Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis": Eluding the Frames

Author(s): Ann Miller

Source: L'Esprit Créateur , Spring 2011, Vol. 51, No. 1, Watch This Space: Women's
Conceptualisations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art (Spring 2011),
pp. 38-52
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26290021

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 Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis:
Eluding the Frames
Ann Miller

graphical comic book Persepolis, the author recounts the difficult process
IN ofTHE
gainingFOURTH ANDin Teheran
admission to art school FINAL in 1989 atVOLUME of Maijane Satrapi's autobio
the age of twenty.1
Along with a written examination in Persian, a language that she has not stud
ied during four years spent in Austria, she has to pass a drawing test. Certain
that one of the subjects will be "Les Martyrs," she practises copying a photo
graph of Michelangelo's Pietà, kitting Mary out in a tchador and Christ in a
military uniform (Figure 1). The subject does indeed come up. Maijane2 exe
cutes her drawing and two weeks later is thrilled to discover that she has
passed. This incident is significant in its impact on the life of Satrapi the
future artist, but the large (over half-page-sized) panel in which she narrates
it has further significance through its play upon symbolic representations of
national and gendered identity.
Michelangelo's masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture is, of course, con
sidered to be a work of genius within art-historical discourse. This is a dis
course, though, that began to be challenged by feminists in the latter part of
the twentieth century. Griselda Pollock points to the "false universalization of
a positivist Eurocentric, masculine and often Christian subject position which
mistakes itself for humanity in general."3 The Pietà, whose sublime beauty
calls forth a powerful aesthetic-emotional response in spectators, offers a par
ticularly effective example of the capacity of Western art to naturalize and
render highly tenacious a set of meanings around the sign "woman," in this
case selfless, tragic motherhood.
As Satrapi transforms Mary into an icon of selfless, tragic, Iranian moth
erhood, and transmutes the monumentality of the marble into a black-and
white line drawing, she represents her own hand holding the pencil very
prominently in the foreground of the panel. The strategic reappropriation of
this canonical work of European masculinist high culture by an Iranian
woman comics artist, affirmed through this meta-representative element,
destabilizes the very symbols that it mobilises, demonstrating the provisional
nature of the signifying systems that maintain gender hierarchies in place. The
panel may in fact be read as a mise en abyme of Satrapi's endeavour, through
art, to regain agency and position herself vis-à-vis dominant discourses of
both Western and Iranian culture.

© L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2011), pp. 38-52

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 Ann Miller

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Figure 1. "Le Concours," Maijane's take on the Pietà: desta

of femininity. © 2003 Maijane Satrapi and L'Association.

In discussing Persepolis in relation to the theme of wo

will draw upon a framework suggested by Pollock for r
women artists (Pollock 78-93). Pollock refers to three spa
the locations represented by the work (and, in particular,
public and private space); second, the spatial order with
(concerning, for example, angles of vision and other fr
third, the space from which the representation is made, i
space of the artist, and more generally the social and p
which she is located, and within which her work is receiv
The question of location, Pollock's first register, is fun
polis, which is set in Iran, the space of home but also th
sonal and political events, and Austria, the space of exil

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 L'Esprit Créateur

umes are set in the Iran of Satrapi's childhood and early adolescence, whic
saw the overthrow of the Shah and the Islamic revolution, followed by th
Iran-Iraq war. The third volume covers her stay in Austria for four years
teenager, brought about by her parents' fear that her outspokenness wou
lead to her arrest. The final volume recounts her return to Iran, ending as s
leaves once more to go to art school in France.4 The inclusion of second-le
narrators, most often members of her family, allows for the portrayal of spac
outside Satrapi's lived experience. These episodes emphasize her family's h
tory of political opposition to the Pahlavi regime, and the imprisonment an
exile suffered by her grandfather and uncle as a result. Pollock's second r
ister, the spatial ordering within the work, translates here into the signify
practices of comic art, a medium highly elaborate in its spatial arrangemen
The third register, the psychic and social space from which Satrapi ultimat
emerges as an artist, is alluded to within the work itself, given its autobi
graphical nature. Since comic art readily allows for outer worlds to be inva
by inner worlds of fantasy and memory, Persepolis can be read in part as a
itinerary of psychic development that involves the negotiation of comple
issues of cultural and gendered identity, culminating in the assertion of M
jane's chosen identity as an artist. Her development specifically as a comic
artist is not depicted, however, since this takes place after the departure f
France on which the final volume ends.

In this article, we will invert the order of Pollock's first two registers by
beginning with a brief review of the spatial resources of the medium that
Satrapi uses to particular effect, before going on to discuss how she represents
locations. Finally, we will situate her in relation to the third register, focussing
on psychic space and then on the extra-textual context of the publishing and
reception of comic art.

Comic strip as spatial signifying practice: framing the action

Much of the critical writing on Satrapi has focused on her situation as a
transnational subject. Commentators on her work have linked this liminality
with her choice of comic strip as a medium, not only because of its text/image
hybridity but also because of the analogy between the interstitial space that
she occupies and the gutter, the inter-panel space, on which the discontinuous
narration of comic art is founded.5 Scott McCloud, in a widely-read and often
quoted text, has referred to "the imaginative work of closure" that readers are
required to perform in order to "mentally construct a continuous, unified real
ity."6 Although McCloud emphasizes the active role of the reader, his argu
ment tends to imply that comic art, like Hollywood continuity editing, neces

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 Ann Miller

sarily brings about suture, binding readers into conformist narratives.7 He

thereby underplays the expressive and counter-ideological potential of dis
continuity. It is just this potential that has been stressed by a number of writ
ers on Persepolis. As Nima Naghibi and Andrew O'Malley have argued,
instead of being filled in with dominant ideology, the gutters may function as
sites of aporia, requiring the reader to "interact with and interpret historical,
political, and cultural silences."8 It is noteworthy that Satrapi uses conspicu
ous ellipsis to disruptive effect on the very first page of volume one: the reader
is jolted by the abrupt transition between a panel set during the 1979 revolu
tion, showing a militant group of unbearded men and unveiled women, and
the following panel set in 1980, in which a tchador-clad teacher meekly hands
out veils to her female pupils.
Babak Elahi critiques McCloud's account and its presupposition that the
reader is meant to disappear into the flow of the plot. He argues that the artist
can draw attention to the frame by an effect of refraining, citing Satrapi's use
of mirrors, through which she conveys her "problematic development of iden
tity."9 She thereby, he suggests, brings about an ideological reframing both of
Iran and of Iranian subjectivity, a response to George Bush's framing of Iran
and its people as part of the "axis of evil" (Elahi 312). It is worth expanding
Elahi's analysis to consider the many other instances of reframing that arise
not from mirrors but from the enclosure within the frame of television screens

or newspapers that transmit official discourses. For example, the Shah's tele
vised speech on democracy is reframed in the domestic space of Marjane's
left-wing intellectual family and is greeted with derision, as is, subsequently,
an Islamic official's pronouncement on the dangerously seductive rays that
emanate from women's hair.

Narrative sequentially may also be unsettled by spatial relations that

escape its strict linearity. Bande dessinée theorist Thierry Groensteen has
coined the term "tressage" to refer to the linking of panels, across a page or at
a distance, by formal, semantic or iconic correspondences.10 In Persepolis,
tressage series increase the thematic resonance of repeated events, such as
Marjane's continual moves from one lodging place to another in Austria,
never able to find a home. Tressage may work to indicate insistent psychic
repetition: after changing the TV channel in Austria to avoid watching news
reel film of the war back home, Maijane is assailed in her sleep by images of
her former life there, reproduced from volumes one and two.
More generally, the medium of comic art can work against the easy recog
nition of familiar visual representations through its eschewing of mechanical
reproduction in favour of the highly selective reinscription of the world

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 L'Esprit Créateur

through the artist's graphic line. Comic art tends to avoid careful realist detail
evoking locations and décors instead through metonymy. Hillary Chute, dis
cussing graphic narratives by women in general and Persepolis in particular,
speaks of "interpretation as a process of visualization," often of material that
is culturally and/or psychically invisible.11

Locations 1: Iran as gendered space—the veil

The nation of Iran is, like any other nation, a cultural construct, with a dif
ferent distribution of roles for men and women: the latter bear the burden of

symbolisation, most obviously and visibly through the "loaded signifier" of

the veil.12 This signifier has taken on competing meanings: the garment has
been co-opted both into the "Western narrative of Islam as oppressor and West
as liberator" and into the alternative narrative of "the essentialness of pre
serving Muslim customs, particularly in regard to women, as a sign of resist
ance to imperialism."13 It may be argued that Satrapi colludes with the first of
these narratives by portraying the imposition of the veil solely as a coercive
measure introduced by an Islamic regime that had usurped the victory of the
uprising against the Shah. The opening page of Persepolis claims that the
Islamic government had itself carried out an ideological reframing: the panel
in which unveiled women demonstrate alongside men against the Shah is
accompanied by a narrative voiceover explaining that the 1979 revolution had
retrospectively been called an Islamic revolution.
Satrapi's comic book gives no indication of the extent to which the veil
had come to signify resistance to the Westernizing programme of the Pahlavi
régime, which had itself used women to symbolize modernity. Iran had been
the first Muslim country to impose Western dress on women when Reza Shah
abolished the veil in 1936 and soldiers were instructed to unveil women by
force. The "cultural authenticity" movement of the 1970s argued that imperi
alist ideology had objectified women's bodies. The upholders of authenticity
therefore encouraged the adoption of Islamic dress as an instrument of eman
cipation from Westernisation.14
It seems inappropriate, though, to argue that Satrapi plays into the hands
of Western liberals, particularly since her uncle Anouche, imprisoned under
the Shah, offers a Marxist analysis of the transitional role of religious ideol
ogy in laying the ground for a proletarian revolution, even if his optimism
proves ill-founded. In fact, Satrapi contests the meanings that are associated
with the "veiled woman" both in the West and in Iran. A full-page panel show
ing Maijane and her female school friends engaged in compulsory breast
beating in honour of the martyrs cannot help but evoke the many Western

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 Ann Miller

press and newsreel images of the mourning rituals of bereaved Musli

women, images that invite reading these women as "irrational political actor
and so "frame geopolitical realities in particular ways."15 Marjane and her
friends duly take up their places in such a frame, but they escape it in a s
sequent panel where they fool around by wildly overacting.
At the same time, Satrapi also sets out to show the contradiction betwee
the official Iranian discourse of idealization of women and the treatment of
women who engage in political opposition, including the anonymous women
who make up half of a group who meet a firing squad in both volumes two
and four. The tragedy of the latter scene is intensified by the slow-motion
effect arising out of the depiction within a single panel of victims in different
stages of falling to the ground. Conversely, the tragedy of Niloufar, an eight
een-year-old communist met by Marjane in volume two, is heightened by
brutal ellipsis, accelerating the rhythm of narration. In the space of three
panels, Niloufar is spied on by the revolutionary guards, arrested, and shot.
In the final chapter of volume four, Satrapi portrays her attempt to reclaim
a different place for women in the national imaginary, echoing her account in
the first chapter of her childhood fantasy of becoming a prophet and elbow
ing her way into an all-male line-up that includes a scrawny Christ. Her final
degree project at art school, carried out jointly with her husband Reza, is a
plan for a theme park based on warriors from Persian mythology, half of
whom are female. The presence of these women warriors proves to be a stum
bling block to getting the municipality to adopt the plan, for the warriors
would have to be veiled, an anachronism too absurd to contemplate.

Locations 2: public and private space

Satrapi portrays a society in which women are excluded from the public
sphere. On the second page of the first volume, the theme of surveillance is
introduced through a disturbing juxtaposition. A member of the morals police
seems to cast his fierce gaze down at the nine-year-old veiled Maijane in the
panel below, as she looks out at the reader and sums up the situation: "Et
voilà!" However, at this stage, immediately after the revolution, the street is
still an arena for political struggle, and the very first image of Maijane's
mother, Tadji, to appear in Persepolis, on page three of the same volume,
inscribes her directly into a feminist iconography of proud militancy: a press
photograph taken during an anti-veil demonstration shows her with arm raised
and hps wide in a shout. Several months further on, on page three of volume
two, she is shown lying prone and distraught. As an unveiled woman out in the
street, she has been called a whore. Tadji takes to her bed. She does attend one

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 L'Esprit Créateur

more demonstration, along with her husband and daughter, but the terrifying
police violence with which it is met puts an end to her political activity. She is
returned to her 'place' and is silenced. By volume four, when Maijane returns
from Austria, even the names of the streets have changed; they are now called
after martyrs, a symbolic masculinization of the geography of the city. The
walls of buildings, decorated with murals representing martyrs and their griev
ing mothers, seem to lean in oppressively, and she hurries back indoors.
Surveillance extends to the minutest details of dress. The art students are

forbidden to wear wide trousers: such indecent behaviour would trample on

the memory of the blood spilled by the martyrs. Satrapi portrays the conse
quence of this permanent harassment as a retreat from public life, with private
hedonism as the only form of resistance to the regime. The split between pri
vate and public selves is materialized by the gutter between two panels repre
senting the same group of women: in the top one they are outdoors, veiled,
and in the bottom one they are indoors, wearing low-cut dresses and display
ing luxuriant hair. The narrative voiceover tells us that this split is internal
ized: "Cette disparité nous rendait schizophrènes."
The public/private division that Satrapi portrays is somewhat at odds with
the cultural demarcation of space that the Iranian cultural theorist Hamid
Naficy describes as a philosophical principle that finds aesthetic expression in
a range of artistic practices, from architecture to cinema: the inner, private self
must be separated from the outer, public self, the domain of corruption and
worldly influences, by a boundary zone such as a veil or screen.16 In Perse
polis, the private sphere is portrayed not as the location of inner core values,
but as a space of frenetic pleasure-seeking. The only screen Satrapi portrays
is seen as a set of bars across the panel when she returns home for the first
time after her marriage to Reza. She and Reza have jointly taken the decision
to wed in order to avoid the difficulties, and the danger, of living as an unmar
ried couple, but the bars symbolize the coercion exercised by the regime to
force women into private, interior space. Satrapi clearly has no desire to aes
theticize this as an ornamental screen.

Locations 3: border-crossings
Iran does not exist in isolation: as both geographical and cultural space it
is subject to border-crossings of all kinds. It is noteworthy that on the one
occasion when Persepolis features a map of Iran—on the television screen
Maijane and her parents watch in a Spanish hotel in volume two—it is under
invasion, by a black mass that the Satrapis are unable to interpret, only later
understanding that it represents the Iraqi attack. In volume one, Marjane's

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 Ann Miller

father Ebi gives a history lesson to his daughter as intratextual interlocutor,

and indirectly to us. This lesson occupies a large panel where the left-to-right
reading order and the division into frames are abandoned in favour of the
boustrophedon progression of a series of invaders from East and West: the
Anglo-Americans who installed and maintained the Pahlavis in power are
merely the most recent. In the late twentieth century, boundaries are further
blurred by the invisible flows of capital, although some of its effects are mad
visible by Satrapi's drawing a line of heavily bandaged patients in the hospi
tal where Maijane goes to visit her uncle in volume two. Any reader believ
ing the Iran-Iraq war to be a Middle Eastern affair is disabused by another
second-level narrator, a doctor, who explains to Marjane's family not only tha
the West sold chemical weapons to both sides but that the victims were used
to test drugs for Western pharmaceutical companies.
Iran's borders are clandestinely breached by the importing of Western
youth-cultural products, like the Nike shoes and the Michael Jackson badge,
smuggled in by Marjane's parents from Turkey, that get her into trouble with
the revolutionary guards in volume two. Naghibi and O'Malley note a ten
dency among commentators to interpret the book within a liberal-humanist
framework, according to which "Marji is just like any other teenager in the
West" but one whose normal rebelliousness over dress codes is transformed

in the context of Iran into resistance to the fundamentalist theocracy. They

argue that her emulation of Western fashion might equally well be read as an
indictment of the shallow consumerism that prevents her and her friends from
challenging the political order.17 It is perhaps not necessary to adopt either of
these readings, but to think instead of the "power-geometry," in Doreen
Massey's term, through which the local intersects with the global. Massey
argues that all youth cultures are hybrid: imported cultural products will enter
into locally produced systems of social interactions and symbolic meanings.18
The Bee Gees tee shirt worn by Marjane's neighbour in volume one seems to
brand on his body the class privilege that prompts his hasty withdrawal from
a romantic correspondence with a young woman called Mehri once he learns
that she is not Marjane's sister but the family maid. On the other hand, the
kudos that Maijane derives from her expedition to buy cassettes in volume
two seems mainly attached to her knowledgeable and feisty dealings with
male black-marketeers.

Locations 4: Austria—becoming the Other

In volume three, Marjane physically crosses the borders that take her
from East to West by moving to Austria. She has only a kitsch image of an

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 L'Esprjt Créateur

Alpine landscape, imagining her roommate Lucia, before meeting her, as a

beplaited Heidi. The view that Austrians hold of Iranians, and in particular
Iranian women, turns out to be less sentimental, even if the would-be anar
chists that she hangs out with at school are impressed by the third-world
authenticity that they attribute to her. She encounters racism from a series
of people: in a shocking echo of Art Spiegelman's Maus, the word "Raus!"
is shouted at her by her boyfriend Markus's mother and by an elderly man
on a train. She is also called a thief and a prostitute by one of her land
ladies, an accusation that is ironical, given her own initial shock on expe
riencing the "sexual liberation" of Westerners at first hand at a party where
her friend Julie notches up her nineteenth sexual partner. Marjane attempts
to protect herself from this assault on her cultural sensibilities by losing
herself in a book. Significantly, although it has a French title, it seems to
read from right to left, like an Iranian book, perhaps an unconscious slip on
the part of Satrapi the artist, but one that invests this banal object with
deeper affective meaning.
Marjane gradually becomes acculturated, but when her relationship with
the self-centred Markus ends, she is cast out in the streets, and her expulsion
from even provisional dwelling places "strips her of layers of social privilege
that separate her from illegal immigrants or refugees."19 Her inability to be
integrated into Austrian society is figured by the trajectory of the bus she rides
to keep warm: she has become nothing but an abject body in permanent
motion. Later, in volume four, when Reza complains about the intrusive
scrutiny to which Iranians are subject, Maijane will contrast this with the
indifference of Europeans.

The space from which the representation is made 1: gendered identity

and psychic space
Many commentators of Persepolis have taken the panel in volume one, in
which Satrapi portrays herself as split between modernity and Iranian tradi
tion, as emblematic of her inner divide. Elahi argues though that she is not
simply split between two essential and monolithic cultures, given that the fan
tasies of identification offered to her are presented as self-consciously ideo
logical: these fantasies include both her performance of a "Western" self in
front of her smuggled-in Kim Wilde poster in volume two, and her mental
image of a veiled woman when she fails to recognize herself as the person
interpellated by the morality police in volume four. Maijane attempts to piece
together a divided identity, Elahi says, out of a more complex set of influ
ences, including her family (Elahi 318).

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 Ann Miller

At its most dramatic, in volume four, Maijane's inability to conform to the

gendered identity required of her either in the West or in Iran leads to a break
down, and she depicts herself as no more than a woman-shaped hole against th
black background of the panel. However, she takes herself in hand, fabricating
an acceptable persona through a progressive assemblage of accoutrements and
painfully-epilated body parts. But, like the reflection shown in the mirror
images analysed by Elahi, in which Maqane is always frowning (Elahi 320),
these juxtaposed versions of presentable femininity speak only of an alienated
identity. There is another way in which she constructs herself that seems con
siderably less problematic. Elahi's point about the role of the family in the cr
ation of identity can be further developed in relation to the rediscovery of
maternal line. Second-level narratives have given Maqane pride in her descen
from male relatives who made sacrifices for their oppositional politics,20 but th
return to a female genealogy operates at a more phantasmatic level.
Volumes two and four end in the Teheran airport. These scenes set in the
most liminal of spaces emphasize Maqane's status as liminal subject, but their
emotional intensity arises out of the drama of separation that they stage. On th
first occasion, the voiceover indicates that Maqane equates goodbyes with
death, an anxiety visually echoed by the image of her mother who has fainted
The second departure, for Paris, gains resonance from the tressage effect of the
repetition of location, and the voiceover links the scene with the death of th
grandmother. Along with these evocations of loss, Persepolis includes scene
representing a fantasized return to fusion with a maternal figure, mother o
grandmother, often involving senses other than vision: the jasmine scent of the
grandmother who shares Maqane's bed before her departure, and the "nourri
ture céleste" that Maqane's mother cooks for her daughter when she visits he
in Austria, where she also sits on her bed as she sleeps. The Farsi script in th
speech balloons in one panel can be equated by the reader who cannot decode
it with an intimacy in which what is actually said is immaterial.
If she is able to endure the loss of this imaginary state of unity, it is through
the mediation of books, and in particular the encounter with women's writing
which maintains and strengthens her affective links with her mother. Maijan
reads her mother's favourite author, Simone de Beauvoir, whilst in Austria
Nancy K. Miller notes that in Persepolis, "dissident genealogies turn out to b
as much a matter of books as of blood."21 Three small panels portraying Mar
jane as a child, watching her mother read Le Deuxième Sexe, are juxtaposed
with two large panels showing the adolescent Maijane in Austria. In the first
she attempts a practical demonstration of Beauvoir's precept that if only women
could urinate standing up, their view of the world would change. This bid to

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 L'Esprit Créateur

escape her anatomical destiny may end in damp failure, but the bond with her
mother is reforged through reading. In the second of the two panels, Maijane
sits on the toilet and ruminates on how, as an Iranian, she can become a free
woman. She will ultimately achieve this freedom through her artistic produc
tion, which will allow her to symbolize her transnational female experience. An
episode in the next chapter figures the link between women's artistic expression
and a fantasized journey back home, to Iran and to her mother. The episode does
so by taking a detour through the symbolic as formulated by Jacques Lacan.
Luce Irigaray has argued that the patriarchal symbolic order offers no
speaking position for women,22 and how better to make this point than by
quoting from the master himself? Julie's mother, Armelle, holds forth to Mar
jane on Lacan's isolation of the orders of the real, the imaginary, and the sym
bolic, quoting his assertion that men and women do not think in the same way.
For Irigaray though, the female subject can emerge into the symbolic on her
own terms, through "le parler femme," a language that allows for "both a
fusion with and a differentiation from the mother."23 Just as Armelle moves
on to the topic of women's writing, Marjane is transported to a vision of her
self with her parents by the Caspian Sea.24 The conduit back to the maternal
presence that Maijane craves is the samovar, a metonym for everyday life in
Iran, evoked by Armelle as they prepare tea together. In addition, Armelle ha
rung her parents, a metaphorical reinstatement of the umbilical cord. The
Lacanian discourse gradually loses sense to become just the sound of
Armelle's voice (transcribed as "La littérature féminine bla,bla,bla, la littéra
ture masculine bla, bla bla bla"), and the boundary between the symbolic and
the imaginary fades away (Figure 2).
This return to the mère/mer does not have to be read as the recovery of an
authentic 'origin,' however. As the comics artist that she has subsequently
become, Satrapi is instead resymbolizing that return. Samantha Haigh glosses
Irigaray as follows: "It is [...] vital that a maternal genealogy be (rediscov
ered, that women be able to separate themselves and symbolize their relation
ship to [the] woman-mother as 'origin.'"25 Satrapi's choice of medium is cru
cial here: the visualization of what is invisible, in Chute's terms, is achieved
through a graphic style that is elegantly detached from the immediacy of the
sensations and emotions that are portrayed, and the wit of the retrospective
narrative text offers a further space for reflection.

The space from which representation is made 2: artist and comics artist
Satrapi's frequent representation of herself reading connects her not only
to her mother but to another female genealogy: that of the history of women

48 Spring 2011

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 Ann Miller

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Figure 2. "La Pilule," Symbolizing the rediscovery of maternal genealogy

2002 Maijane Satrapi and L'Association.

painters in both East and West, much of which was long suppressed and
been disinterred relatively recently by feminist art critics.26 Aline Dall
Popper, for example, finds the "désir de savoir," figured through the book he
in the hand, a constant in the self-portraits of women artists from Sofon
Anguissola onwards.27 Satrapi's choice of medium means that she is able
effect a double reframing of texts, including Le Deuxième Sexe, the ur-tex
feminism, in their materiality as valued objects and through citation, so t
the dialectical clash of ideas reverberates through Persepolis, extending t
vital, sustaining texture of talk between women. Moreover, the account of
art school experience in volume four links her with another feminist hero
like Artemisia Gentileschi, she is not allowed to paint from the nude and
becomes virtuoso at rendering the folds in cloth.
Satrapi's subsequent development as a comics artist takes place after t
ending of volume four, although the paratext for volume one, wh

Vol. 51, No. 1 49

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 L'Esprjt Créateur

includes an introduction by comics artist David B., contains a trace of

David B., at the time when Persepolis was published, was a member
L'Association collective, the first of a new wave of non-commercial small
presses that appeared in France in the early 1990s, and which, by their
choice of subject matter (a marked tendency towards autobiography) and
format (black and white, soft covers, book- rather than album-sized, no
preset page limit), differentiated themselves from the mainstream. The
medium of comics had long been notorious in France for its misogynistic
portrayals of women (exacerbated to often pornographic levels in the wake
of its accession to an adult readership in the post-1968 period) and for its
hostility to female artists. The male dominance of the bande dessinée milieu
did not cease with the arrival of alternative publishing houses in the 1990s.
The Association collective, for instance, was all male. However, this col
lective's commitment to artistically ambitious work led them to publish
comic books by women such as the Québécoise Julie Doucet and the Amer
ican Debbie Drechsler, whose portrayal of the female body and female
experience escaped the masculine fantasies that hitherto had passed for rep
resentation of women. Satrapi's mentors were nonetheless male. She has
spoken of the encouragement that she received from David B, to whose
graphic style she admits her debt,28 from other experienced comic strip
artists that she worked alongside in the Atelier des Vosges, and from Jean
Christophe Menu, the most demanding of editors.29
The immense success of Satrapi's book has somewhat overturned this
gender imbalance. From an initial print run of 3,000,30 it has sold over
400,000 copies in France and over a million in English translation,31 and
many more millions of people have seen the Oscar-nominated animated film
scripted and directed by Satrapi herself with Vincent Paronnaud. For all those
whose knowledge of comic strip was limited to Astérix or to super heroes, this
Iranian woman, writing in French, has become the highly recognizable face of
the new-found legitimacy of the medium as a whole. Whereas Spiegelman's
Maus had been received in 1986 as a one-off, a work whose profundity belied
its mass-cultural format, the cultural visibility of Persepolis has served to
increase awareness of the work of Satrapi's contemporaries. Satrapi has con
tinued to celebrate the heritage of women in Broderies, a demonstration of
sophisticated and free-thinking female gossip between different generations,32
and has herself become an inspirational figure to a new generation of women
artists. The publication of Persepolis is described as "un tournant" for young
women comic strip artists by Jeanne Puchol, the president of the woman
graphic artists' association Artemisia.33

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 Ann Miller

Conclusion

With her Pietà, Satrapi demonstrates, to the delight of the reader, the
inspired idea that enabled her subsequent career by securing her access to art
school: that of manipulating the iconography of the European high art tradition
and deftly translating one idealized version of womanhood into another, offer
ing a seemingly perfect fit with the gender norms underpinning the symbolism
of nationhood. Throughout Persepolis, she uses the resources of a less presti
gious art form to disrupt ideological conformity by eluding any such predeter
mined frames of gendered or national identity. She defines herself ultimately
as an artist, and it is as an artist that she is able to reclaim a sense of self by
offering a complex representation of home and exile, maternal attachment and
loss. By her achievement, she plays a pivotal role in the cultural repositioning
of the medium itself, staking out a new terrain for herself and for other women.

University of Leicester

Notes

1. Maijane Satrapi, Persepolis (4 volumes, unpaginated) (Paris: L'Association, 2000-2003).

2. We will use "Maijane" to refer to Satrapi's textual self.
3. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (London: Routledge, 2003), xxvi-xxvii.
4. The film version of the book also includes Paris as a location, through a framing narrative
set in Orly airport. See Floriane Place-Verghnes, "Instruction, distraction, réflexion: lecture
de Persepolis," French Cultural Studies, 21 (2010): 257-65.
5. See Rocio G. Davis, "A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Maijane Satrapi's Perse
polis," Prose Studies, 27:3 (2005), 264-79.
6. Scott McCIoud, Understanding Comics (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 67.
7. See Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan 1981), 76-112.
8. Nima Naghibi and Andrew O'Malley, "Estranging the Familiar: 'East' and 'West' in
Satrapi's Persepolis," English Studies in Canada, 31:2/3 (2005): 246. On framing in rela
tion to both cultural difference and trauma, see Gillian Whitlock, "Autographies: The
Seeing 'I' of the Comics," Modern Fiction Studies, 52:4 (2006): 977.
9. Babak Elahi, "Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis," symplokë, 15:1/2
(2007): 320.
10. Thierry Groensteen, Système de la bande dessinée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1999), 173.
11. Hillary Chute, 'The Texture of Retracing in Maijane Satrapi's Persepolis," Women's Stud
ies Quarterly 36:1/2 (2008): 93-94.
12. Naghibi and O'Malley, 244.
13. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale U P, 1992), 166-67.
14. Ashraf Zahedi, "Concealing and Revealing Female Hair: Veiling Dynamics in Contempo
rary Iran," in Jennifer Heath, ed., The Veil: Women Writers on its History, Lore and Politics
(Berkeley: U of California P, 2008), 250-65.
15. Falah Ghazi-Walid, "The Visual Representation of Muslim/Arab Women in Daily Newspa
pers in the United States," in Ghazi-Walid and Caroline Nagel, eds., Geographies of Muslim
Women (London: The Guilfors Press, 2005), 312, 317.
16. Hamid Naficy, "Poetics and Politics of Veil, Voice and Vision in Iranian Post-Revolution
ary Cinema," David A. Bailey and Gillian Taiwadros, eds., Veil, Veiling Representation and
Contemporary Art (London: Institution of International Visual Arts, 2003), 139.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

Naghibi and O'Malley, 235-38.

Doreen Massey, "The Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures," in Tracey Skelton and G
Valentine, eds., Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 1
Lopamudra Basu, "Crossing Cultures/Crossing Genres: The Re-invention of the Grap
Memoir in Persepolis and Persepolis 2," Nebula 4:3 (2007): 15, http://www.nobleworld
.biz/images/Basu.pdf (accessed 7 February 2009).
See Kimberly Wedeven Segall's essay about the regrounding of identity through interg
erational narratives of trauma, "Melancholy Ties: Intergenerational Loss and Exile in Perse
polis," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 28:1 (2008): 38-4
Nancy K. Miller, "Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi's Per
polis;· Life Writing, 4:1 (2007): 13.
Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 67.
Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), 1
Maijane's father, described in volume two by her mother as "not macho," is not exclud
from this scene.
Samantha Haigh, "Between Irigaray and Cardinal: Reinventing Maternal Genealogies,"
Modem Language Review, 89:1 (1994): 63. Haigh is discussing Irigaray's Éthique de la dif
férence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1989).
See Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology
(London: Pandora Books, 1981).
Aline Dallier-Popper, Art, féminisme, post-féminisme (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009), 43. See
Anguissola's Autoportrait (1554).
See http://www.bdselection.com/php/?rub=page_dos&id_dossier=51 (accessed 10 October
2008).
See http://mapage.noos.fr/maijane.persepolis/paroles/arte.html (accessed 7 February 2009).
Jean-Christophe Menu, editorial in Lapin 33 (2002): 6-9.
http://www.myspace.com/persepolisleftlm (accessed 7 February 2009).
Marjane Satrapi, Broderies (Paris: L'Association. 2003).
See Yves-Marie Labé, "BD: les femmes sortent des cases," Le Monde 2, 4 April 2009,
48-51.

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