In the chapter on Lolita, Nafisi focuses on the theme of oppression in literature. This is her way to understand and cope with the oppression she experiences as a woman in Iran. She understands that her situation in totalitarian, fundamentalist Iran is similar to that described in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and Lolita, and she takes strength from the idea that the victims of totalitarianism don't have to end up broken and destroyed.
Nafisi also examines A Thousand and One Nights as the story of a woman who resists severe oppression. Finally, in Lolita she finds a young girl resisting the oppression of her pedophile captor—who tries to maintain total control of her— in all the subtle ways the little girl can. She reads Lolita as an example of a man exerting disproportionate power over an innocent victim, just as the fundamentalist regime in Iran was doing to women in general.
Overall in her book, Nafisi sees literature as a way to fight back against totalitarianism. Literature, she writes
can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
Totalitarianism, in contrast, believes only in absolutes and doesn't offer people the plurality of viewpoints a novel does. Reading novels like Lolita, which condemn destroying one person at the whim of another, is Nafisi's way of fighting back against her own oppression.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, narrator and author Azar Nafisi chooses to study the controversial novel Lolita in her women's study group because the main character's life mirrors the oppression that she and the other women feel. As occupants of post-revolutionary Iran, Nafisi and her former students face the oppression of a restrictive Islamic regime. They are forced to cover themselves and threatened if they do not conform to the regime's ideals of what a woman should be and do. Similarly, Lolita is a young girl who is defined by her relationship to a much older man. At one point, Nafisi says that "not only her life but also her life story is taken from her," in reference to Lolita. She sees this as a parallel to the freedom that was taken from Iranian women, and the act of joining together to read forbidden books is a way to avoid falling victim to oppression a second time. The imbalance of power in the dynamic between Humbert and Lolita mirrors the dynamic between the women in the group and the men around them. If this dynamic is not present in their own marriages and families, it is present in greater society.
Lolita is only one of the many books that were forbidden in the new Iranian regime. Despite the risk, Nafisi and the others feel that it is important to carve out their own spaces of freedom where they can. In this sense, reading Lolita is an act of rebellion. Most of the women have a copied version from the book because it has been banned by the government. Nasifi notes that the women in her study group also have "fragility and courage" in common, both of which are qualities that can be seen peeking through Lolita's character even through Humbert's biased lens.
No comments:
Post a Comment