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Out of the Family: Generations ofWomen in Marjane Satrapi's PersepolisNancy K. Miller

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Out of the Family:Generations of Women inMarjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

Nancy K. Miller

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis offers a new perspective on familiallegacies and feminist generations. Through the use of black-and-white stylisedimages and the interplay of panels, Satrapi shows how three generations ofwomen interact in the spaces of memory as well as history. In this autobio-graphical narrative of a transnational artist’s development, dissident genealogiesturn out to be as much a matter of books as of blood. Persepolis presents acomplex vision, both political and personal, of an intergenerational legacyderived from acts of rereading and translation. As we contemplate the questionof gender and generations from the still-fragile threshold of the twenty-firstcentury, Satrapi offers images that counter our stereotypes, both foreign anddomestic.

Keywords Satrapi; autobiography; generations; feminism

They will know that there are books waiting for them as there were no books forme; will know that others have been there, have recorded their experience; willknow that help is available and that they can name their anger and findcompanionship in enduring it. (Heilbrun 101)

In the last few years I’ve been involved with academic conferences in thehumanities whose themewas identified as ‘gender and generation’. The organisersof these conferences actually intended something more specific than all themeanings those two words could encompass. ‘Gender’ meant women, and usuallyfeminism; ‘generation’, the relations between women of different generationsand ages, usually between women writers and between feminists. At stake, itseemed to me, was the question of ‘transmission’ on the threshold of the twenty-first century*/in the aftermath of a century marked by the violence of world war,global atrocity, and collective traumatic experience, but also several importantpositive social and political revolutions, including that of modern feminism.

ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/07/010013-17# 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14484520701211321

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I found myself on these occasions asking a set of questions, which are boththeoretical and personal: How does one generation of women, in particularsecond-wave feminists, transmit its work, thoughts, and desires to the next?What does the next generation of women do with*/or want from*/the legacy ofits precursors? Should we think in terms of filiation (inherited family lines,mothers and daughters, for instance), or should we think about affiliation(chosen association, invented genealogies)?1

Since autobiography has long been one of my passions, and a form with whichmany women writers and second-wave theorists have passionately engaged,I turned to its many first-person examples (including my own) looking foranswers. In what follows, I sketch out a paradox of sorts that confronted me onmy journey into the recent feminist past: that the mother!/daughter relation,central to a great deal of women’s writing, and notably to the contemporaryautobiographical tradition, has been good for literature*/that is, aestheticallyproductive*/and at the same time, politically bad, by which I mean divisive, as amodel (or metaphor) for the relations between women involved in feministtransmission.2

The mother!/daughter relation that locates its origins in conflict has at leasttwo famous avatars. The first, the opening line from Luce Irigaray’s manifesto,‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’: ‘With your milk, Mother,I swallowed ice’ (60). The second, equally famous, declaration is from thelate 1970s, from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: ‘The cathexis betweenmother and daughter*/essential, distorted, misused*/is the great unwrittenstory’. Rich goes on to describe that silenced narrative as ‘the flow of energybetween biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic blissinside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other’ (225!/26).While Rich cites many literary examples from the works of women writers toillustrate the difficulty that often inhabits this intimate bond, the complicatedchapter in Of Woman Born devoted to mothers and daughters posits therelationship as foundational to the future of feminism, even as that relationcries out for transformation: ‘any radical vision of sisterhood demands that wereintegrate’ inherited ideas about mothers and daughters, rejecting theeconomy of ‘patriarchal attitudes’, which lead us to ‘project all unwantedguilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the ‘other’ woman’ (253).3 Irigaray’smonologue, which is almost an enactment of Rich’s language, also points to thenecessity of fixing an angry and frozen relationship.

I’d like to frame this reflection about the ways women have written andrewritten their lives through and against maternal models and metaphors with avignette from my own experience, showing my hand and speaking from theperspective of an older, academic, 1970s feminist who is not a mother. Thepassage below comes from my book Bequest and Betrayal, published in 1996,long after my mother’s death.

It’s 1981 and I’ve just gotten tenure at Barnard, the women’s college of ColumbiaUniversity. I’m running the Women’s Studies Program. There’s to be a panel

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celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Barnard Women’s Center. I’m going tospeak as the director of the program. I have not mentioned this to my mother.I still feel about my mother coming to see me perform just as I did in junior highon Open School Day, when I feigned laryngitis in order not to read my paper aloudin front of her. But because of a conference she attended at the Women’s Centera few years earlier, my mother’s been on their mailing list. ‘Why didn’t you tellme you were going to speak,’ she demands to know, eyes flashing with hurt andindignation. ‘Why did you think I wouldn’t be interested,’ she continues,undaunted by my stony silence. ‘You know I’m always interested in what youdo.’ ‘Well, you’re not a feminist,’ I reply sullenly. ‘Maybe I’m not a feminist theway you’re a feminist, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a feminist. I believe inwomen’s rights.’ My mother rests her case. I open my mouth but no words comeout. Rather than repeat my analysis of how you can’t be a feminist if yourhusband (a man!) supports you financially, even if you have worked part-time allyour life, I revert to adolescent gracelessness. ‘Well, you can come if you wantto, but I’m going to be very busy and won’t be able to talk to you. You’ll have tohave lunch by yourself,’ I add, hoping for maximum discouragement. ‘I’ll be at atable with the speakers.’ My mother says she’s coming anyway.The day of the panel, my mother arrives early to see my new office, even

though I’ve told her it’s temporary: a hole in the wall behind the dining commonsin which the event is to be held, but my first office to myself. She doesn’t reallywant to see the office, it turns out; she wants to show me a button she’s found toreplace the one I’ve lost on my winter jacket (she’s bought us matching jackets indifferent colors). She’s pleased with herself and eager to detail the trouble she’sgone to. I’m supposed to exclaim what a great find it is*/the button*/what abargain, how nice it was for her to do this for me. After all, she’s busy too, even ifshe doesn’t have a job. Fine, it’s fine, but I don’t want to think about buttonsnow. I have to give a talk. I move my mother into the hall, make her go sit byherself.I am forty years old. She is sixty-eight. She is still fixing my clothes, shortening

hems, letting out and taking in seams. A tailor’s daughter, whose Hebrew name,Malka, she used to say, meant queen. She is dying of cancer, but neither of usknows this yet. If we did, we would still have the fight. (89!/90)

That dispiriting account of mother!/daughter misunderstanding, which you canfind more elegantly rendered in the works of a long list of well-known twentieth-century women writers from Simone de Beauvoir to Marie Cardinal and AnnieErnaux, Vivian Gornick, Jill Ker Conway, Maxine Hong Kingston, and CarolynSteedman, to name a few, provides the literary backdrop against which I want tocontrast Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, an experiment in life writing that offersthe reader of European and American women’s autobiography a fascinating twiston the late twentieth-century model of mother!/daughter generations.

Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis , the first Iranian comic book, is the storyof a girl’s coming of age during the Islamic Revolution.4 In 1980, when Satrapi wasten years old, the young narrator explains, it became obligatory for girls to weara headscarf to school. The very first image of the first volume is a class picture ofSatrapi’s ten-year-old self, her face like that of her female classmates, framedby the black hood. The last image of the second volume shows a veiled Marjaneleaving Iran for France in 1994. Her father, mother, and grandmother (bothwomen also veiled) wave her off. The mother’s last words at the airport forbid

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the daughter to return as long as Iran remains under its repressive regime.Between the first image and the last, Satrapi’s panels chart the unfolding of afemale coming of age, but the dilemmas of identity and development thattypically provide the material of women’s autobiography are drawn against thedemands of a collective narrative of sexual difference where the marks of genderare not just ideologically constructed, as we like to say, but also literally policed.

Persepolis is an overtly political autobiography in which the matter of what itmight be to live*/or write*/a woman’s life is inseparable from the constraints of aspecific slice of historical time. In part because of the weight of this history,Persepolis escapes the classical oedipal psychodrama of conflict and separationtheorised by second-wave feminists, which shapes so many women’s autobio-graphies. It’s not that the daughter doesn’t struggle with her parents before shefinally leaves home, but Persepolis tells a different kind of story of attachmentand separation, a form of intergenerational collaboration of the sort morecommonly invoked by black feminist theorists. In Satrapi’s memoir, the daughter’sleaving*/she actually leaves home twice: once for Austria, the second time forFrance*/is refigured as a mode of transnational dislocation. Through theseparation produced by political exile family ties are both suspended andreforged.5

What gives Satrapi’s project its distinctive place in the expanding domains oflife writing, then, is neither the obviously new*/the Iranian revolutionary saga ingraphic form*/nor the familiar story of the daughter leaving home and separatingfrom her mother, but the arc of the autobiography created by the interlockingvisual and narrative trajectories that link the two. In the interaction between thewords and drawings, in the gaps, connections and silences that structure what wemight think of as the ‘trans-verbal’ spaces of the comic-book world, Persepolisrealigns the domains of the personal and the political, the singular and thecollective, for the twenty-first century.

Thinking about Satrapi’s innovation in representing generations of women ledme back to Julia Kristeva’s now-classic ‘Women’s Time’, an essay I taughtrecently in a course on post-war women writers and intellectuals. Kristeva beginsher meditation on generations of women in feminism with a slightly apocalypticaccount of history. She replaces what she sees as an antiquated view of nationwith a concept called ‘Europe’, against or within which she locates a ‘trans-European temporality’ experienced by women, or at least by ‘existentialfeminists’ (18) and their political demands. Although I don’t share Kristeva’sdark views about feminism’s future, I want to borrow her redefinition of thenotion of ‘generation’ as ‘less a chronology than a signifying space, a corporealand desiring mental space’ (33). This shift from a temporal to a spatial metaphormakes it possible for Kristeva to posit the ‘parallel existence’ (33) of thedifferent women’s times she identifies, an interweaving of lived experience inspaces both separate and shared. The spatial metaphor collapses the verticalhierarchy of generation onto a horizontal plane*/like the pages of a book, or amap, especially the contiguous panels of a comic book.

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In Persepolis the generations of women (inexorably and unambiguouslyidentified as women by the regime) coexist in the overlapping spaces of dialogueand memory*/a psychic and physical space made even more palpable to thereader by the conventions of this emergent genre: a graphic memoir whosenarrative mode depends as much on the visual arrangement of relations as onchronological order. At the same time, however, because Persepolis is also an actof political witness, of testimony, the panels cannot be deciphered fully outsidethe grid of historical time. Generations of women, we might say in thisborrowing, are shaped in their bodies and beliefs (Kristeva’s ‘corporeal anddesiring mental space’) by their response to laws designed precisely tocircumscribe their common realities.

Thus, when in reaction to the government’s imposition of the veil, women,including Marjane’s mother, march for and against the wearing of the veil. In oneof the earliest sequences Satrapi draws her mother, unveiled and wearing darkglasses, raising her arm in fierce protest. A German journalist snaps a picture ofMarjane’s mother at one of the demonstrations and publishes it in a Europeanmagazine. In facing panels, the mother protests outside in the streets and thedaughter, from the safety of her room, contemplates the photograph of hermother in the magazine with pride (Childhood 5).

What happens to the mother!/daughter plot when your mother is a dissidentand a feminist, and your grandmother a nonconformist?

Early in the narrative, in a sequence of three small panels, little Marjanestands between her mother and her grandmother in the kitchen as the womenanxiously wait for Marjane’s father, who is outside taking forbidden pictures, toreturn home (Childhood 29). (Although the women are dissident and protest, themen*/primarily*/are the ones who go to prison and are subjected to torture.) Inthe drawing, the child stands waist-high between the solid bodies of the women,who protect and comfort her. The dangerous content of the conversationbetween the two women (whose heads in one panel are missing) as theyspeculate about the father’s return is marked by a code in the dialogue balloonthat the little girl doesn’t understand (the women literally and figuratively speakover her head). The physical bonds among the women of three generationswaiting in the kitchen form a strand of female identification; the scene of thewomen drawn against one another in the confines of domestic space produces apause of intimate history within the broader strokes of national upheaval.(I should add that, while the bonds between women are especially strong, malefamily members*/Marjane’s father, in particular*/are also portrayed as sympa-thetic and wholly supportive of the women’s lives and ambitions.)

The politics of revolution finally make schooling impossible for children fromfamilies who believe in intellectual freedom, and Marjane’s parents send theirteenage daughter to Vienna. Lonely and confused, in the throes of a full-blownadolescent identity crisis, Marjane realises that she has to educate herself. Hereducation begins with books that she hopes will lead her to understand herexistential dilemmas as an Iranian girl attending a French-speaking school in aGerman-speaking city.

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The experiment of female self-discovery through reading is represented acrossseven panels on a single page (see Figure 1). At the top, from left to right, againsta black background are two panels that portray teenage Marjane first readingvoraciously, then studying a book by Simone de Beauvoir. At the far left, threesmall panels flash back to Marjane’s memory of being a little girl watching hermother engrossed in reading. The daughter tries to decipher what has capturedher mother’s attention, and identifies the title on the cover*/The Mandarins(Beauvoir’s autobiographical, prize-winning novel), but stumbles over theauthor’s name: ‘Simone de Bavar’ is as far as she gets. ‘No, Beauvoir,’ hermother corrects. In the last of the memory panels the mother reads aloud fromthe novel in Persian, as Marjane ponders the meaning of the words, questionmarks forming above her head. ‘But I was a little young,’ the older narratorobserves, thinking back on the incomprehension of her younger self (Return 21).

Immediately adjacent to the memory panels of the earlier scene of readingare two images of Marjane trying to pee standing up and peeing sitting down. Thenarrator explains that she learned from reading The Second Sex that if womenurinated standing up their entire view of the world would change. She tries but isdiscouraged by the results. In the second panel Marjane is hunched glumly on thelowered toilet seat, concluding that before she could learn to pee as a man,she’d have to learn to become a liberated and emancipated woman. The puddleon the floor of the failed experiment in changing her standpoint in the worldmigrates into the folds of the trousers gathered around her feet as she meditatesphilosophically on what it means to be a woman.

Beauvoir’s analysis of the implications of the ‘erect position’ for malesappears in the section on childhood that begins with the famous line, ‘One is notborn, rather one becomes a woman’ (267). Beauvoir underlines the crucial role ofcustomary positions in ‘contemporary Western society’ for the girl’s perceptionof gender relations: ‘This difference,’ she argues, ‘constitutes for the little girlthe most striking sexual differentiation’ (273). Later in that chapter, stillnarrating the drama of becoming a woman, Beauvoir observes:

It is a strange experience for an individual, who feels himself to be anautonomous and transcendent subject, an absolute, to discover inferiority inhimself as a fixed and preordained essence: it is a strange experience forwhoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness,alterity. This is what happens to the little girl when, doing her apprenticeship forlife in the world, she grasps what it means to be a woman therein. (297)

Marjane has this painful experience of finding herself ‘othered’ twice: once inher own country, when the regime reifies the differences between the sexes, andagain in Vienna, where being Iranian makes her seem foreign to herself. In thiscrucial turning point along the journey of self-knowledge, Marjane reads Simonede Beauvoir not only as a troubled adolescent looking for herself in books, tryingto understand what it means to become a woman, but also as a young Iranian

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woman on her own in Europe, in relation to her emerging transnationalexistence, a bi-cultural identity for which she does not yet have a language.6

More specifically, for the model of transmission I’m proposing, the daughterreads a book that is already part of her mother’s library (though not written inher mother tongue)*/a volume her mother is willing to share with her, evenprematurely. The scene of reading, then, is one that not only connects motherand daughter through the book The Second Sex; it also connects mother anddaughter through memory across geographical and temporal separation. On thevery same page, Marjane’s mother is sitting in her armchair in Teheran readingSimone de Beauvoir, observed by the little girl, while Marjane the adolescent isstretched out on her bed, then sitting in her room, reading in Vienna. Theinterplay of the panels spatialises the relations of separation and connection.The three small boxes stacked up like a set of blocks articulate the daughter’svisual memory of her childhood self watching her mother read and interruptingher reading. Juxtaposed to the memory boxes, against a stark, black background,two vertical panels convey the daughter’s unsuccessful attempt to understandher place in the world, turning theory into practice: peeing standing up. Therooms and the experiences of self-realisation that take place in them, thoughattached to different geographies and temporalities, sit side by side on the page;past inhabits the present and the present reinterprets memory.

The daughter tries to find herself through remembering not just her mother’swords or love but also her mother’s reading*/the scene of her self-absorption inwhich mother is separate from daughter, yet potentially connected through ashared narrative. The daughter’s reading, however, if inspired by her mother’sfeminism, can become part of her life only through her own experience, throughher own body, as it were. The word ‘feminism’ is never used, but feministconsciousness, often expressed through irony and juxtaposition, infuses thisuniverse constrained by gender polarities. (For example, on the page directlyopposite the Beauvoir experiment, Marjane dips into Sartre, the favourite authorof her lefty schoolmates*/‘The notion of consciousness comes from man’s livedexperience’*/only to confess that she found him ‘a little annoying’ [Return 20].)We might think of this effort of self-understanding (what we once calledconsciousness-raising) among women of different generations as a case offeminist intertextuality. The arresting juxtaposition of Satrapi’s images helpsus imagine a set of relations between texts and readers*/readers existing indifferent historical times and ideological situations, as well as quite literallydifferent physical locations, who connect through the mediation of books.

Let me offer another concrete example of this kind of feminist intertexuality,uncannily similar to the reading scene Satrapi illustrates, that derives from thepersonal history of Laura Freixas, a Spanish novelist. At a conference ofcontemporary European writers around the theme of gender and generationsheld in Bath in 2005, Freixas, born in 1958, described her mother’s obsession withreading, reading French novels, and, in particular, the work of Simone deBeauvoir. The little girl felt ignored. ‘My mother was always reading,’ Freixassaid, ‘and so when I was young, I wanted to be a book*/or failing that, to become

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a writer.’ In the repressive years of Franco’s Spain, the ‘patron saint’ of thenovelist’s mother was Simone de Beauvoir.

Reading Generations

During a recent sabbatical in London, I was working on a memoir about the yearsI lived in Paris, from 1961 to 1967, when I was young. One cold winter evening,I went to hear Doris Lessing read from her new book The Grandmothers in a WestEnd theatre. Lessing’s landmark novel, The Golden Notebook, which waspublished in 1962, stunned me when I first read it (in 1966, while I was stilltrying to make my life turn out well in Paris, a little like Marjane in Vienna).

The audience at Lessing’s reading was populated primarily by women wholooked, I thought, like some version of me: lots of women with grey hair, linedfaces, glasses, sensible shoes, and the occasional cane. Grandmothers, pre-sumably. Also, a few younger women as well as a sprinkling of quite young, left-looking men. Not being a grandmother myself, I had been slightly hesitant aboutgoing to hear Lessing speak about a book titled The Grandmothers. I feared acelebration of grandmotherhood, which is even more fashionable today,including among second-wave feminists, than motherhood as destiny in the1950s. But the novella ‘The Grandmothers’, which gives the new book its title, ismore about older women having good sex with young men, and the friendshipbetween women, than that stage of life itself; each woman has a long affair withthe other’s teenage son (maybe this is a celebration of grandmotherhood).

During the discussion period, I felt emboldened to ask Lessing what shethought now, in retrospect, about the reception of The Golden Notebook, sinceshe had often been very irritated by having the book seen as an opening salvo ofsecond-wave feminism, especially in the United States. Rather than blowing meoff as an irritating American feminist, Lessing answered anecdotally, almostwarmly. She quoted a woman who came up to her at a conference to say: ‘I readyour book, my mother told me to read it, I told my daughter to read it.’ Then shedescribed visiting a reading group in London and hearing women discussthe novel. She realised with something akin to shock, she said, that what forthe young women belonged to the realm of history, for her belonged to the realmof memory. She remembered on her pulses, as it were, a time that for theyounger readers belonged only to the past*/a then of their mothers, or even theirgrandmothers. The novel, she concluded, ‘had a life of its own’. Lessing hadactually written something quite similar in the preface to the 1994 reissue of thenovel:

I meet women in their fifties who say, ‘I was influenced by this book, and I gave itto my daughter and she loves it.’ Or a young woman says, ‘My mother gave methis book because she said it was important to her and now I understand her muchbetter.’ I used to hear, ‘My mother read it and now I do’*/so that’s two

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Figure 1 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Return 21. Courtesy of PantheonBooks.

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generations, but the other day I was told of a grandmother who gave it to her sonwho gave it to his daughter. Three generations. Yes, I am indeed flattered. (xi)

Like The Second Sex, The Golden Notebook continues to be read andunderstood by different generations of readers, by women of different ages,with different life histories, and translated into various languages. What seemsimportant and potentially useful in looking for non-biological models ofgenerations is precisely the life of the book*/a book that in fact changes withits readers, through the dialogues of feminist intertextuality.

At the event in London, Lessing reiterated what she said in the 1971 preface tothe novel, that for her The Golden Notebook was about what the character Annasays to her friend Molly in the first sentence of dialogue: ‘The point is, the pointis [. . .] that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up’ (3). In the preface,Lessing explains how this notion applies to the relations between Anna and herlover, Saul, a blocked writer, as well as their relations to other people in thebook: ‘This theme of ‘breakdown’,’ Lessing goes on to say, ‘that sometimes whenpeople ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing falsedichotomies and divisions’ for Lessing was the novel’s ‘central theme’. Butthe importance of this experience was overlooked, Lessing complains, because ofthe attention reviewers paid to the ‘sex war’ (xiv).

When I discovered The Golden Notebook in Paris, I wrote to my mothersuggesting that she read it. Given the state of our relations, this recommendationwas probably not delivered in an entirely friendly fashion. My mother askedsuspiciously whether I thought the book ‘applied to her particularly’, as she put itin her letter. My mother preferred non-fiction to fiction, especially biography,and we were not in the habit of discussing literature, especially not by mail, butmy guess is that the book told me something about what I was living through thatI wanted my mother to know: I was cracking up. I preferred to have her learn itthrough a book, rather than from me. Like Marjane, far from home I connected tomy mother*/or wanted to*/through the pages of a significant book.

At the end of Bequest and Betrayal , I drew a portrait of myself at a crossroadsin my life, trying to understand my relations to the previous generations of myfamily. I described two moments: a dream involving my mother, and a scene inwhich I am standing in a cemetery where my parents and my paternalgrandparents are buried. When I was deciding how to end the book, I foundmyself hesitating between two possible final images: the dream with my mother,which is a scene of unexpected reconciliation, and a scene in the cemetery,which is a scene of anger and refusal. A graduate student who had been helpingme with the final edit of the book lobbied for the scene with my mother as theclosing image. I resisted. I wanted to keep the anger alive. Since the recent deathof two friends with whom I shared my years in feminism, I’ve wondered aboutthat decision, about its wisdom, both as writing, and as a statement aboutwomen and generations. Why was I so determined not to end on a dream ofcollaboration?

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Before I published Bequest and Betrayal, I read from its first chapter at aconference organised around the themes of the body, memory, and life writing.The conference was a mixed event, in part to honour Helene Cixous, in part togive an example of contemporary feminist literary criticism. Before I read thepaper I had prepared, I described the dream about my mother, which I had hadthe night before. After my presentation Cixous’s translator came up to me andtold me that ‘Helene’ liked the dream. (Cixous, I should perhaps mention, wasvery attached to her mother*/as well as to her dreams.) At her own presentationto the conference, she explained that she always wrote directly upon awaking,writing out of her dreams. I think her writing narrative inspired my dream.Perversely, though, Cixous’s positive reaction to my dream made me feel I shouldnot end the book with the dream. Reuniting with the mother was too predictablyfeminist, and symbolic of a mode of feminism I had always resisted, even if, asCixous herself had famously said, the ‘mother, too, is a metaphor’ (881).

In an important essay about identification, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjaminargues that the self ‘can and will allow all its voices to speak, including the voiceof the other within’ (‘Shadow’ 108). It seems to me now that even fifteen yearsafter her death, when I wrote my book, I was not able to admit there wassomething about my mother I didn’t want to lose. Now that I’m more practiced inloss, I can see that the dream was about something I do value, even if, in order toexperience a sense of connection with my mother*/both of us alive*/she had tobe dead, and I had to dream it.

The Grandmother’s Breasts

Throughout the two volumes of Persepolis , the mother!/daughter relation, whichis represented as one of sporadic struggle as well as underlying complicity, issupplemented by crucial encounters with the grandmother. Her grandmother’smotto*/‘Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself’ [integre] (Childhood150)*/haunts Marjane during the painful adolescent years in Vienna when self-knowledge eludes her. The words bear the wisdom of an earlier generation’sexperience, but they are also inseparable from the connection between bodiesthat touch in the same space. The night before Marjane’s departure for Europe,her grandmother comes to spend the night. From her vantage point in the bedthey share Marjane observes her grandmother undress; she marvels as thegrandmother shakes jasmine flowers out of her bra and the flowers constellatethe dark space of the room. ‘Grandma,’ the girl asks, ‘how do you have suchround breasts at your age?’ Her grandmother explains that she soaks them in abowl of ice water every morning and night for ten minutes (Childhood 150).Marjane says she knew the answer; she just liked hearing the words. This scene,which precedes the farewell between Marjane and her parents at the airport,establishes the bodily grounds for memory: the smell of her grandmother’sbosom: ‘I’ll never forget that smell’ (Childhood 150).

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Later, back in Teheran, when she is a student at the university, Marjane takes apublic stand against the administrators who demand that women assume theresponsibility of covering themselves completely so as not to excite men,whereas the men can wear revealing clothes. As a result of her intervention,Marjane is invited to redesign the uniform for women*/‘Subtle differences thatmeant a lot to us’ (Return 144), the narrator concludes. This episode of rebellionmakes up for an earlier one of surprising cowardice for which her grandmotherhad chastised her severely: ‘It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s alsowhat transforms us into cowards. You had guts! I’m proud of you’ (Return 137).Marjane invokes her grandmother’s discourse as the model for her own self-knowledge: ‘And this is how I recovered my self-esteem and dignity. For the firsttime in a long time, I was happy with myself’ (Return 144). And it is again thegrandmother who gives Marjane the advice she needs when she breaks down intears, on the verge of divorcing her husband. Her grandmother cites herself as amodel, invoking her own divorce of fifty-five years earlier: ‘I always told myselfthat I would be happier alone than with a shitmaker!!’ (Return 179). AlthoughMarjane’s mother and father both also support their daughter’s right to divorce,it is the grandmother’s advice, based on her own history of non-conformity, thatempowers Marjane to tell her husband that their marriage is over. When Satrapirecreates her life as autobiography in Persepolis, she draws on her mother’s andher grandmother’s dissident narratives, as well as the emotional intimacies oftheir shared experiences.

In Kristeva’s imaginary third-generation space, conflicts over rights for womendisappear along with an insistence on sexual difference. This new era in women’stime becomes instead the backdrop against which the ‘singularity of each personand, even more [. . .] the multiplicity of every person’s identification’ (‘Women’sTime’ 35) can emerge. Kristeva’s vision of singularity combined with multiplicityreappears in almost the same language twenty years later, at the end of her recentbook on Colette, the third in her trilogy of portraits of ‘feminine genius’, whichincludes Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein. In the conclusion to the analysis ofColette, which recapitulates in slightly different language the phases of women’semancipation struggles and the demands for equality described in ‘Women’sTime’, Kristeva seeks both to dissociate herself from ‘feminism as a massmovement’ (Colette 404) and to acknowledge Simone de Beauvoir’s role as aprecursor in the study of female subjectivity. Kristeva positions herself as takingthe analysis of what Beauvoir called in The Second Sex ‘individual opportunities’to the next level, redefining, or updating, Beauvoir’s quest for freedom as a questfor happiness. In an act of intellectual affiliation, Kristeva expresses the wish to‘dedicate this triptych to [Beauvoir’s] memory’ (Colette 407).

The last words of Persepolis express an intense desire for freedom, and afreedom inseparable from the condition of women generally*/the women who asa group still must fight for equal rights along with political freedom from arepressive regime. Unlike Kristeva, I don’t think that feminism as a massmovement needs to disappear in order for singularity to be expressed*/on thecontrary. And this is precisely why The Second Sex appears as it does in the

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memoir of a young woman’s struggle to assume her individuality*/even, inKristeva’s terms, her singularity as a dissident artist. The panels devoted toMarjane’s reading of The Second Sex are a sign of Satrapi’s affiliation with a longhistory of feminist engagement*/an affiliation that is both transgenerational andtransnational.

At the same time, I’ve been arguing, there is a piece of this history that ischanging, that needs changing. The mother, Adrienne Rich powerfully argued in1976, glossing the pernicious effects of matrophobia, ‘stands for the victim inourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr’ (236). Perhaps it is time to re-placethose models in their political context and history*/better yet, in the vast andliving library of women’s time*/seeing them as landmarks of a struggle forchange, symptoms of a nightmare of oppression from which we longed to escape,rather than a universal and timeless structure. The mother!/daughter dyadenshrined by second-wave feminism as an icon of over-identification*/for betteror for worse*/needs to be interrupted, disrupted, by literary texts. Works likePersepolis, from the third generation, both read the past and move us into thefuture.7 Whatever the conflicts involved in the young woman’s coming of age,the story she tells moves past the stuck places of mother!/daughter violence,which characterised so much 1970s feminism.8

We might today more usefully re-imagine earlier generations not so much asour mothers, or indeed grandmothers, which tends to keep us locked into thefatal logic of Rich’s ‘biologically alike bodies’ (generations separated by time butcaught in the same story, which they are doomed to repeat), but rather ascontiguous spaces, or texts and intertexts: palimpsests of difference recordingearlier struggles that enable and renew our own. It is in that sense thatbooks*/whether The Second Sex or The Golden Notebook*/serve better thanbodies as transitional objects that permit generations of women to talk to oneanother across the temporal divide that separates them; to connect throughhistory and memory. These books are indeed spaces of the imagination*/and is itan accident that they are, to a greater or lesser degree, autobiographical?*/thatbridge the gaps between mothers and daughters, daughters and grandmothers.Colette describes the phenomenon in the expansive last lines of her autobio-graphical novel Break of Day, when she transforms her banished lover intoliterature, time past into space: ‘a quickset hedge, spindrift, meteors, an openand unending book, a cluster of grapes, a ship, an oasis’ (143).

Maybe it’s only in novels and through a writer’s wish that bodies becomebooks, but we can try.

Break of Day is a fiction of failed romance that intersects with amother!/daughter correspondence; alternatively, it’s a narrative about a meetingbetween mother and daughter (punctuated by the love story) that never takesplace, except in memory and on the page. The book opens with the narrator,Colette’s mother, announcing that she will not be visiting her daughter becauseshe is waiting for her flowering cactus plant to bloom; it closes on the image ofthe mother’s last letter*/‘all messages from a hand that was trying to transmit to

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me a new alphabet’ (142). The separation from the mother in Colette’s penbecomes the matter of an entire life’s work.9

The apparently euphoric mother!/daughter relation in Break of Day wouldseem to occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Irigaray’s dysphoricdiatribe. But perhaps adoration and dread are simply the twin poles that definethe figure whom Jessica Benjamin calls the ‘omnipotent mother’.10 The end of‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’, with which we began, mightbe said to transcend the cold rage with which it opens: ‘With your milk,Mother, I swallowed ice’ (60). The last line points to a desire for somethingelse*/something like a letter in a new alphabet that the daughter sends back toher dying mother, the wish to find each other on the same page of a differentbook: ‘And what I wanted from you,’ Irigaray writes to the woman who occupiesthe space of the mother, ‘was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive’(67). If the daughter of the mother shaped by patriarchy remains coiled in anger,ready to spring into attack, the daughter of feminist mothers have other tales totell*/in which the mother remains alive: as another, but not the other woman.This is one of the reasons why I’ve turned to Satrapi, whose stylised life drawingsescape and complicate the ineluctable binary of being dead or alive. Thecomplication involves sympathy for the mother and the recognition of the role ofhistory as it shapes the destiny of a given generation.

In Mary Kelly’s ninety-second film loop, ‘WLM Demo Remix’, recently displayedin New York at Postmasters Gallery (Winter 2005), the images of a 1970 feministdemonstration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, whichgranted women the right to vote, dissolves to be replaced by a rally of womenheld in 2005. Because of the group pose, the women look similar but are not, ofcourse, identical. Kelly’s video makes it possible to visualise the changingrelations between generations, without the one ever eliminating the other; thereis always a return, but it is never the exactly the same.

In Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold, the book from which I drewmy epigraph, Carolyn Heilbrun acknowledges the need for a ‘different modelthan that of mothers and daughters’ (100) to emerge if there is to be continuitybetween generations. ‘We have learned,’ she writes sadly, ‘that the womanprofessor cannot hold her own as a maternal figure.’ She urges feminists of olderand younger generations to ‘search for new ways of relating one to the other’; toexit from ‘a play in which our parts are written for us’ (101). This drama of thethreshold*/the liminal place, as she puts it*/between destinies is precisely theone that Marjane, the artist in exile, occupies on the eve of her departure. WhatI am wishing to add here to Heilbrun’s analysis is a slightly different view of thebook and the library. If feminists of Heilbrun’s lonelier generation did not havebooks waiting for them, 1970s feminists do: we have the work of younger writerswho, like Satrapi, are capable of looking back to feminist precursors and who caninspire us to look forward to places we might not be able to occupy ourselves,except in our imaginations.

At the end of the first volume, when Marjane departs for Vienna, afterencouraging her daughter to be brave, the mother collapses at the airport. In a

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posture that evokes the iconography of the pieta, Marjane’s father carries hisprostrate wife in his arms, literally supporting the weight of her suffering.Although we are not given many details about the mother’s life beyond herdissidence, her feminism, and her desire for her daughter’s freedom (‘I havealways wanted you to become independent, educated, cultured,’ she says whenMarjane announces her plans to marry, ‘and here you are getting married attwenty-one’ [163]), as readers we are offered clues (Return 49) rather than anindependent storyline about the cost of maternal sacrifice. Bottom line: it’s toolate for the mother to leave.11 The tableau at the end of volume 1 registers themother’s pain as part of the cost of the daughter’s freedom, but her suffering isnot oppositional.

On the last page of the memoir, after Marjane’s mother tells her that she mustleave ‘for good’, that she is a ‘free woman’, and forbids her to come back,Marjane waves goodbye to her parents and grandmother; the generationsphysically, spatially, overlap in their relation to history and to feminism*/tofreedom for women and for nations. Leaving this time, the artist/narratorcomments, is easier than the departure ten years earlier for Vienna at the sameairport*/both for her mother and for herself. But she draws her grandmother’sface streaked with tears (her father cries too). The memoir’s last words are forthe grandmother, with whom there will be no reunion.12 ‘She died January 4,1996 [. . .] Freedom had a price’ (Childhood 187). The presence, even muted, ofthe mother’s story and discourse about freedom, as well as the grandmother’scantankerous wisdom, means that in Persepolis there are always the scenarios ofthree generations.

Abandoning the constraints of Iran for the freedom of Europe as a youngwoman, the narrator recreates herself in the form of a dissident artist, and shetakes her mother’s and grandmother’s stories further than they could*/whilekeeping them alive through the journey of reparative memory. On the page offarewells, however, the beloved grandmother’s face remains inscribed insadness, her tears pearling the memoir’s final panel. Separated from her familyby a glass barrier, Marjane turns to wave as she moves to face a new destinyalone. The reader’s eye follows the diagonal of hands waving that almost seem totouch across the pane of transparent glass. The hands do not meet but theyexchange signs, signs of farewell but also of a new beginning, signalling the firstpage of the ‘open and unending book’ that is the artist’s voyage out.

Satrapi tells the story of a girl who leaves home and becomes an artist. Sheleaves home not to get away from an oppressive family but to escape anoppressive political culture. But, as we know, it’s not easy to get out of thefamily, even if you leave home.

Acknowledgements

The image from Persepolis: The Story of a Return appears courtesy of MarjaneSatrapi and Pantheon Books.

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Notes

[1] The two terms are not without common properties and problems. For a discussion ofthese concepts from the early 1980s, see Edward Said’s ‘Secular Criticism’ andSandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s ‘Forward into the Past: The Female AffiliationComplex’.

[2] This question is analysed by Astrid Henry in Not My Mother’s Sister from theperspective of a third-wave feminist.

[3] Marianne Hirsch’s pioneering study The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psycho-analysis, Feminism is perhaps the earliest full-scale analysis of mother!/daughterrelations in literature and second-wave feminism. See also her more recent essay‘Feminism at the Maternal Divide: A Diary’, which revisits the history of feministtheory and motherhood, and in particular the political struggles undertaken bymothers.

[4] The inaugural status of Persepolis as genre is signalled in the preface to the Frenchpublication of the memoir, which is authored by a fellow writer of a graphic memoir,David B.

[5] This pattern of collaboration in the face of exile is also embedded in the metaphorsof translation that conclude Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Satrapilives in Paris and publishes in French. She also often publishes political andautobiographical commentary in the online version of the New York Times .

[6] It is important to remember that Satrapi writes in French about her emergence intothis new identity; it’s as though the language of the memoir is also the story of thepassage out of childhood and the childhood self*/a passage out of the family, whiledrawing on its material.

[7] Henry makes a similar argument from the perspective of a third-wave feministscholar about the way the mother!/daughter model reduces the range of genera-tional relationships. She shows ‘how the mother!/daughter relationship is thecentral trope in depicting the relationship between the so-called second and thirdwaves of US feminism and how the employment of this metaphor*/or matro-phor*/has far-reaching implications for contemporary feminism’ (2).

[8] I’m doing a little violence of my own to Kristeva’s model by assimilating themother!/daughter binary to the ‘symbolic contract’ (‘Women’s Time’ 21) that shesees as determining the nature of female subjectivity. But I believe that it’s notpossible to separate a certain view of generations from the theorisation ofmother!/daughter conflict, as well as from the questions of sexual difference thatdrive Kristeva’s inquiry.

[9] Kristeva gives the ‘new alphabet’ pride of place in her study of Colette; MarianneHirsch titles her reading of Colette’s novel in The Mother/Daughter Plot with thephrase ‘An Open and Unending Book’; most recently, Katharine Jensen revisitsthe stakes of the mother!/daughter relationship that has been idealised by manyfeminist critics in ‘Idealization and the Haunted Daughter in Colette’s La Naissancedu jour’.

[10] Benjamin’s ‘The Omnipotent Mother’ approaches the problem of the monolithicmother!/daughter dyad from a psychoanalytic perspective in which the ‘third term’(96) is also a ‘space’ in which female subjectivity can and must be renegotiated.

[11] I am grateful to Hana Wirth-Nesher for bringing the iconography of the pieta imageto my attention as the clue to deciphering the cost of the mother’s story. See alsoPatricia Storace’s remarks on the image in the New York Review of Books (42). InVienna, when the mother visits her daughter in exile, she brings the comfort ofgestures in which mother cradles daughter (Return 49).

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[12] Readers of Satrapi’s Embroideries will have further evidence of the grandmother’slife story. And although this is never commented upon, the grandfather’s name isSatrapi, like the author. Why Satrapi took that name could reflect the danger ofpolitical dissidence*/i.e. the author’s desire to protect her parents*/or the choiceof the family name with the more distinguished lineage

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Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.*/*/. ‘The Shadow of the Other Subject.’ Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and

Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1998.Cixous, Helene. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs:

Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (1976): 875!/94.Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle. Break of Day. Trans. Enid McLeod. New York: Farrar, 1982.Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. ‘Forward into the Past: The Female Affiliation Complex.’

No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century; The War ofthe Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold . Toronto: U of TorontoP, 1999.

Henry, Astrid. Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-wave Feminism.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.*/*/. ‘Feminism at the Maternal Divide: A Diary.’ The Politics of Motherhood. Ed. Annelise

Orleck and Diana Taylor. Hanover: University of New England Press, 1996.Irigaray, Luce. ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other.’ Trans. Helene Vivienne

Wenzel. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1981): 60!/67.Kristeva, Julia. Colette. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia UP, 2004.*/*/. ‘Women’s Time.’ Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs: Journal of Women in

Culture and Society 7 (1981): 13!/35. Trans. of ‘Le temps des femmes.’ 34/44: Cahiersde recherche de sciences des textes et documents 5 (1979): 5!/19.

Jensen, Katharine. ‘Idealization and the Haunted Daughter in Colette’s La Naissance dujour.’ Ms.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. NewYork: Vintage, 1977.

Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook . New York: Harper, 1994.Miller, Nancy K. Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death. New York: Oxford UP,

1996.Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 2nd ed. New

York: Norton, 1986.Said, Edward. ‘Secular Criticism.’ The World, the Text, and the Critic . Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1983.Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon, 2003.*/*/. Persepolis: The Story of a Return. Vol. 2. New York: Pantheon, 2004.*/*/. Embroideries . New York: Pantheon, 2005.Storace, Patricia. ‘A Double Life in Black and White.’ New York Review of Books 7 Apr.

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