Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 4-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4 Summary: “Austen”

Content Warning: This section depicts abuse of women.

In Part 4, Nafisi turns her focus toward her secret book club from 1995-1997. She describes heated debates between her girls about issues such as female agency, sexuality, and love. Part 4 explores the various personal dilemmas Nafisi and her girls face, with Jane Austen as the literary focal point.

Nafisi praises Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for “the variety of voices it embodies” (268), which creates a narrative in which “all tensions are created and resolved through dialogue” (268). She argues that while characters like the protagonist Elizabeth show the ability to listen, grow, and change, Austen’s more unsympathetic characters are unwilling to hear others. Austen’s subject matter, revolving around courtship and marriage, strikes Nafisi as especially relevant to the personal dilemmas she and her girls are wrestling with. She believes Austen knew that marriage poses “the question of individual freedom” (262), which preoccupies them all.

Several of the secret book club members confront issues concerning marriage and sexuality. Azin, one of the most lively and outspoken members of the club, confesses one day to being trapped in an abusive marriage. Azin is on her third marriage and unapologetic in discussing matters of desire and sexuality: “Perhaps she married so often because marriage was easier in Iran than having a boyfriend” (272). Despite her open embrace of her sexuality, Azin is unhappy in her marriage. Her third husband tries to exercise total control over her, even being “jealous of her books, her computer and her Thursday mornings [when the secret book club meetings take place]” (272). Her husband frequently beats her in his rages. Azin wishes to divorce him but is afraid he will take her daughter from her if she does, as Iranian courts favor the father for custody.

Sanaz is jilted by her long-term boyfriend shortly after they become engaged. He lives abroad and has been apart from her for many years. Although things seem to go well when they are briefly reunited and their engagement is announced, he calls it off, and it appears he has been unfaithful to her while living in England. Sanaz tries to be brave but worries that “she had become too provincial for him in comparison with other girls, say, a fine English girl, not coy, not afraid of staying the night” (279). Sanaz’s family responds to her failed engagement with shock and disappointment.

Nassrin has a brief relationship with a young scholar named Ramin. At first, she is excited and proud to have a boyfriend and respects his intellect. However, the relationship ends in disappointment. Nassrin describes Ramin’s attitude toward women and female sexuality as regressive: “Ramin thought there was a difference between the girls that you were sexually attracted to and the girls you married” (322). Nassrin tells Nafisi that she has decided to escape from Iran and join her sister abroad. She successfully flees the country shortly afterward, before Nafisi herself emigrates.

Nafisi’s own personal dilemmas reach their climax when she decides to leave Iran. She admits to her girls that her husband resisted the move at first and that she even considered leaving him over it, although he ultimately did give in. Nafisi has several last meetings with her magician. While he supports her move abroad, he declines to stay in contact with her, saying that it is always his “rule” not to keep in touch with those who leave the country.

Nafisi is struck by “how tough he [the magician] seems to us, yet how fragile is his life” (337). During their last meeting, she tells him she wishes to write a book one day about “thank[ing] the Islamic Republic for all the things it had taught [her]—to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom” (338). Nafisi leaves the magician’s house for the last time with mixed feelings, knowing she has “many reasons to feel sad” and yet also feeling “vaguely elated […] thinking how wonderful it is to be a woman and a writer at the end of the twentieth century” (339).

Epilogue Summary

In a brief epilogue, Nafisi records the fates of some of her secret book club members after she leaves Iran. While a couple of students remain in Iran, such as the devout Mahshid, most have left for Europe or the United States, wishing to build new lives elsewhere.

Part 4-Epilogue Analysis

Part 4 is the section of the memoir most concerned with exploring the secret book club members’ private problems. In choosing Austen as her literary centerpiece, Nafisi draws attention to issues of love, marriage, and female agency while also exploring the value of literature.

As in prior parts of the memoir, Nafisi argues that empathy and a “democratic” approach to allowing multiple voices and perspectives is the hallmark of great literature. She credits Austen with exhibiting these qualities in her novels. Nafisi argues that intolerance toward dissenting points of view is the defining feature of all close-minded people and regimes, connecting it with Austen: The “most unsympathetic characters in Austen’s novels are those incapable of genuine dialogue with others” (268).

She adds that in the works of Nabokov, the same incapacity for empathy and dialogue “takes on monstrous forms in characters such as Humbert in Lolita and Kinbote in Pale Fire” (268-69). Nafisi once again explores The Uses and Misuses of Creativity. She creates a distinction between her view of literature as something that ought to foster dialogue and those who, like the Islamic regime, wish to limit it to only representing one point of view while forcibly suppressing all others.

The disappointments in love experienced by Azin, Sanaz, and Nassrin speak to the problems of gender dynamics and sexuality in Iran. Azin endures an abusive marriage for years because she is frightened of losing custody of her daughter, as she knows the Islamic courts will favor her husband even though he has abused her. Sanaz discovers that her erstwhile fiancé wants nothing to do with her after tasting freedom and other relationships in England, which leaves her questioning her own self-worth and romantic prospects. Nassrin’s relationship with Ramin likewise falters due to his regressive views on women and sexuality. Although these three women experience disappointments in different ways, what links all of their experiences is a lack of opportunity for living their lives as entirely free women: The regime and the men in their lives control them or reject them, leaving them unable to experience love, desire, and marriage on their terms.

Nassrin’s decision to escape from Iran at the end of the memoir is significant for several reasons. The first is that she articulates the blurring between the personal and political that Nafisi argues takes place under totalitarian regimes. For Nassrin, the regime has left her with an identity crisis: “I am twenty-seven. I don’t know what it means to love. I don’t want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is” (323). Nassrin’s escape is an attempt at not just political liberation, but self-discovery—the regime has never allowed her to know and define herself on her own terms. Nassrin’s crisis of identity speaks to the memoir’s larger thematic preoccupation with The Problems of Identity and Home that have tormented Nafisi and others throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. Finally, Nassrin’s dilemma and bid for freedom embodies the choice faced by many young Iranian women, who must go abroad to live in the way they wish to.

Nafisi’s debate about emigration reveals just how much she has grown disenchanted with the Islamic regime and how much the recovery of her agency means to her. While Nafisi has sought compromises with the regime to a greater or lesser degree, such as wearing the veil in order to teach, she no longer feels capable of more compromises. However, Nafisi recognizes that her experiences have shaped her in important ways, such as when telling her magician that the regime taught her how to fully love and appreciate good literature, simple pleasures, and “freedom.” Nafisi closes her memoir on a note of both sadness and elation. Though being a female writer isn’t easy, Nafisi still believes that writing and living freely are meaningful acts of both resistance and creation.