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¶ … Lolita in Tehran -- the Threats of Western Literature and Freedom
Reading the great classics of Western literature in Tehran during the height of the fundamentalist Iranian regime's power over its citizens was a threatening and radical act of defiance. This was not simply because these books were banned. Specifically, Western literature and Western fiction in particular offered the girls who gathered for discussions in the author's living room the ability to express opinions contrary to the fundamentalist regime. Western novels always involve choices for the protagonist and the reader. What do I do, wonders the character? What do I think about what he or she does, wonders the reader? The main characters studied by the girls under the tutelage of Azar Nafisi, like Daisy Miller or Jay Gatsby, make choices -- some of them very dangerous, like going outside during a fever season, or risking a fortune for love. The idea of choice and multiple perspectives on life was not something good Muslim girls were supposed to entertain. They were supposed to obey their husbands, fathers, and sons, and do what they were told. But to read a novel, stresses the author Azar Nafisi, is to make a choice. The writer does not tell the reader, in Western literature, what to think of Lolita. Rather, the reader must make a choice with her own mind and will about the plight of the character.
The reasons that Western literature was so threatening -- that their plots provide the reader with choices and many views of morality -- are why Western values were also so threatening to the Iranian fundamentalist Muslim regime. Western values were threatening, because they suggested that the individual should decide, in his or her own opinion, what was best, rather than some outside religious authority. Morality could not be found in a single book, in the Koran. There was more than one interpretation to the novels. Thus, when Nafisi debated one of her students, before the revolution, about Gatsby's morality, unbeknownst to him she engaged in a very Western and radical act. She posed the question that there were two sides to Gatsby and the issues raised by the novel, rather than only one.
Work Cited
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York; Random House, 2003.
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