, urban spatial reorganisations, planning structures and city administrative systems; novelistic representations have been almost absent as sources of studies. See, for example, Eckart Ehlers and Willem Floor, “Urban Change in Iran, 1920-1941,” Iranian Studies 26, no. 3-4 (1993): 251-275; Farzin Vahdat, “Iran’s Early Intellectual Encounter with Modernity: A Dual Approach,” in Society and Culture in Qajar Iran, ed. Elton L. Daniel (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2002), 99-141; Ali Madanipour, Tehran, The Making of a Metropolis (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); Seyed Mohsen Habibi, Az shar ta shahr [de la cité à la ville] (Tehran: University of Tehran Press, 2006); Talinn Grigor, “Tehran: A Revolution in Making,” in Political Landscapes of Capital Cities, ed. Jessica Joyce Christie, Jelena Bogdanović, and Eulogio Guzmán (Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 347-377; Huseyn Soltanzadeh, Moqadameh-ee bar tarikh-e shahr va shahrsazi dar Iran [An Introduction to the History of City and Urbanism in Iran] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1988); Amir Banimasoud, Memari-ye moaser-e Iran [Iranian Contemporary Architecture] (Tehran: Honar-e Memari-e Gharn, 2009); Mahvash Alemi, “The 1891 Map of Tehran: Two Cities, Two Cores, Two Cultures,” Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 1 (1985): 74-84; Mostafa Kiyani, Memari Pahlavi avval [Architecture of the First Pahlavi Era] (Tehran: Moaseseh Motaleat Tarikh Moaser Iran, 2004).

22. Shahram Parastesh and Samaneh Mortazavi Gazar, “Baznemaee fazaaha-ye shahri Tehran dar romanha-ye doreh Reza Pahlavi” [The Representation of Urban Space in Novels Produced during the Pahlavids], Sociological Journal of Art and Literature 3, no. 1: 105-132.

23. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), cited in Shahram Parastesh and Samaneh Mortazavi Gazar.

24. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (1 January 2002): 50; quoted in Rasmus Christian Elling, “Urbanizing the Iranian Public: Text, Tehran and 1922,” Middle Eastern Studies 55, no. 3 (4 May 2019): 316.

25. Amy Wigelworth, Rewriting Les Mystères de Paris: The Mystères Urbains and the Palimpsest. (London: Routledge, 2020), 1, quoted in Elling, “Urbanizing the Iranian Public,” 301.

26. Shamsi Aliyari and Leyla Noohi Tehrani, “Rabeteh-ye mizan-e tavanmandi va no’e monasebati jensiati shakhsiati jensiyat shakhsiati asli-ye zan dar roman-e Tehran-e Makhuf,” [The Relationship between the Capacity and Gendered Relationships of the First Female Character in the Novel Dreadful Tehran]. The Sociology of Art and Literature 4, no. 2 (2012): 21–38.

27. For further details on political and social conditions in this era see, for example, Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Homa Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Iran (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization, Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

28. Ahmad Ashraf, “The Roots of Emerging Dual Class Structure in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” Iranian Studies 14, no. 1-2 (1981): 5.

29. Homa Katouzian, Iran: Politics, History and Literature, Iranian Studies 15 (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2013).

30. In February 1921 General Reza Khan, commander of the Cossack garrison in Qazvin, took control over Tehran launching the new era of the Pahlavis (Pahlavi was an adopted name). Reza Khan came from a military family that fled Russian advance into the Caucasus. He was self-educated and had risen through the ranks. Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

31. Abbas Amanat, “Constitutional Revolution i. Intellectual Background,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (London, Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1993); an updated version is available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/constitutional-revolution-i. See also Homa Katouzian, “Problems of Democracy and the Public Sphere in Modern Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East XVIII, no. 2 (1998): 31-37.

32. Fakhri Haghani, “The 'New Woman' on the Stage: The Making of a Gendered Public Sphere in Interwar Iran and Egypt” (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, 2008), 14-15.

33. This press included, for example, Jahan-e Zanan (Women’s World) edited by Fakhr Afagh Parsa, and Zaban-e Zanan (Women’s Voice) edited by Sedigheh Dolatabadi.

34. Haghani, “The 'New Woman' on the Stage,” 71.

35. See Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy & the Origins of Feminism, The History and Society of the Modern Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

36. H Bahrambeygui, Tehran: An Urban Analysis (Tehran: Sahab Books Institute, 1977).

37. See John D. Gurney, “The Transformation of Tehran in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Téhéran: Capitale Bicentenaire, ed. Chahryar Adle and Bernard Hourcade (Paris, Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1992), 51-71.

38. Madanipour, Tehran, The Making of a Metropolis; Seyed Mohsen Habibi and Zahra Ahari, “Lalehzar- Arseh-ye tafaroj, az bagh ta khiaban, sheklgiri-ye khiaban be sabk-e oroupaee dar doreh-ye Naser al-Din Shah” [Lalehzar – a Place for Recreation, from a Garden to a Street, Formation of a Street in the European Style during Naser al-Din Shah]. Honarha-ye Ziba 34 (1387 / 2008).

39. William A.V. Jackson, Persia Past and Present (London, 1906), 418-19, quoted in Mahvash Alemi, “The 1891 Map of Tehran, Two Cities, Two Cores, Two Cultures,” 1985, 84.

40. Ali Madanipour, “Urban Planning and Development in Tehran,” Cities 23, no. 6 (2006): 433-38.

41. Parviz Khatibi, Khaterati az honarmandan [Memories of Artists] (Los Angeles: Entesharat Bonyad Farhangi Parviz Khatibi, 1993). Abbas Milani, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Nafisi, Saeed, Be revayat-e Saeed Nafisi, khaterat siasi, adabi, javani [Saeed Nafisi’s political, literary and youth memories], ed. Alireza Etesam (Tehran: Nashr Markaz, 2002).

42. Nafisi, Be revayat-e Saeed Nafisi, khaterat siasi, adabi, javani.

43. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 67. Felski suggests that a vast culture of consumption began with the emergence of the modern city and modern urban life across the world. Contemporary scholarship on urban modernity observes a relationship between gender and capital at the very heart of modern social relations – outlining capitalism’s impact on gender. It is believed that the attitude, characteristics and role of women were affected and transformed by this emergent culture of consumption. See also William R. Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925,” The Journal of American History 71, no. 2 (1984): 319-42; Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, revised and updated edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

44. Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010, vol. 4 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012); Khatibi, Khaterati az honarmandan; Milani, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979; Nafisi, Be revayat-e Saeed Nafisi, khaterat siasi, adabi, javani.

45. Hejazi, Ziba, 1931, 43.

46. Ibid., 43.

47. Ibid., 54-55.

48. The magazine Shokoofeh (Blossom) mentions these emerging social-spatial relationships several times throughout its numbers.

49. Jafar Shahri, Tarikh-e ejtemaeeTehran [Social History of Tehran] (Tehran: Entesharat Esmaeelian, 1989).

50. Hejazi, Ziba, 1931, 67.

51. Ibid., 54.

52. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 67.

53. This dependency should not suggest that it was impossible for women to have incomes in early modern cities. Modernity brought possibilities of an economic independence for women through employment in, for instance, services and factories.

54. Hejazi, Ziba, 55.

55. Ibid., 192.

56. Badr al-Muluk Bamdad, From Darkness into Light: Women’s Emancipation in Iran, ed. F. R. C. Bagley (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2013).

57. Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911, 179, quoted in Valentine Moghadam, “Hidden from History? Women Workers in Modern Iran,” Iranian Studies 33, no. 3-4 (2000): 385.

58. Hejazi, Ziba, 34.

59. Ibid., 43.

60. Ibid., 298.

61. Ibid., 212.

62. Ibid., 202.

63. Wendy Parkins, Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s-1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.

64. Hejazi, Ziba, 96.

65. Ibid., 117.

66. Being a place of new modern functions, Lalehzar Street was seen as a place of “prestige” and symbol for the new upper middle class in the country. Jafar Shahri, Tehran ghadim [Old Tehran], vol. 1. (Tehran: Entesharat Moeen, 2001); Habibi and Ahari, “Lalehzar”.

67. Hejazi, Ziba, 152.

68. Susynne M. McElrone, “Nineteenth-Century Qajar Women in the Public Sphere: An Alternative Historical and Historiographical Reading of the Roots of Iranian Women’s Activism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 2 (2005): 300. The New Schools offered an expanded curriculum that was no longer focused on traditional religious education. Traditionalists opposed these Schools, claiming that they were one of the reasons for what they saw as women’s loss of dignity. McElrone provides a detailed historiography of women’s education in Qajar Iran. See also Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution.

69. Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, cited in Moghadam, “Hidden from History? Women Workers in Modern Iran.”

70. Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Gender and the Sexual Politics of Public Visibility in Iranian Modernity,” in Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere, ed. Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 44–68; Moghadam, “Hidden from History? Women Workers in Modern Iran.”

71. Morteza Moshfegh Kazemi, Tehran-e Makhuf [Dreadful Tehran] (Tehran: Omid-e Farda, 2015 [1924]).

72. Ibid., 32.

73. Shahri, Tarikh-e ejtemaeeTehran. Shahri describes the tramcars as he remembers them from early twentieth-century Tehran.

74. Bamdad, From Darkness into Light; see McElrone, “Nineteenth-Century Qajar Women in the Public Sphere."

75. Guity Nashat, “Women in Pre-Revolutionary Iran: A Historical Overview,” in Women and Revolution in Iran, ed. Guity Nashat (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983), 20, quoted in McElrone. The restriction on visibility did not, however, mean an absolute absence from the public sphere. For details see McElrone, 311-12.

76. Sima Bahar, “A Historical Background to the Women’s Movement in Iran,” in Women of Iran, the Conflict with Fundamentalist Islam, ed. Farah Azari (London: Ithaca, 1983), 171. On the gender ideology and women public invisibility in Europe see Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990); Jenny Ryan, “Women, Modernity and the City,” Theory, Culture and Society 11 (1994): 35-63; Parkins, Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s-1930s; Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity; Jules Michelet, La Femme, ed. Thérèse Moreau (Paris: Flammarion, 1981 [1860]); Felski, The Gender of Modernity.

77. Haleh Esfandiari, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 20-21; quoted in McElrone, “Nineteenth-Century Qajar Women in the Public Sphere,” 300.

78. Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911, cited in Moghadam, “Hidden from History?”; Bamdad, From Darkness into Light.

79. Elling, “Urbanizing the Iranian Public”, 306.

80. Ibid., 309, original emphasis.

81. See, for example, Mozayen al-Saltaneh, Shokoofeh, 1912; Mozayen al-Saltaneh, Shokoofeh, 1916; Roshanak Nodoost, Peyk Saadat Nesvan, 1928.

82. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 52.

83. Ibid., 65.

84. Faust is a play written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe between 1770-1831. The completed version appeared in 1832. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, 37, 360.

85. Ibid., 61.

86. Anderson, “Cultural Geography II."

87. Simin Daneshvar, Suvashun, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Kharazmi, 1969), 18.

88. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Collector’s Library, 2003 [1925]); Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure (London: Penguin, 2005 [1927]); Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (London: Virago Press, 1995 [1938]); Olivia Manning, The Doves of Venus, (London: Virago Press, 1984 [1955]).

89. Carmen Laforet, Nada (London: Vintage, 2008 [1945])

90. Claire Etcherelli, Elise Ou La Vraie Vie [Elise or the Real Life] (London: Routledge, 2001 [1967]); Cora Sandel, Alberta and Freedom (London: Peter Owen, 2008 [1931]); Christina Stead, The Beauties and Furies (London: Virago, 1982 [1936]).

91. Mozayen al-Saltaneh, Shokoofeh, 1912, 2.

92. See, for example, Shokoofeh, Year 1, no 4 and Year 2, no 13.

93. Kamran Talattof, “Iranian Women’s Literature: From Pre-Revolutionary Social Discourse to Port-Revolutionary Feminism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 4 (1997): 531-558.