This article was downloaded by: [University of Haifa Library]On: 15 September 2013, At: 23:56Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Life WritingPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlwr20

Out of the Family: Generations ofWomen in Marjane Satrapi's PersepolisNancy K. MillerPublished online: 21 Mar 2007.

To cite this article: Nancy K. Miller (2007) Out of the Family: Generations of Women in MarjaneSatrapi's Persepolis , Life Writing, 4:1, 13-29, DOI: 10.1080/14484520701211321

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484520701211321

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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 the

humanities whose theme was identified as ‘gender and generation’. The organisersof these conferences actually intended something more specific than all the

meanings those two words could encompass. ‘Gender’ meant women, and usuallyfeminism; ‘generation’, the relations between women of different generations

and 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

Life Writing VOLUME 4 NUMBER 1 (APRIL 2007)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

I found myself on these occasions asking a set of questions, which are boththeoretical and personal: How does one generation of women, in particular

second-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 of

its 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 which

many women writers and second-wave theorists have passionately engaged,I turned to its many first-person examples (including my own) looking for

answers. 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 contemporary

autobiographical tradition, has been good for literature*/that is, aestheticallyproductive*/and at the same time, politically bad, by which I mean divisive, as a

model (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 between

mother and daughter*/essential, distorted, misused*/is the great unwrittenstory’. Rich goes on to describe that silenced narrative as ‘the flow of energy

between 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 complicated

chapter in Of Woman Born devoted to mothers and daughters posits therelationship as foundational to the future of feminism, even as that relation

cries 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 unwanted

guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the ‘other’ woman’ (253).3 Irigaray’smonologue, which is almost an enactment of Rich’s language, also points to the

necessity of fixing an angry and frozen relationship.I’d like to frame this reflection about the ways women have written and

rewritten their lives through and against maternal models and metaphors with avignette from my own experience, showing my hand and speaking from the

perspective 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

14 MILLER14 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

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, eventhough 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, shorteninghems, 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 can

find 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 Annie

Ernaux, 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 offers

the 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 was

ten 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 of

Satrapi’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 (both

women also veiled) wave her off. The mother’s last words at the airport forbid

OUT OF THE FAMILY 15

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

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 a

female coming of age, but the dilemmas of identity and development that

typically provide the material of women’s autobiography are drawn against the

demands of a collective narrative of sexual difference where the marks of gender

are 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 it

might be to live*/or write*/a woman’s life is inseparable from the constraints of a

specific slice of historical time. In part because of the weight of this history,

Persepolis escapes the classical oedipal psychodrama of conflict and separation

theorised 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 she

finally leaves home, but Persepolis tells a different kind of story of attachment

and separation, a form of intergenerational collaboration of the sort more

commonly invoked by black feminist theorists. In Satrapi’s memoir, the daughter’s

leaving*/she actually leaves home twice: once for Austria, the second time for

France*/is refigured as a mode of transnational dislocation. Through the

separation produced by political exile family ties are both suspended and

reforged.5

What gives Satrapi’s project its distinctive place in the expanding domains of

life writing, then, is neither the obviously new*/the Iranian revolutionary saga in

graphic form*/nor the familiar story of the daughter leaving home and separating

from her mother, but the arc of the autobiography created by the interlocking

visual and narrative trajectories that link the two. In the interaction between the

words and drawings, in the gaps, connections and silences that structure what we

might think of as the ‘trans-verbal’ spaces of the comic-book world, Persepolis

realigns the domains of the personal and the political, the singular and the

collective, for the twenty-first century.Thinking about Satrapi’s innovation in representing generations of women led

me back to Julia Kristeva’s now-classic ‘Women’s Time’, an essay I taught

recently in a course on post-war women writers and intellectuals. Kristeva begins

her meditation on generations of women in feminism with a slightly apocalyptic

account of history. She replaces what she sees as an antiquated view of nation

with a concept called ‘Europe’, against or within which she locates a ‘trans-

European temporality’ experienced by women, or at least by ‘existential

feminists’ (18) and their political demands. Although I don’t share Kristeva’s

dark views about feminism’s future, I want to borrow her redefinition of the

notion of ‘generation’ as ‘less a chronology than a signifying space, a corporeal

and desiring mental space’ (33). This shift from a temporal to a spatial metaphor

makes it possible for Kristeva to posit the ‘parallel existence’ (33) of the

different women’s times she identifies, an interweaving of lived experience in

spaces both separate and shared. The spatial metaphor collapses the vertical

hierarchy of generation onto a horizontal plane*/like the pages of a book, or a

map, especially the contiguous panels of a comic book.

16 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

In Persepolis the generations of women (inexorably and unambiguously

identified as women by the regime) coexist in the overlapping spaces of dialogue

and memory*/a psychic and physical space made even more palpable to the

reader by the conventions of this emergent genre: a graphic memoir whose

narrative mode depends as much on the visual arrangement of relations as on

chronological order. At the same time, however, because Persepolis is also an act

of political witness, of testimony, the panels cannot be deciphered fully outside

the grid of historical time. Generations of women, we might say in this

borrowing, are shaped in their bodies and beliefs (Kristeva’s ‘corporeal and

desiring mental space’) by their response to laws designed precisely to

circumscribe 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 one

of the earliest sequences Satrapi draws her mother, unveiled and wearing dark

glasses, raising her arm in fierce protest. A German journalist snaps a picture of

Marjane’s mother at one of the demonstrations and publishes it in a European

magazine. In facing panels, the mother protests outside in the streets and the

daughter, from the safety of her room, contemplates the photograph of her

mother in the magazine with pride (Childhood 5).What happens to the mother�/daughter plot when your mother is a dissident

and a feminist, and your grandmother a nonconformist?Early in the narrative, in a sequence of three small panels, little Marjane

stands between her mother and her grandmother in the kitchen as the women

anxiously wait for Marjane’s father, who is outside taking forbidden pictures, to

return home (Childhood 29). (Although the women are dissident and protest, the

men*/primarily*/are the ones who go to prison and are subjected to torture.) In

the drawing, the child stands waist-high between the solid bodies of the women,

who protect and comfort her. The dangerous content of the conversation

between the two women (whose heads in one panel are missing) as they

speculate about the father’s return is marked by a code in the dialogue balloon

that the little girl doesn’t understand (the women literally and figuratively speak

over her head). The physical bonds among the women of three generations

waiting in the kitchen form a strand of female identification; the scene of the

women drawn against one another in the confines of domestic space produces a

pause of intimate history within the broader strokes of national upheaval.

(I should add that, while the bonds between women are especially strong, male

family 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 from

families who believe in intellectual freedom, and Marjane’s parents send their

teenage daughter to Vienna. Lonely and confused, in the throes of a full-blown

adolescent identity crisis, Marjane realises that she has to educate herself. Her

education begins with books that she hopes will lead her to understand her

existential dilemmas as an Iranian girl attending a French-speaking school in a

German-speaking city.

OUT OF THE FAMILY 17

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

The experiment of female self-discovery through reading is represented across

seven panels on a single page (see Figure 1). At the top, from left to right, against

a black background are two panels that portray teenage Marjane first reading

voraciously, then studying a book by Simone de Beauvoir. At the far left, three

small panels flash back to Marjane’s memory of being a little girl watching her

mother engrossed in reading. The daughter tries to decipher what has captured

her mother’s attention, and identifies the title on the cover*/The Mandarins

(Beauvoir’s autobiographical, prize-winning novel), but stumbles over the

author’s name: ‘Simone de Bavar’ is as far as she gets. ‘No, Beauvoir,’ her

mother corrects. In the last of the memory panels the mother reads aloud from

the novel in Persian, as Marjane ponders the meaning of the words, question

marks forming above her head. ‘But I was a little young,’ the older narrator

observes, thinking back on the incomprehension of her younger self (Return 21).

Immediately adjacent to the memory panels of the earlier scene of reading

are two images of Marjane trying to pee standing up and peeing sitting down. The

narrator explains that she learned from reading The Second Sex that if women

urinated standing up their entire view of the world would change. She tries but is

discouraged by the results. In the second panel Marjane is hunched glumly on the

lowered 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 puddle

on the floor of the failed experiment in changing her standpoint in the world

migrates into the folds of the trousers gathered around her feet as she meditates

philosophically on what it means to be a woman.Beauvoir’s analysis of the implications of the ‘erect position’ for males

appears in the section on childhood that begins with the famous line, ‘One is not

born, rather one becomes a woman’ (267). Beauvoir underlines the crucial role of

customary positions in ‘contemporary Western society’ for the girl’s perception

of gender relations: ‘This difference,’ she argues, ‘constitutes for the little girl

the most striking sexual differentiation’ (273). Later in that chapter, still

narrating 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 in

her own country, when the regime reifies the differences between the sexes, and

again in Vienna, where being Iranian makes her seem foreign to herself. In this

crucial turning point along the journey of self-knowledge, Marjane reads Simone

de Beauvoir not only as a troubled adolescent looking for herself in books, trying

to understand what it means to become a woman, but also as a young Iranian

18 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

woman on her own in Europe, in relation to her emerging transnational

existence, 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 daughter

reads a book that is already part of her mother’s library (though not written in

her mother tongue)*/a volume her mother is willing to share with her, even

prematurely. The scene of reading, then, is one that not only connects mother

and daughter through the book The Second Sex; it also connects mother and

daughter through memory across geographical and temporal separation. On the

very same page, Marjane’s mother is sitting in her armchair in Teheran reading

Simone de Beauvoir, observed by the little girl, while Marjane the adolescent is

stretched out on her bed, then sitting in her room, reading in Vienna. The

interplay of the panels spatialises the relations of separation and connection.

The three small boxes stacked up like a set of blocks articulate the daughter’s

visual memory of her childhood self watching her mother read and interrupting

her reading. Juxtaposed to the memory boxes, against a stark, black background,

two vertical panels convey the daughter’s unsuccessful attempt to understand

her place in the world, turning theory into practice: peeing standing up. The

rooms and the experiences of self-realisation that take place in them, though

attached 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’s

words or love but also her mother’s reading*/the scene of her self-absorption in

which mother is separate from daughter, yet potentially connected through a

shared narrative. The daughter’s reading, however, if inspired by her mother’s

feminism, can become part of her life only through her own experience, through

her own body, as it were. The word ‘feminism’ is never used, but feminist

consciousness, often expressed through irony and juxtaposition, infuses this

universe constrained by gender polarities. (For example, on the page directly

opposite the Beauvoir experiment, Marjane dips into Sartre, the favourite author

of her lefty schoolmates*/‘The notion of consciousness comes from man’s lived

experience’*/only to confess that she found him ‘a little annoying’ [Return 20].)

We might think of this effort of self-understanding (what we once called

consciousness-raising) among women of different generations as a case of

feminist intertextuality. The arresting juxtaposition of Satrapi’s images helps

us imagine a set of relations between texts and readers*/readers existing in

different historical times and ideological situations, as well as quite literally

different 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 the

personal history of Laura Freixas, a Spanish novelist. At a conference of

contemporary European writers around the theme of gender and generations

held in Bath in 2005, Freixas, born in 1958, described her mother’s obsession with

reading, reading French novels, and, in particular, the work of Simone de

Beauvoir. The little girl felt ignored. ‘My mother was always reading,’ Freixas

said, ‘and so when I was young, I wanted to be a book*/or failing that, to become

OUT OF THE FAMILY 19

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

a writer.’ In the repressive years of Franco’s Spain, the ‘patron saint’ of the

novelist’s mother was Simone de Beauvoir.

Reading Generations

During a recent sabbatical in London, I was working on a memoir about the years

I 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 West

End theatre. Lessing’s landmark novel, The Golden Notebook, which was

published in 1962, stunned me when I first read it (in 1966, while I was still

trying 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 who

looked, I thought, like some version of me: lots of women with grey hair, lined

faces, 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 about

going to hear Lessing speak about a book titled The Grandmothers. I feared a

celebration of grandmotherhood, which is even more fashionable today,

including among second-wave feminists, than motherhood as destiny in the

1950s. But the novella ‘The Grandmothers’, which gives the new book its title, is

more about older women having good sex with young men, and the friendship

between women, than that stage of life itself; each woman has a long affair with

the other’s teenage son (maybe this is a celebration of grandmotherhood).During the discussion period, I felt emboldened to ask Lessing what she

thought now, in retrospect, about the reception of The Golden Notebook, since

she had often been very irritated by having the book seen as an opening salvo of

second-wave feminism, especially in the United States. Rather than blowing me

off as an irritating American feminist, Lessing answered anecdotally, almost

warmly. She quoted a woman who came up to her at a conference to say: ‘I read

your book, my mother told me to read it, I told my daughter to read it.’ Then she

described visiting a reading group in London and hearing women discuss

the novel. She realised with something akin to shock, she said, that what for

the young women belonged to the realm of history, for her belonged to the realm

of memory. She remembered on her pulses, as it were, a time that for the

younger readers belonged only to the past*/a then of their mothers, or even their

grandmothers. The novel, she concluded, ‘had a life of its own’. Lessing had

actually written something quite similar in the preface to the 1994 reissue of the

novel:

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

20 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

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

OUT OF THE FAMILY 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

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 and

understood by different generations of readers, by women of different ages,

with different life histories, and translated into various languages. What seems

important and potentially useful in looking for non-biological models of

generations is precisely the life of the book*/a book that in fact changes with

its readers, through the dialogues of feminist intertextuality.At the event in London, Lessing reiterated what she said in the 1971 preface to

the novel, that for her The Golden Notebook was about what the character Anna

says to her friend Molly in the first sentence of dialogue: ‘The point is, the point

is [. . .] 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 her

lover, Saul, a blocked writer, as well as their relations to other people in the

book: ‘This theme of ‘breakdown’,’ Lessing goes on to say, ‘that sometimes when

people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false

dichotomies and divisions’ for Lessing was the novel’s ‘central theme’. But

the importance of this experience was overlooked, Lessing complains, because of

the attention reviewers paid to the ‘sex war’ (xiv).

When I discovered The Golden Notebook in Paris, I wrote to my mother

suggesting that she read it. Given the state of our relations, this recommendation

was probably not delivered in an entirely friendly fashion. My mother asked

suspiciously whether I thought the book ‘applied to her particularly’, as she put it

in 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, but

my guess is that the book told me something about what I was living through that

I wanted my mother to know: I was cracking up. I preferred to have her learn it

through a book, rather than from me. Like Marjane, far from home I connected to

my 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 crossroads

in my life, trying to understand my relations to the previous generations of my

family. I described two moments: a dream involving my mother, and a scene in

which I am standing in a cemetery where my parents and my paternal

grandparents are buried. When I was deciding how to end the book, I found

myself 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 helping

me with the final edit of the book lobbied for the scene with my mother as the

closing image. I resisted. I wanted to keep the anger alive. Since the recent death

of two friends with whom I shared my years in feminism, I’ve wondered about

that decision, about its wisdom, both as writing, and as a statement about

women and generations. Why was I so determined not to end on a dream of

collaboration?

22 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

Before I published Bequest and Betrayal, I read from its first chapter at a

conference 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 to

give an example of contemporary feminist literary criticism. Before I read the

paper I had prepared, I described the dream about my mother, which I had had

the night before. After my presentation Cixous’s translator came up to me and

told me that ‘Helene’ liked the dream. (Cixous, I should perhaps mention, was

very attached to her mother*/as well as to her dreams.) At her own presentation

to 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 should

not end the book with the dream. Reuniting with the mother was too predictably

feminist, and symbolic of a mode of feminism I had always resisted, even if, as

Cixous herself had famously said, the ‘mother, too, is a metaphor’ (881).

In an important essay about identification, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin

argues that the self ‘can and will allow all its voices to speak, including the voice

of the other within’ (‘Shadow’ 108). It seems to me now that even fifteen years

after her death, when I wrote my book, I was not able to admit there was

something about my mother I didn’t want to lose. Now that I’m more practiced in

loss, I can see that the dream was about something I do value, even if, in order to

experience a sense of connection with my mother*/both of us alive*/she had to

be dead, and I had to dream it.

The Grandmother’s Breasts

Throughout the two volumes of Persepolis , the mother�/daughter relation, which

is represented as one of sporadic struggle as well as underlying complicity, is

supplemented by crucial encounters with the grandmother. Her grandmother’s

motto*/‘Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself’ [integre] (Childhood

150)*/haunts Marjane during the painful adolescent years in Vienna when self-

knowledge eludes her. The words bear the wisdom of an earlier generation’s

experience, but they are also inseparable from the connection between bodies

that 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 bed

they share Marjane observes her grandmother undress; she marvels as the

grandmother shakes jasmine flowers out of her bra and the flowers constellate

the dark space of the room. ‘Grandma,’ the girl asks, ‘how do you have such

round breasts at your age?’ Her grandmother explains that she soaks them in a

bowl 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’s

bosom: ‘I’ll never forget that smell’ (Childhood 150).

OUT OF THE FAMILY 23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

Later, back in Teheran, when she is a student at the university, Marjane takes a

public stand against the administrators who demand that women assume the

responsibility 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 that

meant a lot to us’ (Return 144), the narrator concludes. This episode of rebellion

makes up for an earlier one of surprising cowardice for which her grandmother

had chastised her severely: ‘It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also

what 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 first

time in a long time, I was happy with myself’ (Return 144). And it is again the

grandmother who gives Marjane the advice she needs when she breaks down in

tears, on the verge of divorcing her husband. Her grandmother cites herself as a

model, invoking her own divorce of fifty-five years earlier: ‘I always told myself

that I would be happier alone than with a shitmaker!!’ (Return 179). Although

Marjane’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, that

empowers Marjane to tell her husband that their marriage is over. When Satrapi

recreates her life as autobiography in Persepolis, she draws on her mother’s and

her grandmother’s dissident narratives, as well as the emotional intimacies of

their shared experiences.In Kristeva’s imaginary third-generation space, conflicts over rights for women

disappear along with an insistence on sexual difference. This new era in women’s

time becomes instead the backdrop against which the ‘singularity of each person

and, even more [. . .] the multiplicity of every person’s identification’ (‘Women’s

Time’ 35) can emerge. Kristeva’s vision of singularity combined with multiplicity

reappears in almost the same language twenty years later, at the end of her recent

book on Colette, the third in her trilogy of portraits of ‘feminine genius’, which

includes Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein. In the conclusion to the analysis of

Colette, which recapitulates in slightly different language the phases of women’s

emancipation struggles and the demands for equality described in ‘Women’s

Time’, Kristeva seeks both to dissociate herself from ‘feminism as a mass

movement’ (Colette 404) and to acknowledge Simone de Beauvoir’s role as a

precursor in the study of female subjectivity. Kristeva positions herself as taking

the 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 quest

for 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 a

freedom inseparable from the condition of women generally*/the women who as

a group still must fight for equal rights along with political freedom from a

repressive regime. Unlike Kristeva, I don’t think that feminism as a mass

movement needs to disappear in order for singularity to be expressed*/on the

contrary. And this is precisely why The Second Sex appears as it does in the

24 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

memoir of a young woman’s struggle to assume her individuality*/even, in

Kristeva’s terms, her singularity as a dissident artist. The panels devoted to

Marjane’s reading of The Second Sex are a sign of Satrapi’s affiliation with a long

history of feminist engagement*/an affiliation that is both transgenerational and

transnational.At the same time, I’ve been arguing, there is a piece of this history that is

changing, that needs changing. The mother, Adrienne Rich powerfully argued in

1976, glossing the pernicious effects of matrophobia, ‘stands for the victim in

ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr’ (236). Perhaps it is time to re-place

those models in their political context and history*/better yet, in the vast and

living library of women’s time*/seeing them as landmarks of a struggle for

change, symptoms of a nightmare of oppression from which we longed to escape,

rather than a universal and timeless structure. The mother�/daughter dyad

enshrined by second-wave feminism as an icon of over-identification*/for better

or for worse*/needs to be interrupted, disrupted, by literary texts. Works like

Persepolis, from the third generation, both read the past and move us into the

future.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 as

our mothers, or indeed grandmothers, which tends to keep us locked into the

fatal logic of Rich’s ‘biologically alike bodies’ (generations separated by time but

caught in the same story, which they are doomed to repeat), but rather as

contiguous spaces, or texts and intertexts: palimpsests of difference recording

earlier struggles that enable and renew our own. It is in that sense that

books*/whether The Second Sex or The Golden Notebook*/serve better than

bodies as transitional objects that permit generations of women to talk to one

another across the temporal divide that separates them; to connect through

history and memory. These books are indeed spaces of the imagination*/and is it

an accident that they are, to a greater or lesser degree, autobiographical?*/that

bridge 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 into

literature, time past into space: ‘a quickset hedge, spindrift, meteors, an open

and 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 become

books, but we can try.

Break of Day is a fiction of failed romance that intersects with a

mother�/daughter correspondence; alternatively, it’s a narrative about a meeting

between mother and daughter (punctuated by the love story) that never takes

place, 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 because

she is waiting for her flowering cactus plant to bloom; it closes on the image of

the mother’s last letter*/‘all messages from a hand that was trying to transmit to

OUT OF THE FAMILY 25

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

me a new alphabet’ (142). The separation from the mother in Colette’s pen

becomes the matter of an entire life’s work.9

The apparently euphoric mother�/daughter relation in Break of Day would

seem to occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Irigaray’s dysphoric

diatribe. But perhaps adoration and dread are simply the twin poles that define

the 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, might

be 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 something

else*/something like a letter in a new alphabet that the daughter sends back to

her dying mother, the wish to find each other on the same page of a different

book: ‘And what I wanted from you,’ Irigaray writes to the woman who occupies

the 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 to

tell*/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 drawings

escape and complicate the ineluctable binary of being dead or alive. The

complication involves sympathy for the mother and the recognition of the role of

history as it shapes the destiny of a given generation.

In Mary Kelly’s ninety-second film loop, ‘WLM Demo Remix’, recently displayed

in New York at Postmasters Gallery (Winter 2005), the images of a 1970 feminist

demonstration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which

granted women the right to vote, dissolves to be replaced by a rally of women

held in 2005. Because of the group pose, the women look similar but are not, of

course, identical. Kelly’s video makes it possible to visualise the changing

relations between generations, without the one ever eliminating the other; there

is 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 drew

my epigraph, Carolyn Heilbrun acknowledges the need for a ‘different model

than that of mothers and daughters’ (100) to emerge if there is to be continuity

between generations. ‘We have learned,’ she writes sadly, ‘that the woman

professor cannot hold her own as a maternal figure.’ She urges feminists of older

and younger generations to ‘search for new ways of relating one to the other’; to

exit from ‘a play in which our parts are written for us’ (101). This drama of the

threshold*/the liminal place, as she puts it*/between destinies is precisely the

one that Marjane, the artist in exile, occupies on the eve of her departure. What

I am wishing to add here to Heilbrun’s analysis is a slightly different view of the

book and the library. If feminists of Heilbrun’s lonelier generation did not have

books waiting for them, 1970s feminists do: we have the work of younger writers

who, like Satrapi, are capable of looking back to feminist precursors and who can

inspire 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, after

encouraging her daughter to be brave, the mother collapses at the airport. In a

26 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

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 have

always wanted you to become independent, educated, cultured,’ she says whenMarjane announces her plans to marry, ‘and here you are getting married at

twenty-one’ [163]), as readers we are offered clues (Return 49) rather than anindependent storyline about the cost of maternal sacrifice. Bottom line: it’s too

late 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 is

not oppositional.On the last page of the memoir, after Marjane’s mother tells her that she must

leave ‘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*/to

freedom for women and for nations. Leaving this time, the artist/narratorcomments, is easier than the departure ten years earlier for Vienna at the same

airport*/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 for

the 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’s

cantankerous 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 she

takes her mother’s and grandmother’s stories further than they could*/whilekeeping them alive through the journey of reparative memory. On the page of

farewells, however, the beloved grandmother’s face remains inscribed insadness, her tears pearling the memoir’s final panel. Separated from her family

by 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 they

exchange 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 an

oppressive 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 Marjane

Satrapi and Pantheon Books.

OUT OF THE FAMILY 27

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

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).

28 MILLER

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013

[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

References

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1989.Benjamin, Jessica. ‘The Omnipotent Mother.’ Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on

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.

2005: 40�/43.

OUT OF THE FAMILY 29

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

aifa

Lib

rary

] at

23:

56 1

5 Se

ptem

ber

2013