Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation

In 1992, Farzaneh Milani’s groundbreaking Veils and Words brought into dialoguethe fields of Iranian studies and feminist critical theory – two areas ofhumanist inquiry that, in some sense, need each other. Moreover, with workslike Hamid Naficy’s The Making of Exile Cultures (1993), interdisciplinarycritical theory has informed many humanist and social science approaches toIranian literature and culture. These links between integrated critical theoryand Iranian studies can produce compelling and insightful analyses. However,the cadence of such work might be more in tune with one subfield than another.While the content and subject of these studies might include Iranian society,culture, or art, it is often the case that the critical method being deployedis more important than the historical, literary, or social content to which it isapplied. Methodology eclipses the subject of analysis.This is the case with Leila Rahimi Bahmany’s Mirrors of Entrapment andEmancipation (Mirrors). Bahmany’s work tells us more about the feministcritical genealogy brought to bear on the work of Sylvia Plath (d. 1963) andForrough Farrokhzad (d. 1967) than it does about the works and lives of thesepoets themselves. But if, as I note above, these fields do “need” each other,then this book is worth exploring for both feminist scholars and Iranian studiesspecialists. Beyond specialists, however, the work does little to draw in areader not already at least slightly familiar with debates in psychoanalyticfeminist theory of the twentieth century.Bahmany begins her book with the highly suggestive images of Narcissusand Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, she quickly movesfrom this basis in classical western mythology to the relevance of these imagesfor psychoanalysis and feminism. Thus, she rapidly establishes a ...