Abstract
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004) —focused on her youth and early adulthood in Iran and Austria— reveal in many ways the conflicting coexistence between the West —Europe and North America— and the Middle East. This article explores feminist Orientalism and national identity in both Satrapi’s works, with the purpose of demonstrating the manners that these comics complicate and challenge binary divisions commonly related to the tensions amid the Occident and the Orient, such as East-West, Self-Other, civilized-barbarian and feminism-antifeminism. In the first part of the analysis, feminist Orientalism —a concept based on the works of Edward Said and Roksana Bahramitash, which is defined in the paper as any form of domination from the West on the East, validated by women’s rights and/or Western feminism— is applied on the two comics of Satrapi, in order to explain how they break some stereotypes linked to women from the East, like their passive and subjugated role in a patriarchal and religious society. Through the study of feminist Orientalism on both graphic novels, it can also be observed the various ways in which the protagonist disputes the notion of the West as the best place for women to live, unlike the “uncivilized” Orient. The second part of the analysis exposes the complex national identity of the main character. On the one hand, she opposes the nationalism that the Iranian fundamentalist regime wants to impose, and, on the other hand, she is attached to her family and Iranian culture. Moreover, the article delves into the ambivalent national identity of the protagonist during her experience as a migrant in Vienna, where she defies misunderstandings and Orientalized visions, but also suffers because of the tensions and differences between the Occident and the Orient.
Conclusion
Through the different elements of Persepolis and Persepolis 2 that I presented, it can be observed that these graphic novels defy, complicate, and debate the topics of feminist Orientalism and national identity. They display an Iranian society that coexists in conflicting and varied ways with Orientalist discourse, feminism, and the idea of nation that remove the divisions of binaries and stereotyped categories like East-West, Self-Other, feminist-antifeminist, civilized-uncivilized, among others. Satrapi, although she is an Iranian woman, shares many Occident’s perceptions and beliefs, including characteristics of the first and second wave of Western feminism. In spite of her Westernization, she feels like a marginalized Other in some episodes during her life in Vienna, and suffers the migrant’s nostalgia for returning home, for going back with her family and culture. Nevertheless, when Satrapi returns to Iran, she does not fit in this society whose totalitarian government, justified in an extremist nationalism, wants to erase the individual and complex identity of women and their willingness to decide what and how to dress, behave, think, say and be. The protagonist represents, on the one hand, the Spivak’s argument of “the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (306) but, on the other hand, she does not disappear under the “patriarchy and imperialism” (306) that Spivak denounces, because Satrapi’s individuality achieves to break the different walls that the Middle East and the Western Vienna impose on her. (103)
