Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis : Eluding the Frames

Abstract

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis:Eluding the Frames Ann Miller In the fourth and final volume of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical comic book Persepolis, the author recounts the difficult process of gaining admission to art school in Teheran in 1989 at the age of twenty.1 Along with a written examination in Persian, a language that she has not studied 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 photograph of Michelangelo's Pietà, kitting Mary out in a tchador and Christ in a military uniform (Figure 1). The subject does indeed come up. Marjane2 executes 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, considered to be a work of genius within art-historical discourse. This is a discourse, 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 particularly 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 motherhood, 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. [End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. "Le Concours," Marjane's take on the Pietà: destabilizing the signifiers of femininity. © 2003 Marjane Satrapi and L'Association. In discussing Persepolis in relation to the theme of women and space, we will 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 between public and private space); second, the spatial order within the work itself (concerning, for example, angles of vision and other framing devices); and third, the space from which the representation is made, including the working space of the artist, and more generally the social and psychic space within which she is located, and within which her work is received. The question of location, Pollock's first register, is fundamental to Persepolis, which is set in Iran, the space of home but also that of devastating personal and political events, and Austria, the space of exile. The first two volumes [End Page 39] are set in the Iran of Satrapi's childhood and early adolescence, which saw 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 a teenager, brought about by her parents' fear that her outspokenness would lead to her arrest. The final volume recounts her return to Iran, ending as she leaves once more to go to art school in France.4 The inclusion of second-level narrators, most often members of her family, allows for the portrayal of spaces outside Satrapi's lived experience. These episodes emphasize her family's history of political opposition to the Pahlavi regime...