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Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi's PersepolisAuthor(s): Babak ElahiReviewed work(s):Source: symplokē, Vol. 15, No. 1/2, Cinema without Borders (2007), pp. 312-325Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40550774 .

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FRAMES AND MIRRORS IN MARJANE SATRAPl'S PERSEPOLIS

Babak Elahi

Marjane Satrapi explains in an interview in Bitch magazine that

Today, it's important more than ever that people know: what is this "axis of evil"? You are completely reduced to a very abstract notion. But the 70 million people [of Iran] are human beings, they are not an abstract notion. They are individuals with life, love, hopes. Their life is worth the life of anybody else in the whole world. (Wood 55)

Indeed, as Edward Said suggests in Culture and Imperialism, the writing of empire - in the literature of the colonizer - involves "the intellectual will to please power in public, to tell it what it wants to hear, to say to it that it could go ahead and kill, bomb, and destroy, since what would be being attacked was really negligible, brittle, with no relationship to books, ideas, cultures and no relationship either, it gently suggests, to real people" (298). This intellectual will to please power produces what Said, using the structuralist terms of Kenneth Burke, calls "frameworks of acceptance," a whole way of seeing the world that has "for decades in America" produced "a cultural war against the Arabs and Islam: appalling racist caricatures of Arabs and Muslims suggest that they are all either terrorists or sheikhs, and that the region is a large arid slum, fit only for profit or war" (301). Frameworks of acceptance, then, divide the abstraction of identity into polarities of good and evil, and it is to this kind of framing that Satrapi attempts to respond. While Satrapi wrote her comic-book memoir, Persepolis, before George W. Bush coined the phrase "axis of evil," she has expressed in a number of interviews1 as well as in the introduction to Persepolis that she wrote her book in response to one-dimensional representations of Iran as a terrorist nation. In response to this ideological framing of Iran, Satrapi reframes its

^e, for example, Tara Bahrampour's New York Times interview.

©symplokë Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2 (2007) ISSN 1069-0697, 312-325.



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people as " individuals with life, love, hopes." Since Satrapi works in the

graphic novel form, we might consider the ways in which frameworks of acceptance work in relation to the literal pictorial framing of the comic art panel. In what follows, I want to connect social science theories of framing with sequential-art theories of framing, and to subject both of these to critical theoretical models of ideological interpellation as a frame structure in order to understand how Satrapi' s book reframes Iran and reconstructs Iranian subjectivity. Satrapi uses the frame of the comic panel to redirect the gaze of Western European and North American readers toward the individual life and the complex identity of her own narrative and autobiographical persona. At the heart of this process of reframing is Satrapi's use of mirrors as a motif that doubly frames the self and allows for a deconstruction and reconstruction of Iranians as individuals who matter.

Framing

Social scientists Alex Mintz and Steven B. Redd claim that political leaders set foreign policy agendas through various forms of framing, including what they call thematic and sequential framing. They give examples such as Ronald Reagan's framing of the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire," George H. W. Bush's framing of Saddam Hussein as Hitler, and the framing of the war in Afghanistan (by Laura Bush and Donald Rumsfeld) as the liberation of the women of Afghanistan. We may wish to add to Mintz and Redd's list something they do not mention: George W. Bush's framing of Iraq, Iran, and Korea within the rhetorical structure of "the axis of evil." Mintz and Redd call this political marketing in which a potentially unacceptable course of action - invading Iraq, for example - is repeatedly framed through the same rhetorical structure before, during, and after the course of action is taken. Though Mintz and Redd don't mention them in their study, we might recall phrases such as "WMD" and the "axis of evil" as frames used to guide popular thinking and policy decisions with regard to Iraq.

Another point I would add to Mintz and Redd's analysis is that this process of framing takes an issue out of the flow of historical events, framing them within thematic, structural, or other frames of political vision. These ideological frames - as they are produced within dis- courses of political, bureaucratic, or journalistic expertise - tend to draw attention away from themselves, naturalizing themselves as "common sense," "liberal humanism," or "objectivity." By contrast, while comic art does not necessarily draw attention to its own framing mechanism, neither does it try to conceal it. Unlike film, for example, in which



314 Babak Elahi Frames and Mirrors

frames are made to vanish in the flow of projection, comic art uses the visible frame as part of its aesthetic, cognitive, and narrative form. Furthermore, it uses these frames to present a segmented flow that can lend itself to a re-historicizing of what ideological frames would take out of the flow of history. It is precisely this segmented flow of the pictorial image in graphic novels - their ability to frame time - that has at least the potential to restore the historical flow of experience back into the abstract, ahistoricizing ideological frame. In this sense, comic art can potentially challenge those modes of political or aesthetic representation that naturalize their own worldviews by erasing or obscuring their own frames. Graphic memoir- in the tradition of Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman, and now in the work of Marjane Satrapi- can negotiate identity in a way that explicitly questions existing forms of ideological and psychosocial framing. This is not to say that comic art is non- ideological. Rather, it is to suggest that the conscious use of pictorial panels can expose and thus deconstruct the ideological frame.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud points out the importance of framing in laying out temporal relationships. For McCloud, the segmented panels of a comic book or graphic novel transform temporal relationships into spatial ones. In this way, panels within the comic book create what McCloud calls "a frame of mind" for the reader. Similarly, Will Eisner, in Comics and Sequential Art, claims that the "artist, to be successful on this non-verbal level, must take into consideration both the commonality of human experience and the phenomenon of our perception of it, which seems to consist of frames or episodes" (38). Eisner explains:

[the] sequential artist "sees" for the reader because it is inherent to narrative art that the requirement on the viewer is not so much analysis as recognition. The task then is to arrange the sequence of events (or pictures) so as to bridge the gaps in action .... In visual narration the task of the author/ artist is to record a continued flow of experience and show it as it may be seen from the reader's eyes. This is done by arbitrarily breaking up the flow of uninterrupted experience into segments of "frozen" scenes and enclosing them by a frame or panel. (38-39, emphasis added)

Eisner's emphasis here is on the segmenting and framing of the flow of experience, just as McCloud' s is on the framing of time- time frames. But both conclude with a broader notion that this segmenting of time provides a frame of mind, as McCloud puts it, or performs the task of seeing for the reader as Eisner has it. In this sense, then, pictorial framing can be related to ideological framing - the filtering of information, of news, of time, of identities, of nationality and gender -



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through templates, through structures of feeling that produce predetermined judgments of value or narrativized translations of experience. Both political framing and sequential-art framing aim at recognition, not analysis. While comic art depends on framing in this cognitive way, it does not necessarily, but can, point to its own apparatus of framing. Ideally, the reader of a graphic novel is meant to disappear into the flow of frames just as surely as the reader of a popular novel is meant to disappear into the flow of the plot. However, occasionally, comics draw attention to their own frame-bound nature.

As if to emphasize the importance of framing, for example, Satrapi often uses frames within frames. Early in Persepolis 2, she represents her own autobiographical persona in a photo of herself with her Austrian friend, Lucia. The illustration of the photograph is framed by a picture frame presented as a gift to Marjane by Lucia's father {Persepolis 2 18). The frame of the panel encloses the secondary frame of the picture. This doubly framed image of the self forces the reader to see Marji not only as an individual but almost as a sister to Lucia - a member of an Austrian family, flanked by her Austrian sisters, and framed by a present given to her by their Austrian father. Like the work of Algerian cartoonist Kaci, Satrapi frames or re-frames the individual life by literally using the picture frame. One of Kaci's cartoons is a series of framed portraits - complete with nail and wire showing the pictures hanging on a wall. The portraits show an Algerian woman, first as a little girl in pigtails, then as a schoolgirl in a headscarf, next as a uniformed soldier with a machinegun, and finally as a mother in full hijab holding a baby (Douglas and Malti-Douglas 186). What Satrapi's framed self also does is function as mirror. In addition to the frame around the photo, the panel described above also shows Marji' s hands holding the framed photograph, making us see the snapshot from her point of view. This forces any reader - including any "Western" reader - to identify with Marji, with her gaze upon herself. This kind of mirroring functions both at the abstract ideological level and at the pictorial level in Persepolis. In using a motif of more literal mirrors (which I shall discuss in the last section of this essay), Satrapi forces her readers first to see Marjane (her autobiographical persona) as a complex individual in search of an identity, and, secondly, to identify with this complex individual by seeing her through the frame of the comic book narrative and its panels. Most importantly, this identification is accomplished not by erasing the mechanism of framing, but by exposing it through the use of picture frames and mirrors.




Ref ranting Ideology

Louis Althusser's theory of ideological interpellation includes a figure that involves both framing and reflection: what he calls a mirror- structure. In his landmark essay "Ideological State Apparatuses," Althusser illustrates the power of the state to recruit subjects through an example strikingly similar to a scene Satrapi depicts in a three-panel sequence of her comic book in which the autobiographical hero is hailed by Islamic morality police. In discussing the way Christian religious ideology recruits its members, Althusser says that "the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculari/, i.e., a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its function" (180, emphasis in the original). In Persepolis 2, Satrapi depicts the framing of identity in terms that mimic almost exactly Althusser's model of ideological interpellation.

Althusser writes that he has taken an instantaneous event and divided it into a sequence (much in the same way that Will Eisner's comic-book artist uses panels to frame time):

for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession .... But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing. (174)

Althusser's sequentially framed "theoretical theatre" involves a simple and vivid verbal illustration. He describes "the most commonplace everyday police . . . hailing" in which the policeman's "Hey, you there!" demands the "one-hundred-and-eighty-degree" physical conversion," the recruitment of the concrete individual as concrete subject of the state (174). In this example, the framing device of the mirror, or at least of a reflection, becomes important: "God is thus the Subject, and Moses and the innumerable subjects of God's people, the Subject's interlocutors- interpellators: his mirrors, his reflections" (179).

Satrapi depicts a literal instance of Althusser's theoretical illustration (Persepolis 2 147). A sequence of three panels depicts Marjene being literally hailed by the morality police ("Hey -blue coat. Stop running!"). Thought bubbles indicate Marjane's anxiety and confusion. The three panels culminate in the last image with a mirror-like thought-bubble that frames Marji's identity as the subject of an Islamic ideological state apparatus. Inside the frame of the thought-bubble in the last of these three sequenced panels, Marjane's imagined specular self looks back,



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finger pointing to her chest, asking, "Me?" It is almost as if Satrapi were providing a visual aid for teaching Althusser's concept of ideological interpellation. This calling out of Marjane in the street by one of the morality police - the komitehs that enforce moral religious codes - performs the State-sanctioned recruitment of subjects.

But Satrapi describes a physical event occurring in time, while Althusser describes cognitive events that "happen without any succession." He uses the voice of the policeman calling out to the individual as a metaphor for what happens when the nuclear family, schools, legal institutions, the church, and other ideological apparatuses offer individuals normative identities within structures of power. How is the physical event in Persepolis - actually being hailed by a repressive policing institution- related to other forms of interpellation? In Persepolis, other kinds of interpellation function to frame and reflect the autobiographical subject's identity. The moment when Marji is hailed by the policeman is, certainly, literal. However, it also works as a synec- doche, standing in for the wider forms of repressive interpellation at work in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, Althusser's notion of "State" may apply more directly to the Islamic Republic than to secular European or North American states because of Althusser's use of "Christian Religious Ideology" as his emblematic illustration of ideological state apparatuses.

However, Satrapi's Persepolis also explores other kinds of interpellation, those coming out of North American and Western Europe and reaching into Iran outside of State sanction. Althusser's model has been criticized by Stuart Hall (1985) and others as too narrowly focused on the state and as not accounting adequately for civil (private and corporate) ideological apparatuses. By focusing too narrowly on the state, Althusser limits our understanding of the much more fluid - as opposed to structural - ways in which private corporate and institutional power function in advertising, modes of consumption, and culture in "Western" industrialized and post-industrial societies. Despite attempting to revise the traditional Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, Althusser remains bound by a theoretical model that proceeds from the political-economic base and sees culture as its superstructural mani- festation. In looking at how globalized European and American consumer cultures interpellate Marjane in Satrapi's book, we can complicate the picture a bit.

For example, in Persepolis, Satrapi describes her adolescent adoption of punk style and new-wave European and American music. In one anecdote, she describes her infatuation with Kim Wilde as 1980s music icon. One image in particular shows how the culture of capital also interpellates subjectivity through a more fluid reflection. Marjane gazes




at a poster of Kim Wilde and strikes a pose as if looking into a mirror. The poster is tilted at an angle, and Marji's leaning body mirrors that angle within the panel (Persepolis 131). The poster, as frame within the frame, reflects back Marji's fantasy of "Western" cultural or counter- cultural identity in the image of Kim Wilde whose song "We're the Kids in America" becomes an anthem for young Iranians who feel stifled by the Iranian regime's limits on personal style. Satrapi depicts her young self as performing identity through bricolage, appropriation, borrowing, and mixture of European and North American styles. While state structures of interpellation are pedagogical while civil forms of interpellation are performative, both function as frames and mirrors of the self, both construct lived fictions of identity.

Placing Marjane's ideologically hailed Islamic identity alongside her mimicry of Western cultural and commercial (though potentially counter-cultural) identity, we arrive at the heart of this narrative: the attempt to piece together a divided identity, a fragmented subjectivity, a subjectivity that is split not between some absolute and essential "West" and some monolithic Islam, but between self-consciously iconic and ideological images of Western and Islamic worldviews. Satrapi presents one panel as an ironic icon early in her two books {Persepolis 6). The image divides the panel into two halves. On the left, Marjane's hair is showing, free of hijab, before a backdrop decorated with gears and wheels, a hammer, and a ruler. On the right, Marjane is appropriately dressed in a chador, the backdrop decorated with ornate Persian designs.

This is one of the simplest and most straightforward instances of framing within Satrapi's work. In it, we see a dichotomy between tradition on the right, and science and technology on the left. But the two sides of this dichotomy become more and more difficult to keep apart, especially once Marjane goes to Europe in Persepolis 2 to find traditions as rigid as those of Iran. The dichotomy creates a dilemma in which the autobiographical persona must construct subjective wholeness out of abstract divisions and fragments of self. She attempts to resolve this dilemma in large part through her use of the mirror as a doubly framing motif, bringing her face to face with the competing claims on identity made not by "Western culture" and a monolithic "Islamic ideology," but the competing claims presented by familial, educational, religious, and sexual aspects of Marjane's life.

Mirrors

At the end of the first volume of Persepolis, Satrapi lays out the most important psychological instance of a mirror frame when she describes



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Marji's separation from her grandmother. The grandmother tells her to be true to herself:

In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance .... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.

The panel in which this statement appears shows Marji in her grandmother's bed wrapped in her warm embrace. In connection with this advice from the family matriarch about the jerks she is bound to meet through her life, Satrapi presents an almost Proustian motif - the smell of her grandmother's body: "I smelled my Grandma's bosom. It smelled good. I'll never forget that smell." We might read this in Lacanian terms, as a pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic formation of subjectivity. But the Lacanian model may be too limiting because the pre-linguistic image he emphasizes is still, nonetheless, visual. What Satrapi presents in Marji's matriarchal embrace is an imaginary formation of identity through senses other than the visual. The contrast between Marji's bodily connection to the ample home of her grandmother's embrace and the narrow and fragmenting exile of adulthood is most striking presented in another image in which the grown-up Marjane tells her reflection "I will always be true to myself" (Persepolis 151). In this image, Marjane looks into her bathroom mirror, her reflection half-obscured by the back of her head, her eye registering an emotion between surprise and anxiety.

Althusser's discussion of the mirror-structure of ideological subject formation bears the influence of Lacan' s discussion of how a basically fragmentary subject is made whole through the child's response to her own specular image within the frame of the mirror. The drama of the mirror stage moves the individual subject from a sense of insufficiency to that of anticipation. The sense of not being whole is replaced by a sense of completeness. To make Lacan's theoretical discussion a bit more concrete and clear, we might think of how art historian Anne Hollander describes the function of the mirror in myth and painting. Hollander writes that the mirror is "a glassy surface and empty frame [that] lie in wait for the self-portrait that is to be re-created at each reciprocal view of the artist and his captive subject," and that the "mirror is the personal link between the human subject and its representation" (391). And, Hollander explains, while the mirror is sometimes used for certain kinds of objective evidence about the body - shaving, plucking eyebrows, etc. - it is most often a device for producing a flattering and self- deceptive image of the subject. Looking at oneself in the mirror "is at best an exercise in art, at worst one in self-deception- or at the very




worst, perhaps a path to death and damnation" (393). In this sense, mirroring is like ideological framing in that it takes the self out of its social context, and it is like sequential-art framing in that it encourages (mis) recognition (flattering self-deception) more than it allows for analysis (objective evidence). The contrast in Persepolis is not only between a pre-linguistic visual reflection of the self and an adult linguistic reflection, but a non-visual bodily and sensory reflection of the self in the matriarchal other, and the visual and exilic reflection of the self outside the home and the nation.

Taking these discussions of ideology as mirror-structure (Althusser) or performative reflection (Hall), of subjectivity as being formed through a mirror-stage (Lacan), and the mirror's pictorial and artistic construction of a false sense of one's looks (Hollander), it becomes clear in looking at Satrapi's uses of the mirror as a secondary frame within the comic panel that Persepolis narrates a problematic development of identity, one which is agonistic and remains largely unresolved for Marjane as autobiographical persona. The first instance of the mirror as frame is not a picture of Marjane herself, but a picture of her mother- with her hair dyed blonde. She looks back into a bathroom mirror, her mouth in the curve of a frown, her eyebrows slanted in an expression of worry (Persepolis 5). Marji's mother has already been framed by Pahlavi- controlled newspapers, one of which prints a photograph of her demonstrating in the streets of Tehran (5). Marjane not only reframes this image of her mother as the picture of a hero, she also connects it with the more complex image of her mother with blonde hair frowning at her own reflection. The image of the mother as blonde and her anxiety about being a revolutionary point to the complex and conflicted ways in which identities are constructed by ourselves and by others. We see the mother through the institutional gaze of the newspaper, through her daughter's refraining of that identity, and through the mother's own anguished feelings of fear and uncertainty as she is reflected back in a bathroom mirror, her hair lightened to disguise her chosen identity as dissenter and her imposed identity as subversive.

This image sets the stage for almost every other framed mirror image that Satrapi presents of herself as a child and young adult. In most of them, Marjane's identity - like her mother's in this image - is in doubt in some way. Here, the mother's fear about political retribution leads her to disguise her identity. In practically every mirror reflection of herself, Marjane, like her mother in this image, is frowning or even crying. The mirror does not function as a reflection of the specular image of the whole and unified self, something she could only feel when embraced by her grandmother and not looking in a mirror, but neither does it completely deceive Marjane. Rather, as Hollander suggests about mirroring in general, each view swings back and forth for Marjane between



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an exercise in art - mimicry of some kind - and a feeling of possible damnation, between the performance of self and the subjection and subjugation of self. Furthermore, in each one, the face reflected back is partially hidden, as if to suggest the continuing fragmentation or incom- pleteness of self. And, finally, the last mirror image depicts mother and daughter embracing, as if to return to this first image and restore Marjane to a basic psychological sense of identity and home in the arms of her mother, substituting for that grandmotherly embrace of her childhood.

In one early mirror image, Satrapi describes her childhood encounter with two opposed conceptions of the world - one religious and the other Marxist. After beginning to lose faith in God - who she imagines in the likeness of Karl Marx - Marjane puts on a cap, stands in front of the mirror, and pretends first to be Che Guevarra, and then Fidel Castro, important revolutionary icons for the Iranian left in the 1970s. The image of Marjene standing in front of a mirror and pretending to be Fidel, like the image of Marjane's mother, depicts an ambiguity or uncertainty about self, especially since in the second of this two-panel sequence, she turns toward the reader and frowns (16). In the second panel, the face in the mirror is entirely hidden, as Marji's reflected image looks into the deep emptiness of the mirror's interior, into the annihilation of the looking-glass world. Marjane looks at the reader but addresses an absent God, asking "Where are you?" Her reflection remains mute with its back turned to us. This suggests, perhaps, a frag-mentation of the self into the speaking subject in search of ontological grounding in a reflected ideal and the silent or silenced other who turns her back on any such possibility.

In another image in which the self is framed within a mirror, Marjane recalls having heard about the tortures inflicted upon Iranian leftists by the shah's secret police. She recalls coming up with her own playground tortures that she inflicts upon her playfellows. She looks in the mirror to see a devilish version of herself looking back: imagined horns sticking out of her head, a wicked grin on her face. Again, as with the previous example, this is a two-panel sequence with Marji turned around to face the reader in the second, narrower, almost claustrophobic panel, and, again, a half-obscured reflection turns her back on us to look into the depths of the mirror. Marjane has gone through the looking glass while Satrapi the author has stepped out of the narrative frame to express to us her sense of guilt and self -recrimination. Thus, the framing of the mirror-frame within the panel often functions to represent the subject's sense of fragmentation.

When Satrapi retells the story of a visit to her uncle in prison, she presents an image in which her self is fully visible in the mirror. However, her words suggest an uncertainty about identity. Marjane




asks her mother, "Do you think I'm dressed nicely enough?" (68). This suggests a tenuous sense of self marked by historical events and political conflicts that threaten to destroy one of Marji's most important sources of identity and agency - the mirror she finds in her uncle whose face she frames with a sun-image - a classic Zoroastrian icon representing Ahura Mazda, the deity of light, wisdom, and goodness (54). In imagining herself in relation to this idealized image of her uncle, Marjane registers a sense of inadequacy. Again, the point here is that mirrors function in Persepolis as sites of subjective fragmentation, instability, and uncertainty.

In Persepolis 2, Marjane turns to the mirror just before she goes to pick up her mother at the airport in Austria. Again, like her uncertainty about her clothed reflection in the previous example, Marjane is uncertain about how she will look to her mother. Also, this example brings us back to the importance of the mother as a key figure in the authorial persona's sense of self. The mother's absence and years of change threaten not only their relationship with each other, but also each ones relationship with her self. Like her childhood anxiety about looking pre- sentable enough for a visit to her uncle in prison, here too, she is con- cerned with how her own mother will perceive her: "I made myself as beautiful as I could before going to meet her at the airport" (Persepolis 2 46). She thinks this as she looks back at a three-quarter image of herself reflected in a hall mirror. At the end of her stay in Austria, just as she is about to leave for Iran, Marjane reflects on the complexity of her own desire for freedom and individual identity. But her desire to go home and her need for the familiarity of national and familial belonging drive her to readopt the hejab and to look in the mirror literally and figure- atively, in another image that harks back to her mother's worried and divided gaze into the mirror. Though we do see her full face in the looking glass this time, it is a face that is, yet again, frowning, lined with worry (specifically, curved lines under the eyes), and whose thoughts betray a new uncertainty about her own motivations. Satrapi' s authorial voice comes in to say: "so much for my individual and social liberties . . . I needed so badly to go home" (91). Once in Iran, Marjane finds it difficult to negotiate through the rules governing hejab and gendered identity. In another scene, she diverts the attention of a moral guidance committee away from herself- her make-up, her less-than-perfect hejab- by falsely incriminating a young man sitting nearby, and telling the authorities that he had been ogling her. The morality police arrest him, and, though she doesn't know what happens, she suspects they punish him physically. Upon returning home, Marjane is reprimanded by her grandmother, the same grandmother who had told her to be true to herself. "My grandmother yelled at me for the first time in my life." This is a lapse in her attempt to be true to that self, and again, this



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uncertainty is depicted in a mirrored, framed reflection: Marji's face is flattened because of the angle of vsion. The style of Satrapi's work is already flat, and, paradoxically, this further flattening is an attempt to represent perspective (137). The flattening out suggests the superficiality of what she has done, her shallowness. However, at the same time, the simulated three-dimensionality suggests a kind of emotional depth: the loss of her grandmother's approval provides the impetus for her, in fact, to work towards the ideal self, a self imagined for her by her grandmother, her uncle, her mother, and her father (137).

Marriage - as a peculiarly modern Iranian institution - presents another dilemma for the protagonist's reconstruction of identity, and again mirrors function to represent the problems of identity formation. Marjane's attempt to negotiate a public identity as a properly veiled and modest woman, and a semi-private identity as worldly are brought into conflict when she is about to be married. Here, she begins to manipulate her physical look- clothes, make-up, exercise. But she is as uncertain as ever. She describes being taken by her friends to a salon called "Wedding Hairdos." One panel gives a frontal view of a hair salon mirror. Reflected back is Marjane and her hairdresser, whose hair is dyed blonde, whose wrinkles indicate her middle age, and who is leaning over displaying ample cleavage. Marji, her hair in an overly adorned frame of curls, looks back with surprise and shock into the mirror (161). The whole process of matrimony seems disconnected from naturalized notions of love, fidelity, and the formation of identities around a nuclear family. Marjane wants to live with Reza before marrying him (158). But the only way the two can live with each other is to be married first. Furthermore, after their marriage, Marjane realizes that her identity is not permanent, and in a two-panel sequence, she compares the woman Reza married (Marjane smiling brightly with long hair, wearing make up and a short dress with lace trim, sitting in front of a window overlooking a garden with birds) with the woman he found himself living with (Marjane frowning, smoking a cigarette, dressed in black pants and shirt, sitting in front of a dark window at night) (164). Thus, the process of getting married, even for a young woman with enlightened parents, involves the construction of a self that is hardly recognizable. Again, the young fiancee's misrecognition of herself is most strikingly registered in the image of herself looking in the mirror, not knowing what to think.

Finally, the last mirror-image in Persepolis 2 depicts Marjane hugging her mother. She has just received her mother's reluctant blessing on her marriage. She does eventually divorce, proving her mother right, but the embrace in this scene represents the mother's acknowledgement not of the marriage but of her daughter's adulthood and independent agency. Paradoxically, this acknowledgement of independence is represented by an image that underscores subjective inter-dependence. In this image, it




is as if the mother's and the daughter's faces complete each other. In the foreground, in the initial frame of the comic panel, we see the mother's face - her hair dyed as in the first image of her we saw reflected in a mirror. In the mirror - the secondary frame within the frame - we see Marjane's face in profile. It is in this image that Marjane begins to find a sense of self. A speech bubble shows Marjane saying, "My sweet little mom! Trust me, I know what I'm doing" (163). But, as I have said, this journey is incomplete, and we are left with a sense that Marjane is still in the process of becoming a complete subject - perhaps like all of us - rather than already being a complete subject, whether recruited ideologically by the state or existing in some pure and essential sense of self.

Frames vs. Frames

As Satrapi contains the ideological frames of Iranian and Western misrepresentations of Iran into her own pictorial frames, she is not replacing these iconic and stereotypical frames of Western media and Iranian political discourse with "true," accurate, or ideologically neutral realities. Rather, she is producing a dialectical relationship between her own iconic images and frames, and the stereotypes and propaganda of both Iran, and Western Europe and the US. In his study of comics and ideology, Martin Barker has suggested that it is too simplistic to dismiss comics or any other iconic framing device (such as television) as stereotype: a bad and irrational way of seeing that can simply be corrected through good and rational ways of seeing informed by more experience and increased knowledge. Instead, Barker offers a dialogic approach to ideology in which one is aware of the ways in which different ideologies - different ways of framing one's worldview - really involve the development and articulation of arguments. This kind of dialogue and dialectic between one way of framing Iran and another is precisely what makes Satrapi's work interesting. In her subsequent books, Satrapi rarely uses panels at all (Embroideries) or constantly breaks the frame (Chicken with Plums). But in Persepolis, she re-frames conceptions of Iran by framing an autobiographical history in the context of her view of Iran's national history.

It is at the level of the depiction of personal identity - the face in the mirror - that Satrapi's work is most interesting because she takes her own experiences of revolution, war, and exile, and presents them to her readers through a framed iconic image that has a universal look, a look closer to the iconic end of Scott McCloud's abstraction scale. According to McCloud, comic art (and, indeed, all pictorial representation) can be understood as existing along a scale of verisimilitude-abstraction. At one end of this scale would be the most abstract or iconic: the smiley



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face, deer-crossing signs, ideographs, even written words, etc. At the other end of the scale would be realistic illustrations or photographic realism. Satrapi's art clearly falls closer to the iconic than the realistic end of the scale. Her figures are simple line drawings with very little attempt to produce verisimilitude through detail. She works through a paradox between a narrative that makes Iranian history and experience less abstract and a pictorial style that presents her characters as iconic (or more abstract than photographs or film, for example). In this way, she frames her own experience as a gift of identification for her reader, like the picture frame that Lucia's father gives to Marjane as a gift. Satrapi's Persepolis, while reframing her own autobiography within geopolitical history, is also iconic enough to be like an empty picture frame into which the reader can insert his or her subjective experience. She presents her life as a gradual and incomplete struggle to create a self. And we can all identify with that.

ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

References

Althusser, Louis. "Ideological State Apparatuses/' Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971.

Bahrampour, Tara. 'Tempering Rage by Drawing Comics/' New York Times (21 May 2003).

Baker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.

Douglas, Allen, and Fedwa Malti-Douglas. Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse P, 1985. Hall, Stuart. "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-

Structuralist Debates." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2.2 (June 1985): 91-114.

Hollander, Anne. Seeing through Clothes. New York: Viking, 1978. Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage." Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan.

New York: Norton, 1977. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper

Collins, 1993. Mintz, Alex, and Steven B. Redd. "Framing Effects in International Relations."

Synthese 135.2 (2003): 193-213. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Trans. Mattais Ripa and

Blake Ferris. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. . Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Trans. Anjali Singh. New York: Pantheon,

2004. Wood, Summer. "Scenes from the Axis of Evil: The Tragicomic Art of Marjane

Satrapl." Bitch 22 (Fall): 55-58, 94-95.



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