Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3 Summary: “James”

Content Warning: This section depicts suicide.

Nafisi opens Part 3 by recalling the day the Iran-Iraq War began: September 23, 1980. Nafisi describes herself as blindsided and confused by the outbreak of the conflict: “For me, as for millions of ordinary Iranians, the war came out of nowhere […] unexpected, unwelcome and utterly senseless” (157). As the Iran-Iraq War rages over the next eight years, Nafisi details her professional and personal woes as the political situation continues to darken.

Nafisi describes Iranian society as becoming ever more polarized during these years. The veil becomes mandatory for all women, including female students and professors at universities. Due to “women’s overwhelming objection to the laws” (167), the Islamic regime institutes harsh measures to enforce compliance, including “up to seventy-six lashes and jail terms” for any woman who disobeys (167). Nafisi feels deeply conflicted about the new clothing requirements; she tries to resist for as long as she can, but ultimately must submit to the mandatory veiling and clothing searches each day before entering campus to continue teaching.

The social and political pressures she faces foster tension within her marriage. She resents her husband Bijan’s “apparent disregard for what I, as a woman and an academic, was going through” (169). Although she admires Bijan’s calmness and devotion to duty, she is irritated by his insistence that “we had to serve our country, regardless of who ruled it” (169). These marital tensions reflect the way in which the totalitarian regime’s reach once again infiltrates the most personal realms of Iranian life. Privately, Nafisi admits that she has “lost all concept of terms such as home, service, and country” and hardly recognizes Iran (169). Dispirited, she resigns from the University of Tehran, turns even more eagerly to her reading for solace, and recalls her early days of friendship with the magician, with whom she associates with at this time.

Nafisi is eventually convinced by a woman called Mrs. Rezvan to return to teaching, this time at the University of Allameh Tabatabei. To her surprise, the magician also urges Nafisi to take on the post, arguing that she has no real desire to “withdraw” from public life as he has. Nafisi’s arrival at the university is controversial, with someone leaving a note condemning her shoved under her office door. Nafisi returns to teaching, forced to conform with the veiling mandates but still given enough “tolerance” to choose her own texts for teaching and to be “informal” in her interactions with students.

Nafisi is astonished to discover Nassrin in her class one day. Nassrin is a young woman who, seven years earlier, had attended some of her literature lectures just for fun before suddenly disappearing. Nassrin explains that she was arrested by the Revolutionary Guards for “distributing leaflets in the streets” and sentenced to ten years in prison (191). Her sentence was later reduced to three years due to her religious father’s good standing with the regime. Nassrin describes her traumatic experiences in the prison, including the executions of many of her friends.

Nafisi continues to teach texts that arouse debate in class, including Henry James’s novel Daisy Miller. The students debate the character of Daisy, with the Islamic students condemning her as wayward and the female students feeling sympathy for her liveliness and attempts at agency. Meanwhile, the war rages on, and Nafisi and her family experience bombings in Tehran. Nafisi reflects on James’s experiences living through World War I in the final two years of his life, in particular the way the war horrified him while also stirring him to feel patriotic toward Britain.

Nafisi hears from one of her students, Mahtab, who has also just been released from prison. Mahtab reveals that another former female student of Nafisi’s, Razieh, was executed in prison. Nafisi is moved by the news, remembering Razieh as “a slight girl, small and dark” with “an amazing capacity for beauty” and a passionate love for the works of Henry James (221). In honor of Razieh’s memory, Nafisi writes an analysis of James’s novel Washington Square, reflecting on the character arc of its heroine, Catherine, who learns to stand up for herself at the novel’s end and chooses her own destiny.

The Iran-Iraq War finally ends “the way it had started, suddenly and quietly” after eight years, with the Iranian regime accepting defeat (238). Less than a year later, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini dies, with Nafisi describing the surrealness of the public mourning and funeral. Part 3 ends with one of Nafisi’s classes getting interrupted by an unexpected occurrence: one of the “more fanatical” Islamic students, a war veteran from the Iran-Iraq War, “had set fire to himself in an empty classroom [..] and run down the hall, shouting revolutionary slogans” (250). Nafisi says that the young man dies later that night of his injuries and that “Nothing was said about him—no commemoration, no flowers or speeches” (253).

Part 3 Analysis

The Iran-Iraq War (also known as the First Gulf War) forms an important historical backdrop to Part 3. The Iran-Iraq War lasted from 1980 until 1988, pitting the Iranian Islamic regime against the Iraqi regime of then-dictator Saddam Hussein. Although relations between Iraq and Iran had long been tense, Iraq initiated this particular conflict. Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980 in the wake of territorial disputes and under the pretext that Iran’s Islamic Revolution could spread to its neighbor. The following eight years saw many battles interspersed between periods of stalemate, and resulted in many war crimes, such as the use of child soldiers and chemical weapons. The war officially ended in August 1988 after a powerful Iraqi offensive, after which Iran accepted a ceasefire. The conflict killed approximately half a million people and caused widespread hardship for the Iranian population. It also undermined confidence in the Islamic regime amongst many Iranians.

Against this backdrop of external war, Nafisi focuses on her inner battles. The issues surrounding moral complicity come to the fore, just as they did in Part 2. In Part 3, Nafisi is left feeling conflicted about the new rules she must abide by in order to continue her university teaching. While she does not oppose the voluntary wearing of the veil by religious women such as her student Mahshid, she believes that forcing it upon all women is a violation of personal agency. Nafisi describes her situation as one of ever-growing pressures that cause serious mental strain. She speaks of “this void I felt within me” and is alienated by her husband’s apparent lack of understanding of how hard it is for her, “as a woman and an academic” to be subjected to so many harsh rules (169). In accepting her new teaching position at the University of Allameh Tabatabei, Nafisi complies with the veiling requirements while still trying to teach and challenge her students as she sees fit—an attempt at compromise that she tries to feel, sometimes unsuccessfully, is acceptable.

Both Daisy Miller and Washington Square reflect Nafisi’s concerns with female agency. As with The Great Gatsby, Nafisi is confronted by Islamic students who condemn the novel for its apparent immorality. This time, however, there is no trial. Instead, Nafisi shows how the issue of female agency depicted by James is still a very relevant one. Three of her female students—Nassrin, Mahtab, and Razieh—undergo imprisonment for daring to defy the regime. Only two of them survive. Nafisi is moved by Razieh’s death because Razieh represents the blighted potential of so many young Iranian women, as well as the violent control exercised by the regime. Nafisi describes Razieh as “a strange mix of contradictory passions” who had dreamed of being a teacher (222).

The plight of these female students illustrates the dangers pressing upon Iranian women who try to assert themselves in any way against the regime. As with the titular character in Daisy Miller, some of them never achieve a happy ending and pay the price for their independence.

Nafisi’s account of the young war veteran’s death by suicide shows a different type of victimization under the regime. The war veteran is “fanatical” in his Islamic beliefs and had a reputation for harshly enforcing dress codes on other students. His death leaves Nafisi shaken, both by its violent despair and the way in which it is unceremoniously ignored, with “no commemoration, no flowers or speeches” (253), as though his death is of no importance. The war veteran becomes the embodiment of all the war victims from the Iran-Iraq War and of the dehumanizing effects the violence has had upon the populace at large, with some of the secular students even mocking his death, to Nafisi’s discomfort. Nafisi sees this reaction as emblematic of the wider divisions in Iranian society: “[W]e had been polarized into ‘us’ and ‘them’” (252).

With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi also touches on The Uses and Misuses of Creativity. Once again, a contrast is formed between how the regime views creativity and how Nafisi views it. She depicts Ayatollah Khomeini as someone who was creative in a destructive way: His regime leaves Nafisi feeling “light and fictional” under the weight of his strict edicts, while Khomeini himself is described as a “conscious mythmaker [who] had turned himself into a myth” (167, 246). While the stories Nafisi turns to during the war help sustain her, Khomeini’s myths bring oppression and ruin: “[H]e had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end […] managed to destroy both reality and his dream” (246).