Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation:
Forough Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath

Leila Rahimi Bahmany
Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015

In 1992, Farzaneh Milani’s groundbreaking Veils and Words brought into di-
alogue the fields of Iranian studies and feminist critical theory – two areas of
humanist inquiry that, in some sense, need each other. Moreover, with works
like Hamid Naficy’s The Making of Exile Cultures (1993), interdisciplinary
critical theory has informed many humanist and social science approaches to
Iranian literature and culture. These links between integrated critical theory
and Iranian studies can produce compelling and insightful analyses. However,
the cadence of such work might be more in tune with one subfield than an-
other. While the content and subject of these studies might include Iranian so-
ciety, culture, or art, it is often the case that the critical method being deployed
is more important than the historical, literary, or social content to which it is
applied. Methodology eclipses the subject of analysis. 

This is the case with Leila Rahimi Bahmany’s Mirrors of Entrapment and
Emancipation (Mirrors). Bahmany’s work tells us more about the feminist
critical genealogy brought to bear on the work of Sylvia Plath (d. 1963) and
Forrough Farrokhzad (d. 1967) than it does about the works and lives of these
poets themselves. But if, as I note above, these fields do “need” each other,
then this book is worth exploring for both feminist scholars and Iranian studies
specialists. Beyond specialists, however, the work does little to draw in a
reader not already at least slightly familiar with debates in psychoanalytic
feminist theory of the twentieth century.

Bahmany begins her book with the highly suggestive images of Narcis-
sus and Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, she quickly moves
from this basis in classical western mythology to the relevance of these im-
ages for psychoanalysis and feminism. Thus, she rapidly establishes a theo-

Book Reviews 115



retical foundation for her study within psychoanalytic critical theory, and
gender studies specifically. She works through a history of mainly western
conceptions of the individual “subject” as articulated in works by Carl Jung,
Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, and explores how the conceptual frame-
work of the “mirror” runs through the work of these authors (who themselves
derive it from classical mythology and clinical observation). The mirror and
its implications for gendered subjectivity are once again picked up by femi-
nist critiques and revisions of these theories in the work of Jane Gallop,
Hélène Cixous, Barbara Johnson, Luce Irigaray, and, especially, Julia Kristeva,
among others. 

It is Kristeva’s notion of “the subject in process” that has particular reso-
nance for Bahmany and for her readings of Farrokhzad and Plath. Kristeva’s
notion of process means both the process of becoming and the notion of being
judged, or on trial. Thus the mirror, in this feminist framework, suggests not
only the “entrapment” of the gaze or the mirror as the screen on which com-
pulsory images of femininity and female subjectivity are projected, but also
the potential “emancipation” of text as mirror in which the poet liberates her-
self from the abject and objectified “subjectivity” imposed on her by patriar-
chal society, whether in Iran or in the United States. 

In this book, however, the mirror becomes a fairly narrowly conceived
psychoanalytic tool of critical analysis. Though Bahmany refers to much ear-
lier and broader conceptions of the mirror ranging from classical western
mythology to a brief foray into Sufism as well as a passing reference to Lewis
Carroll, the mirror metaphor remains tightly linked to the feminist psycho-
analytic model. In this sense, the book is a welcome intervention in feminist
psychoanalysis.

However, in staying so close to this area of expertise, the author misses
the opportunity to apply these feminist lessons to other forms of analysis. For
instance, the chapter on Farrokhzad offers surprisingly little on the poetic tra-
dition with which she both engaged and critiqued. A brief consideration of Su-
fism is presented, but no link is made between Farrokhzad and her more
immediate literary historical context. There is also not much offered about Far-
rokhzad’s life, except brief generalities about her unhappy marriage. In fact,
nothing is included about her work as a filmmaker. Farrokhzad’s highly revered
and now canonical film, The House is Black, opens with the striking image of
a woman with leprosy gazing into a mirror. And within the first five minutes
of this short poetic film essay we see images of windows, a secondary image
and metaphor that Bahmany herself traces through Farrokhzad’s work. The au-
thor stays so close to the feminist psychoanalytic debates that she excludes

116 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3



Book Reviews 117

some potentially key details of Farrokhzad’s life and work that, ironically, could
have shed even more light on these very same feminist theories.

Bahmany also only skims over modern or classical Iranian poetics and
mysticism. For example, she does refer to the myth of the Simorgh (Persian
mythical bird), but does not discuss the conclusion of that poem in which the
thirty birds see their own reflection in a lake and find that their quest for di-
vinity has led them back to a secular and specular image of themselves. I
would imagine that this myth might even have been explored in the introduc-
tion, alongside her consideration of Ovid. However, I do not necessarily see
this as a shortcoming of the study, but rather the author’s choice to focus more
on feminist psychoanalysis than on comparative mythology or comparative
poetics.

Thus, taken on its own terms, the book is a deeply insightful considera-
tion of key feminist theorists of the late twentieth century. As applied to Far-
rokhzad, the feminist debate around reflection, identity, and subjectivity is
put into a new and interesting light. On the one hand, the mirror as social ap-
paratus “entraps” women and imposes its demands upon the female subject,
thereby imprisoning the female self within sexual objectification, gendered
social subject-positions, and abjection. On the other hand, the mirror, partic-
ularly writing as reflection, can function as a pathway of self-discovery, self-
construction, and ultimately “emancipation.” Farrokhzad’s recurring use of
the mirror motif along with images of windows allows her to explore both
of these valences of the mirror. Farrokhzad used writing itself as a way of
shattering the mirrors of patriarchal Iranian society that limited the agency
and identity of women. Of particular interest is the argument that Bahmany
traces throughout feminist psychoanalytic theory: Kristeva’s notion of the
“subject in process,” which compellingly combines the meaning of being on
trial (processed, as if through the mechanisms of discipline and punishment)
with that of becoming.

Bahmany’s analysis of Plath is no less compelling and insightful within
the context of the history of psychoanalytic critical theory. The chapter does a
better job of placing Plath within an Anglo-American literary historical context
than the Farrokhzad chapter did in placing the Iranian poet within her modern
Iranian context. With Farrokhzad, the author makes elliptical references to Su-
fism, but with Plath she traces a relatively more direct line to poems like “Vanity
Fair” and Thackeray’s novel by that name, and even to Pilgrim’s Progress. 

Ironically, and this may well be an intentionally counter-intuitive move,
Bahmany has more to say about the “veil” in discussing Plath than she did in
discussing Farrokhzad. Drawing on the work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan



Gubar, Bahmany explores how the veil symbolizes womanhood as socially
incomplete. In fact, one of the most convincing and important moments in the
book comes about halfway through the Plath chapter. Here, she highlights the
gendered ways in which authorship and influence are imagined, contrasting
Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence” with Gilbert and Gubar’s conception
of a “secret sisterhood.” The mirror gaze is transformed from the entrapment
of patriarchal heterosexism to the emancipation of matriarchal feminist iden-
tification. This key insight might help explain Bahmany’s own light touch
when it comes to tracing literary inheritance in any detail. That would be a
Bloomian, not a feminist, move.

However, this sort of insight is in contrast to the sometimes highly spec-
ulative and ungrounded claims that Bahmany makes, such as that many “fe-
male authors have reported their horrible confrontation with an uncanny
otherness or a monster within their mirror” (p. 203). Even though a fascinating
and suggestive image, it seems to be based on speculation about the specular. 

Ultimately, as I have already suggested about the work as a whole, the
chapter on Plath seems caught between what we might call biographical ex-
perience on the one hand and themes within the poetry on the other. Providing
so little biographical detail leaves the analysis of these poets’ lives as women
only half formed. And focusing on image and theme in the poems rather than
the formal elements of poetics shortchanges one of the most promising lines
of critical inquiry: the notion of writing as mirror. Bahmany focuses on mirror
imagery within the writing more than she does on writing as reflection.

The author’s conclusion helps to bring into focus her choice to see the
poet’s life through their work. It is, she claims, “impossible to draw a demar-
cation line between [the poets’] life stories and their art” (p. 246). However,
even though that demarcation is perhaps impossible, it might have helped to
mark, at least provisionally, such a distinction to enable the reader to navigate
the poets’ life and work and then synthesize them. Still, this is an excellent
work of scholarship, particularly if one reads it as an intervention in feminist
psychoanalytic literary critical theory.

Perhaps the most important contributions of this book is her translation
of many of Farrokhzad’s poems in an appendix. Indeed, if one of the author’s
most compelling ideas is the potential for mirroring to create a “secret sister-
hood” of matrilineal authorship, then perhaps translation is itself an act of
emancipatory feminist solidarity. In a sense, the link between Plath and Far-
rokhzad is a form of translation. Bahmany’s translations do more than analyze
this idea. They embody it.

118 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3



In fact, I would recommend that readers begin reading this book with a
leisurely and reflective perusal of the appendix. A reading of these translations,
and, for those who have some Persian literacy, a reading of the originals can
give the reader an embodied experience of precisely what Bahmany wants us
to take away from her work: the experience of reading as reflection and writing
as mirror. Translation, in a sense, does both at once.

Babak Elahi
Associate Dean and Professor, Department of English

Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY

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