Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [106]
Catherine and Daisy seemed too exacting to many of my students, who were more practical and did not understand what the fuss was all about. Why did Catherine defy both her father and her suitor? And why did Daisy tease Winterbourne so? What was it that these two difficult women wanted of their bewildered men? From the very first moment she appears with her parasol and her white muslin dress, Daisy creates some excitement, and some unrest, in Winterbourne’s heart and mind. She presents herself to him as a puzzle, a dazzling mystery at once too difficult and too easy to solve.
Somewhere around this point, as I begin to move into a more detailed discussion of Daisy Miller, Mr. Ghomi raises his hand. His tone is one of protest, and immediately it puts me on the defensive and irritates me. What is it, he asks, that makes these women so revolutionary? Daisy Miller is obviously a bad girl; she is reactionary and decadent. We live in a revolutionary society and our revolutionary women are those who defy the decadence of Western culture by being modest. They do not make eyes at men. He continues almost breathlessly, with a sort of venom that is uncalled-for in relation to a work of fiction. He blurts out that Daisy is evil and deserves to die. He wants to know why Miss F in the third row felt that death was not her just reward.
Mr. Ghomi makes this little speech and sits down triumphantly, looking around him to see if anyone will challenge him. No one does. Except me, of course; they all expect me to perform the task. Mr. Ghomi always managed to divert the class from its course. At first I would get angry with him, but in time I came to see that sometimes he articulated sentiments that others did not dare express.
When I ask the class what they think of this, no one speaks. Mr. Ghomi, encouraged by this silence, raises his hand once more. We are more moral, because we’ve experienced real evil; we are in a war against evil, he says, a war both at home and abroad. At this point Mahshid decides to speak. If you remember, she says quietly, James experienced two terrible wars. When he was young, there was a civil war in America, and before he died he had witnessed the First World War. Mr. Ghomi’s response was an imperceptible shrug; perhaps he felt those wars were not the righteous ones.
I see myself sitting in my chair in silence. The silence seems deliberate. After the class I continue to sit in my chair, caught in a vacuum of light coming from the large curtainless windows that cover one side of the room. Three of my female students come and hover by my desk. “We want you to know that the majority of this class disagrees with those guys,” one of them says. “People are afraid to talk. This is a controversial subject. If we tell the truth, we’re afraid he will report us. If we say what he wants to hear, we are afraid of you. We all appreciate your class.”
Yes, I thought as I walked home that evening and, long after that, whenever this conversation returned to mind. You appreciate the class, but do you appreciate Daisy Miller? Well, do you?
16
If Mr. Ghomi had strong opinions about the Daisy Millers of the world, the class vacillated with the novel’s hero, Winterbourne. With the exception of A Doll’s House, there was no other work to which they responded so passionately. Their passion came from their bewilderment, their doubts. Daisy unhinged them, made them not know what was right and what was wrong.
One day at the end of class, a timid girl who sat in the front row but somehow managed to create the impression that she was hiding somewhere in the shadow of the last row hesitated shyly by my desk. She wanted to know if Daisy was a bad girl. “What do you think?” she asked me simply. What did I think? And why did her simple question irritate me so? I am now positive that my hedging and hesitation, my avoidance of a straight answer,