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Ronak Karami

Abstract

Between the late 1960s and 1970s, Iran’s growing contact with the West aroused many contradictions, inner conflicts, and extravagancies. People could not stand the rapid transformations in the society and particularly in women’s situation that arose due to modernization. By this time, male novelists indicated all their inner tensions in the shape of a woman they created in their stories. This paper focuses on a notable modern Persian fiction, Prince Ehtejab by Houshang Golshiri that was first published in 1969. The author aims, at first, demonstrating how Golshiri uses the four female characters to, in effect, introduce the male narrator and second, analyzing how these four female characters are shown to the reader through the male protagonist’s gaze. The male gaze refers to the sexist attitude of an image: the depiction of women regarding male or masculine preferences. Where of Houshang Golshiri created works that incorporated the literature of the world and adapted modern western literary styles of writing, this essay employs the western approach of the male gaze. It analyzes one Persian fiction, going through names, symbols, settings, comparisons, and contrasts to show the way the male narrator and the readers see the female characters. It depicts not only the torments of women but also how their torments are represented from a male gaze, which imparts a different perspective to readers.

Author Biography

Ronak Karami is an M.A student in English literature at Islamic Azad University, Science and Research faculty, Tehran, Iran. She was born in Nov 1992 in Shiraz; however, she is originally Kurdish. She studied her B.A in English literature at the University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran. Although her major is literature, she is very much interested in women and gender issues (especially those related to Iran).

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