The Unrepresentable Female Body: Persian Miniatures and Myths in Persepolis

Considering Satrapi’s departure from Iran and her education in francophone comic art, this proposed paper argues that Marjane Satrapi appropriates the older tradition of Islamic art, Persian miniatures in particular. Such an appropriation challenges the reception of the whole of Iran as a collectively repressed female body in Europe and the female body in Iran in her graphic novel Persepolis.

Satrapi alludes to the discrete nature of Persian miniatures to offer her graphic narrative the freedom to portray female figures as equals of male bodies. Satrapi echoes her own figure with the myth of Gord Afarid by making the floral pattern on her nightgown worn by the child version of her (fig. 2) identical to the heroine’s in her illustration of the myth project for the amusement park (fig. 3). Compared to the portrayals of male/female encounters in other Shāhnāmeh illustrations, those from the 17th-century Berlin Staatsbibliothek collection show Gord Afarid as “the first Amazon in the Iranian national epic” who is a warrior strong as her male counterparts (Khaleghi Motlagh 42). Such is represented by the equality in stature, physical position and size shared between Gord Afarid and Sohrab. Therefore, Satrapi’s allusions to Persian miniatures can be read as a “cross-culturally aware reading practice” (Whitlock 970) as she reconstructs the Iranian female body from a transnational perspective.

Moreover, according to Marie Ostby, Persian miniatures are closely associated with the unrepresentable as the restrictions on depicting human forms, especially that of the Prophet, were historically less enforced in miniatures due to their private means of circulation (565-566). By presenting the ‘unrepresentable’ female body in the Persian art form in the popular medium of comics, Satrapi dismisses the binary divisions between “East-West, feminist-antifeminist, civili[s]ed-uncivili[s]ed” (Maggi 105). Extending on her play between the two art forms, this paper explores the complex nature of her cultural negotiations with Iran and Europe as a woman.