Machine summary:
Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation: Forough Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath Leila Rahimi Bahmany Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015 In 1992, Farzaneh Milani’s groundbreaking Veils and Words brought into di- alogue the fields of Iranian studies and feminist critical theory – two areas of humanist inquiry that, in some sense, need each other.
While the content and subject of these studies might include Iranian so- ciety, culture, or art, it is often the case that the critical method being deployed is more important than the historical, literary, or social content to which it is applied.
Beyond specialists, however, the work does little to draw in a reader not already at least slightly familiar with debates in psychoanalytic feminist theory of the twentieth century.
The au- thor stays so close to the feminist psychoanalytic debates that she excludes some potentially key details of Farrokhzad’s life and work that, ironically, could have shed even more light on these very same feminist theories.
Bahmany’s analysis of Plath is no less compelling and insightful within the context of the history of psychoanalytic critical theory.
Still, this is an excellent work of scholarship, particularly if one reads it as an intervention in feminist psychoanalytic literary critical theory.
A reading of these translations, and, for those who have some Persian literacy, a reading of the originals can give the reader an embodied experience of precisely what Bahmany wants us to take away from her work: the experience of reading as reflection and writing as mirror.