Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2003

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Uses and Misuses of Creativity

In Reading Lolita in Tehran, creative endeavours—in particular, the writing and dissemination of literature—are used or misused by different people to achieve different ends. In this respect, the memoir serves as both a celebration of what art can achieve while also cautioning against the ways it can be distorted or manipulated, with harmful results.

For Nafisi, the single greatest example of the abuse of literature and creativity is found in the regime of the Islamic Republic. From early in the memoir, Nafisi argues that art suffers under the Islamic regime because the regime wishes to exercise strict control over artistic productions, declaring what is and is not acceptable according to its own ideology. As Nafisi writes, the Islamic regime creates a culture in which “literary works” are “important only when they [are] handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent—namely ideology” (25, emphasis added).

The regime’s emphasis on using art to promote its political and religious ideology has, Nafisi argues, a detrimental effect upon art aesthetically. She claims that in dubbing writers “the guardians of morality” (136), the regime “paralyze[s] them” and condemns them to “a kind of aesthetic impotence” (136). Nafisi suggests that this “aesthetic impotence” is the result of not being able to explore ideas freely, from multiple viewpoints and in sometimes controversial ways. The emphasis on ideology therefore hinders creativity, creating a cultural monolith that does not leave room for innovative or dissenting points of view. Nafisi depicts the regime’s strict attitude toward literature as gradually filtering down and influencing even her own university students, as when Mr. Nyazi objects to studying The Great Gatsby not on aesthetic grounds, but because he believes it promotes lax morality, such as adultery.

While the regime tries to use literature as a political tool for its own ends, Nafisi depicts literature as the antidote to the regime’s desire for total control of the population. Nafisi claims that every “good novel” is, by nature, the opposite of a totalitarian worldview, because it “shows the complexity of individuals” (132), allowing multiple viewpoints to be represented at once without necessarily choosing explicitly between them. She argues that the multiplicity of viewpoints and ideas found within literary works renders a good novel “democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so” (132).

Nafisi presents the inherently “democratic” nature of literature as a challenge to the monolithic worldview advanced by the Islamic regime. Literary works are constant reminders that other ways of seeing, feeling, and experiencing the world are possible and perhaps just as valid. Nafisi holds up Nabokov’s Lolita as an example of literature’s ability to resist monolithic thinking. She argues that although “Lolita was not a critique of the Islamic Republic […] it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives” by exposing the power dynamics of abuse and the dangers of trying to control others (35). In turning to works of literature for both solace and unfettered intellectual discussion, Nafisi and the other women in her book club are choosing to embrace literature as an alternative to the strict, one-sided worldview imposed upon them by the Islamic regime.

Individuality Versus Totalitarianism

Throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran there is a continuous struggle between the forces of individuality and the Islamic regime’s attempts at total control of the population. Nafisi presents this struggle as both political and deeply personal, suggesting that one of the most insidious effects of living under a totalitarian regime is the way in which it impacts even the most private and personal aspects of a person’s life.

Nafisi represents the Islamic regime’s edicts as attempts to minimize or even erase the individuality of each Iranian, especially women. At the opening of the memoir, this is embodied in the two photographs Nafisi describes, which show her and her students in two very different guises. In the first photograph, they are dressed “according to the law of the land” in “black robes and head scarves” that leave only their faces and hands uncovered (4). The strict dress code renders all the women similar, suppressing any trace of distinct identity.

The second photograph is taken after the women have removed their coverings: “Each one has become distinct” due to the variety of colors, styles, and whether or not each woman has chosen to retain the head scarf (4). For Nafisi, these photographs symbolize the stark contrast between what the regime wishes the women to be—indistinguishable, plain, reserved—and how the women wish to represent themselves when allowed to display their individual style and personality.

The struggle symbolized by the photographs appears more broadly in other ways. Nafisi depicts Ayatollah Khomeini and his regime as constantly trying to mold Iranians according to their own desires, whether or not Iranians themselves wish to comply: Ayatollah Khomeini “wanted to re-create us” (28). The regime’s attempts at control extend from everything from how Iranians dress, to how they can behave, to what they can read.

Nafisi describes this process of gradually-increasing control as being akin to being imprisoned in a world created by a bad writer: She says that living under the regime’s strict rules leaves her feeling “light and fictional […] as if I had been written into being and then erased” (167). Elsewhere in the text, she complains about how the “totalitarian regime” in Iran “intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us” (67).

Nafisi’s frequent recourse to literary metaphors to describe the forces of totalitarian control depict totalitarianism as a perverse inverse of the freedom and creativity of art—the Islamic regime is perpetually trying to rewrite (or overwrite) the individuality of its citizens, believing that any trace of uniqueness is a threat to its strict monolithic worldview.

In spite of the pressures the regime imposes, Nafisi describes herself and her “girls” as actively resisting control by clinging to individuality in whatever ways they can. This is embodied most strongly by the secret book club. Nafisi depicts the club as a site of resistance, which allows the participants to defy the “repressive reality” of the regime. It is a space where they can freely express themselves: “We articulated all that happened to us in our own words and saw ourselves, for once, in our own image” (57, emphasis added).

In emphasizing how the book club enables the women to use their “own words” and to create and display themselves in the way they genuinely wish to be (“our own image”), Nafisi stresses the lengths to which she and the other women will go to preserve something of their individuality, even if they can only do so within the privacy of her own home. In clinging to their individuality, Nafisi and the other women continue to resist the regime’s attempts at maintaining total control over them.

The Problems of Identity and Home

As a memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran is driven by Nafisi’s personal experiences and feelings before, during, and after the Iranian Revolution. More specifically, Nafisi is deeply interested in how the revolution impacts conceptions of identity and home—not just in her own case, but in the lives of some of her female students.

Nafisi says that her relationship with Iran as her “home” is a complicated one. As a university student studying in the United States, Nafisi details how her conceptions of Iran begin to shift even before the revolution. “[D]iscrepancies, or essential paradoxes, in [her] idea of ‘home’” result as she becomes more deeply involved in left-wing revolutionary activism (86). The young Nafisi feels torn between the Iran of her real-life memories, “the place of parents and friends and summer nights by the Caspian Sea” and “this other, reconstructed, Iran” that is far more abstract, dreamt up by the revolution-minded students who spend their time “quarreling about what the masses in Iran wanted” (86).

In the memoir, Iran exists simultaneously as both a physical place and an idea, and undergoes various shifts as the years go on. Nafisi discusses how, under the Islamic regime, Iran changes beyond all recognition for her: “Home was changing before my eyes […] It was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile” (145). The regime’s idea of Iran and her own are too different to be reconciled. When her husband Bijan argues that the couple ought to “serve [their] county” in spite of their dislike of the Islamic dictatorship, Nafisi counters that she has already “lost all concept of terms such as home, service, and country” in the wake of such radical and unwelcome changes (169).

Nafisi depicts the regime-imposed idea of Iran as distorting the lives and identities of her students, especially the female ones. She describes the younger generation as being left with “no past” due to the extreme break between life under the Shah and life under the Islamic regime. The strict control exercised by the regime also makes it difficult for her students to know themselves in a meaningful way, creating different forms of identity crisis. They constantly suffer from “the confiscation of their most intimate moments and private aspirations by the regime” (273).

This crisis of identity affects both the religious students and the more secular ones. For the devout Mahshid, the revolution challenges her sense of religious identity. Before the revolution, she had voluntarily worn the head scarf “as a testament to her faith” (13); after “the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless” (13). Mahshid confesses to Nafisi that she has religious doubts in light of the regime’s actions and ideology, suggesting that there are conflicting ideas even between religious individuals of what an “Islamic Iran” means and what it should look like.

The more general identity crisis is best represented by Nassrin. Toward the end of the memoir, Nassrin speaks of the contrast between her time in prison and day-to-day life as an ostensibly “free” woman under the Islamic regime. She claims that her life outside of prison is, in some ways, even more oppressive than the life she had in jail. She describes her dilemma as creating a lack of genuine identity and self-knowledge: “I don’t want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is” (323).

In speaking of herself in the third person (“who this Nassrin is”) and expressing a longing to “know” herself at last, Nassrin sums up her experience of being alienated from herself, as well as her intense desire to break free and shape her identity, away from Iran and its religious authorities. Throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi suggests that the struggle to clearly define both “home” and identity is the greatest—and most personal—struggle of all.