Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [105]
As I talk, my gaze involuntarily shifts to the last chair by the wall in the last row. Since the beginning of the semester, I have been both irritated and amused by the antics emerging from this corner of the room. Usually, midway through the lecture, the tall, lanky occupant of that chair—let us call him Mr. Ghomi—would lift himself up halfway, and, without waiting to rise fully or for me to give him permission to speak, begin to enumerate his objections. It was always objections—of this I could be certain.
Sitting beside Mr. Ghomi is an older student, Mr. Nahvi. He was more composed than his friend. He spoke calmly, mainly because he was always very certain. There were no doubts in him that might emerge in the form of an occasional outburst. He spoke clearly and monotonously, as if he could see each word forming in front of his eyes. He often followed me to my office and lectured me, mostly about Western decadence and how the absence of “the absolute” had been the cause of the downfall of Western civilization. He discussed these matters with assured finality, as facts that could not be argued. When I spoke, he paused respectfully, and as soon as I finished, he would go on in the same monotonous way and continue exactly where he had left off.
This was the second time Mr. Ghomi was taking my class. The first time, my first semester at Allameh, he hardly ever attended, under the pretext that he was in the militia and involved in the war effort. His war efforts always remained vague: he had not enlisted and had never been to the front. The war had become a good excuse for some of the Islamic activists to force undeserved privileges from the faculty. Mr. Ghomi flunked the finals and missed most of the tests, but he resented me nonetheless for failing him. I never quite knew if the lie about the war had become so much a part of his life that he had begun to believe in it, but he seemed to be genuinely hurt and for no good reason I felt almost guilty every time I encountered him. Now he came to the class regularly—more or less. Whenever I confronted students like him, I missed Mr. Bahri, who had had enough respect for the university never to abuse his position.
Mr. Ghomi came fairly regularly to class the second time around, and every time he did, he created some sort of commotion. He decided to turn Henry James into the biggest issue between us. He thrust his hand up at every opportunity and asked, or rather stated, his strident objections. James was his favorite target. He never questioned me directly—he did so obliquely, by insulting James, as if he bore a personal grudge against him.
15
When I picked Daisy Miller and Washington Square for my class, I never thought that Miss Daisy Miller and Miss Catherine Sloper would become such controversial and obsessive subjects of discussion. I had chosen the two novels because I felt they were more accessible than some of James’s longer later works. Before James, we had read Wuthering Heights.
My emphasis in my introductory course was on the ways in which the novel, as a new narrative form, radically transformed basic concepts about the essential relationships between individuals, thereby changing traditional attitudes towards people’s relationship to society, their tasks and duties. Nowhere is this developing change so apparent as in relations between men and women. Ever since Clarissa Harlow and Sophia Western—two modest and seemingly obedient daughters—refused to marry men they did not love, they changed the course of narrative and laid open to question the most basic institutions of their times, beginning with marriage.
Daisy and Catherine have little in common, yet both defy the conventions of their time; both refuse to be dictated to. They come from a long line of defiant heroines, including Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre. These women create the main complications of