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Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: Eluding the Frames

Ann Miller

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 38-52 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/esp.2011.0005

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/esp/summary/v051/51.1.miller.html

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Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis:

Eluding the Frames

Ann Miller

IN THE FOURTH AND FINAL VOLUME of Marjane Satrapi’s autobio-graphical comic book Persepolis, the author recounts the difficult processof gaining admission to art school in Teheran in 1989 at the age of twenty.1Along 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. Certainthat 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 amilitary uniform (Figure 1). The subject does indeed come up. Marjane2 exe-cutes her drawing and two weeks later is thrilled to discover that she haspassed. This incident is significant in its impact on the life of Satrapi thefuture artist, but the large (over half-page-sized) panel in which she narratesit 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 whichmistakes itself for humanity in general.”3 The Pietà, whose sublime beautycalls forth a powerful aesthetic-emotional response in spectators, offers a par-ticularly effective example of the capacity of Western art to naturalize andrender 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 veryprominently in the foreground of the panel. The strategic reappropriation of this canonical work of European masculinist high culture by an Iranianwoman comics artist, affirmed through this meta-representative element,destabilizes the very symbols that it mobilises, demonstrating the provisionalnature of the signifying systems that maintain gender hierarchies in place. Thepanel may in fact be read as a mise en abyme of Satrapi’s endeavour, throughart, 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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In discussing Persepolis in relation to the theme of women and space, wewill draw upon a framework suggested by Pollock for reading the work of women artists (Pollock 78-93). Pollock refers to three spatial registers: first,the locations represented by the work (and, in particular, the division betweenpublic and private space); second, the spatial order within the work itself (concerning, for example, angles of vision and other framing devices); andthird, the space from which the representation is made, including the workingspace of the artist, and more generally the social and psychic space withinwhich she is located, and within which her work is received.

The question of location, Pollock’s first register, is fundamental to Perse- polis, which is set in Iran, the space of home but also that of devastating per-sonal and political events, and Austria, the space of exile. The first two vol-

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FIGURE 1. “Le Concours,” Marjane’s take on the Pietà: destabilizing the signifiersof femininity. © 2003 Marjane Satrapi and L’Association.


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umes are set in the Iran of Satrapi’s childhood and early adolescence, whichsaw the overthrow of the Shah and the Islamic revolution, followed by the

Iran-Iraq war. The third volume covers her stay in Austria for four years as ateenager, brought about by her parents’ fear that her outspokenness wouldlead to her arrest. The final volume recounts her return to Iran, ending as sheleaves once more to go to art school in France.4 The inclusion of second-levelnarrators, most often members of her family, allows for the portrayal of spacesoutside Satrapi’s lived experience. These episodes emphasize her family’s his-tory of political opposition to the Pahlavi regime, and the imprisonment andexile suffered by her grandfather and uncle as a result. Pollock’s second reg-ister, the spatial ordering within the work, translates here into the signifying

practices of comic art, a medium highly elaborate in its spatial arrangements.The third register, the psychic and social space from which Satrapi ultimatelyemerges as an artist, is alluded to within the work itself, given its autobio-graphical nature. Since comic art readily allows for outer worlds to be invadedby inner worlds of fantasy and memory, Persepolis can be read in part as anitinerary of psychic development that involves the negotiation of complexissues of cultural and gendered identity, culminating in the assertion of Mar- jane’s chosen identity as an artist. Her development specifically as a comics

artist is not depicted, however, since this takes place after the departure forFrance on which the final volume ends.

In this article, we will invert the order of Pollock’s first two registers bybeginning with a brief review of the spatial resources of the medium thatSatrapi uses to particular effect, before going on to discuss how she representslocations. Finally, we will situate her in relation to the third register, focussingon psychic space and then on the extra-textual context of the publishing andreception 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 atransnational subject. Commentators on her work have linked this liminalitywith her choice of comic strip as a medium, not only because of its text/imagehybridity but also because of the analogy between the interstitial space thatshe occupies and the gutter, the inter-panel space, on which the discontinuousnarration 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 arerequired 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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sarily brings about suture, binding readers into conformist narratives.7 Hethereby 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 assites 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 readeris jolted by the abrupt transition between a panel set during the 1979 revolu-tion, showing a militant group of unbearded men and unveiled women, andthe 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 artistcan draw attention to the frame by an effect of reframing, citing Satrapi’s useof 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 Iranand 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 arisenot from mirrors but from the enclosure within the frame of television screensor newspapers that transmit official discourses. For example, the Shah’s tele-vised speech on democracy is reframed in the domestic space of Marjane’sleft-wing intellectual family and is greeted with derision, as is, subsequently,an Islamic official’s pronouncement on the dangerously seductive rays thatemanate from women’s hair.

Narrative sequentiality may also be unsettled by spatial relations that

escape its strict linearity. Bande dessinée theorist Thierry Groensteen hascoined the term “tressage” to refer to the linking of panels, across a page or ata distance, by formal, semantic or iconic correspondences.10 In Persepolis,tressage series increase the thematic resonance of repeated events, such asMarjane’s continual moves from one lodging place to another in Austria,never able to find a home. Tressage may work to indicate insistent psychicrepetition: after changing the TV channel in Austria to avoid watching news-reel film of the war back home, Marjane 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 mechanicalreproduction in favour of the highly selective reinscription of the world

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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 thatis 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 Westas 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 coercivemeasure introduced by an Islamic regime that had usurped the victory of theuprising against the Shah. The opening page of Persepolis claims that theIslamic government had itself carried out an ideological reframing: the panel

in which unveiled women demonstrate alongside men against the Shah isaccompanied by a narrative voiceover explaining that the 1979 revolution hadretrospectively been called an Islamic revolution.

Satrapi’s comic book gives no indication of the extent to which the veilhad come to signify resistance to the Westernizing programme of the Pahlavirégime, which had itself used women to symbolize modernity. Iran had beenthe first Muslim country to impose Western dress on women when Reza Shahabolished 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 authenticitytherefore 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 handsof Western liberals, particularly since her uncle Anouche, imprisoned underthe Shah, offers a Marxist analysis of the transitional role of religious ideol-ogy in laying the ground for a proletarian revolution, even if his optimismproves ill-founded. In fact, Satrapi contests the meanings that are associatedwith the “veiled woman” both in the West and in Iran. Afull-page panel show-ing Marjane 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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press and newsreel images of the mourning rituals of bereaved Muslimwomen, images that invite reading these women as “irrational political actors”

and so “frame geopolitical realities in particular ways.”

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Marjane and herfriends duly take up their places in such a frame, but they escape it in a sub-sequent panel where they fool around by wildly overacting.

At the same time, Satrapi also sets out to show the contradiction betweenthe official Iranian discourse of idealization of women and the treatment of women who engage in political opposition, including the anonymous womenwho make up half of a group who meet a firing squad in both volumes twoand four. The tragedy of the latter scene is intensified by the slow-motioneffect 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 bybrutal ellipsis, accelerating the rhythm of narration. In the space of threepanels, Niloufar is spied on by the revolutionary guards, arrested, and shot.

In the final chapter of volume four, Satrapi portrays her attempt to reclaima different place for women in the national imaginary, echoing her account inthe 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 aplan 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 warriorswould 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 isintroduced through a disturbing juxtaposition. A member of the morals policeseems to cast his fierce gaze down at the nine-year-old veiled Marjane in thepanel below, as she looks out at the reader and sums up the situation: “Etvoilà!” However, at this stage, immediately after the revolution, the street isstill an arena for political struggle, and the very first image of Marjane’smother, Tadji, to appear in Persepolis, on page three of the same volume,inscribes her directly into a feminist iconography of proud militancy: a pressphotograph taken during an anti-veil demonstration shows her with arm raisedand lips wide in a shout. Several months further on, on page three of volumetwo, she is shown lying prone and distraught. As an unveiled woman out in thestreet, she has been called a whore. Tadji takes to her bed. She does attend one

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more demonstration, along with her husband and daughter, but the terrifyingpolice 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 Marjane returnsfrom Austria, even the names of the streets have changed; they are now calledafter martyrs, a symbolic masculinization of the geography of the city. Thewalls 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 areforbidden to wear wide trousers: such indecent behaviour would trample onthe 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 withthe cultural demarcation of space that the Iranian cultural theorist Hamid

Naficy describes as a philosophical principle that finds aesthetic expression ina range of artistic practices, from architecture to cinema: the inner, private self must be separated from the outer, public self, the domain of corruption andworldly 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 portraysis seen as a set of bars across the panel when she returns home for the firsttime 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 toforce 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 itis subject to border-crossings of all kinds. It is noteworthy that on the oneoccasion when Persepolis features a map of Iran—on the television screenMarjane and her parents watch in a Spanish hotel in volume two—it is underinvasion, by a black mass that the Satrapis are unable to interpret, only laterunderstanding that it represents the Iraqi attack. In volume one, Marjane’s

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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 theboustrophedon progression of a series of invaders from East and West: theAnglo-Americans who installed and maintained the Pahlavis in power aremerely the most recent. In the late twentieth century, boundaries are furtherblurred by the invisible flows of capital, although some of its effects are madevisible by Satrapi’s drawing a line of heavily bandaged patients in the hospi-tal where Marjane 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 anothersecond-level narrator, a doctor, who explains to Marjane’s family not only that

the West sold chemical weapons to both sides but that the victims were usedto test drugs for Western pharmaceutical companies.

Iran’s borders are clandestinely breached by the importing of Westernyouth-cultural products, like the Nike shoes and the Michael Jackson badge,smuggled in by Marjane’s parents from Turkey, that get her into trouble withthe revolutionary guards in volume two. Naghibi and O’Malley note a ten-dency among commentators to interpret the book within a liberal-humanistframework, according to which “Marji is just like any other teenager in the

West” but one whose normal rebelliousness over dress codes is transformedin the context of Iran into resistance to the fundamentalist theocracy. Theyargue that her emulation of Western fashion might equally well be read as anindictment of the shallow consumerism that prevents her and her friends fromchallenging the political order.17 It is perhaps not necessary to adopt either of these readings, but to think instead of the “power-geometry,” in DoreenMassey’s term, through which the local intersects with the global. Masseyargues 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 tobrand on his body the class privilege that prompts his hasty withdrawal froma romantic correspondence with a young woman called Mehri once he learnsthat she is not Marjane’s sister but the family maid. On the other hand, thekudos that Marjane derives from her expedition to buy cassettes in volumetwo seems mainly attached to her knowledgeable and feisty dealings withmale black-marketeers.

Locations 4: Austria—becoming the Other

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

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Alpine landscape, imagining her roommate Lucia, before meeting her, as abeplaited 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-worldauthenticity that they attribute to her. She encounters racism from a seriesof 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 manon 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 whereher friend Julie notches up her nineteenth sexual partner. Marjane attempts

to protect herself from this assault on her cultural sensibilities by losingherself in a book. Significantly, although it has a French title, it seems toread from right to left, like an Iranian book, perhaps an unconscious slip onthe part of Satrapi the artist, but one that invests this banal object withdeeper affective meaning.

Marjane gradually becomes acculturated, but when her relationship withthe self-centred Markus ends, she is cast out in the streets, and her expulsionfrom even provisional dwelling places “strips her of layers of social privilege

that separate her from illegal immigrants or refugees.”19 Her inability to beintegrated into Austrian society is figured by the trajectory of the bus she ridesto keep warm: she has become nothing but an abject body in permanentmotion. Later, in volume four, when Reza complains about the intrusivescrutiny to which Iranians are subject, Marjane will contrast this with theindifference of Europeans.

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

and psychic spaceMany commentators of Persepolis have taken the panel in volume one, inwhich Satrapi portrays herself as split between modernity and Iranian tradi-tion, as emblematic of her inner divide. Elahi argues though that she is notsimply 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 infront of her smuggled-in Kim Wilde poster in volume two, and her mentalimage of a veiled woman when she fails to recognize herself as the personinterpellated by the morality police in volume four. Marjane attempts to piecetogether a divided identity, Elahi says, out of a more complex set of influ-ences, including her family (Elahi 318).

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At its most dramatic, in volume four, Marjane’s inability to conform to thegendered 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 theblack background of the panel. However, she takes herself in hand, fabricatingan acceptable persona through a progressive assemblage of accoutrements andpainfully-epilated body parts. But, like the reflection shown in the mirrorimages analysed by Elahi, in which Marjane is always frowning (Elahi 320),these juxtaposed versions of presentable femininity speak only of an alienatedidentity. 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 cre-ation of identity can be further developed in relation to the rediscovery of a

maternal line. Second-level narratives have given Marjane pride in her descentfrom male relatives who made sacrifices for their oppositional politics,20 but thereturn to a female genealogy operates at a more phantasmatic level.

Volumes two and four end in the Teheran airport. These scenes set in themost liminal of spaces emphasize Marjane’s status as liminal subject, but theiremotional intensity arises out of the drama of separation that they stage. On thefirst occasion, the voiceover indicates that Marjane equates goodbyes withdeath, 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 therepetition of location, and the voiceover links the scene with the death of thegrandmother. Along with these evocations of loss, Persepolis includes scenesrepresenting a fantasized return to fusion with a maternal figure, mother orgrandmother, often involving senses other than vision: the jasmine scent of thegrandmother who shares Marjane’s bed before her departure, and the “nourri-ture céleste” that Marjane’s mother cooks for her daughter when she visits herin Austria, where she also sits on her bed as she sleeps. The Farsi script in the

speech balloons in one panel can be equated by the reader who cannot decodeit 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. Marjanereads her mother’s favourite author, Simone de Beauvoir, whilst in Austria.Nancy K. Miller notes that in Persepolis, “dissident genealogies turn out to beas 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 juxtaposedwith two large panels showing the adolescent Marjane in Austria. In the first,she attempts a practical demonstration of Beauvoir’s precept that if only womencould urinate standing up, their view of the world would change. This bid to

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escape her anatomical destiny may end in damp failure, but the bond with hermother is reforged through reading. In the second of the two panels, Marjane

sits on the toilet and ruminates on how, as an Iranian, she can become a freewoman. She will ultimately achieve this freedom through her artistic produc-tion, which will allow her to symbolize her transnational female experience. Anepisode in the next chapter figures the link between women’s artistic expressionand a fantasized journey back home, to Iran and to her mother. The episode doesso by taking a detour through the symbolic as formulated by Jacques Lacan.

Luce Irigaray has argued that the patriarchal symbolic order offers nospeaking position for women,22 and how better to make this point than byquoting 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 herown terms, through “le parler femme,” a language that allows for “both afusion with and a differentiation from the mother.”23 Just as Armelle moveson 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 maternalpresence that Marjane craves is the samovar, a metonym for everyday life in

Iran, evoked by Armelle as they prepare tea together. In addition, Armelle hasrung her parents, a metaphorical reinstatement of the umbilical cord. TheLacanian 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 andthe imaginary fades away (Figure 2).

This return to the mère/mer does not have to be read as the recovery of anauthentic ‘origin,’ however. As the comics artist that she has subsequently

become, Satrapi is instead resymbolizing that return. Samantha Haigh glossesIrigaray as follows: “It is [...] vital that a maternal genealogy be (re)discov-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 achievedthrough a graphic style that is elegantly detached from the immediacy of thesensations and emotions that are portrayed, and the wit of the retrospectivenarrative 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 onlyto her mother but to another female genealogy: that of the history of women

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painters in both East and West, much of which was long suppressed and hasbeen disinterred relatively recently by feminist art critics.26 Aline Dallier-

Popper, for example, finds the “désir de savoir,” figured through the book heldin the hand, a constant in the self-portraits of women artists from SofonisbaAnguissola onwards.27 Satrapi’s choice of medium means that she is able toeffect a double reframing of texts, including Le Deuxième Sexe, the ur-text of feminism, in their materiality as valued objects and through citation, so thatthe dialectical clash of ideas reverberates through Persepolis, extending thevital, sustaining texture of talk between women. Moreover, the account of herart school experience in volume four links her with another feminist heroine:like Artemisia Gentileschi, she is not allowed to paint from the nude andbecomes virtuoso at rendering the folds in cloth.

Satrapi’s subsequent development as a comics artist takes place after theending of volume four, although the paratext for volume one, which

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FIGURE 2. “La Pilule,” Symbolizing the rediscovery of maternal genealogy. ©2002 Marjane Satrapi and L’Association.


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includes an introduction by comics artist David B., contains a trace of it.David B., at the time when Persepolis was published, was a member of

L’Association collective, the first of a new wave of non-commercial smallpresses that appeared in France in the early 1990s, and which, by theirchoice of subject matter (a marked tendency towards autobiography) andformat (black and white, soft covers, book- rather than album-sized, nopreset page limit), differentiated themselves from the mainstream. Themedium of comics had long been notorious in France for its misogynisticportrayals of women (exacerbated to often pornographic levels in the wakeof its accession to an adult readership in the post-1968 period) and for itshostility 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 publishcomic books by women such as the Québecoise Julie Doucet and the Amer-ican Debbie Drechsler, whose portrayal of the female body and femaleexperience escaped the masculine fantasies that hitherto had passed for rep-resentation of women. Satrapi’s mentors were nonetheless male. She hasspoken of the encouragement that she received from David B, to whose

graphic style she admits her debt,28 from other experienced comic stripartists 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 thisgender imbalance. From an initial print run of 3,000,30 it has sold over400,000 copies in France and over a million in English translation,31 andmany more millions of people have seen the Oscar-nominated animated filmscripted and directed by Satrapi herself with Vincent Paronnaud. For all those

whose knowledge of comic strip was limited to Astérix or to super heroes, thisIranian 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 beliedits mass-cultural format, the cultural visibility of Persepolis has served toincrease 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 womenartists. The publication of Persepolis is described as “un tournant” for youngwomen comic strip artists by Jeanne Puchol, the president of the womangraphic artists’ association Artemisia.33

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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 artschool: that of manipulating the iconography of the European high art traditionand deftly translating one idealized version of womanhood into another, offer-ing a seemingly perfect fit with the gender norms underpinning the symbolismof 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 ultimatelyas an artist, and it is as an artist that she is able to reclaim a sense of self byoffering a complex representation of home and exile, maternal attachment and

loss. By her achievement, she plays a pivotal role in the cultural repositioningof the medium itself, staking out a new terrain for herself and for other women.

University of Leicester

Notes

1. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (4 volumes, unpaginated) (Paris: L’Association, 2000-2003).2. We will use “Marjane” 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: lecturede Persepolis,” French Cultural Studies, 21 (2010): 257-65.

5. See Rocío G. Davis, “A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Perse- polis,” Prose Studies, 27:3 (2005), 264-79.

6. Scott McCloud, 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, “Autographics: TheSeeing ‘I’ of the Comics,” Modern Fiction Studies, 52:4 (2006): 977.

9. Babak Elahi, “Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” symploke

–

, 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 Marjane 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 MuslimWomen (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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17. Naghibi and O’Malley, 235-38.18. Doreen Massey, “The Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures,” in Tracey Skelton and Gill

Valentine, eds., Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 123.19. Lopamudra Basu, “Crossing Cultures/Crossing Genres: The Re-invention of the Graphic

Memoir in Persepolis and Persepolis 2,” Nebula 4:3 (2007): 15, http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/Basu.pdf (accessed 7 February 2009).

20. See Kimberly Wedeven Segall’s essay about the regrounding of identity through intergen-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): 38-49.21. Nancy K. Miller, “Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi’s Perse-

polis,” Life Writing, 4:1 (2007): 13.22. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 67.23. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), 183.24. Marjane’s father, described in volume two by her mother as “not macho,” is not excluded

from this scene.25. Samantha Haigh, “Between Irigaray and Cardinal: Reinventing Maternal Genealogies,”

Modern Language Review, 89:1 (1994): 63. Haigh is discussing Irigaray’s Éthique de la dif- férence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1989).

26. See Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology(London: Pandora Books, 1981).

27. Aline Dallier-Popper, Art, féminisme, post-féminisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 43. SeeAnguissola’s Autoportrait (1554).

28. See http://www.bdselection.com/php/?rub=page_dos&id_dossier=51 (accessed 10 October2008).

29. See http://mapage.noos.fr/marjane.persepolis/paroles/arte.html (accessed 7 February 2009).30. Jean-Christophe Menu, editorial in Lapin 33 (2002): 6-9.31. http://www.myspace.com/persepolislefilm (accessed 7 February 2009).32. Marjane Satrapi, Broderies (Paris: L’Association. 2003).33. See Yves-Marie Labé, “BD: les femmes sortent des cases,” Le Monde 2, 4 April 2009,

48-51.

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