Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 73

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
By: Amy Motlagh
Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. 200
pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0804775892.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Rebecca Gould, Assistant Professor, Literature
Division of Humanities Yale-NUS College
New Haven, Connecticut
The field of gender studies in modern Iran has witnessed a sea change in the past decade. In the wake of the scholarship of Afsaneh Najmabadi,
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, and Arzoo Osanloo, it is impossible to read Iranian civil and religious codes pertaining to marriage and domesticity as neutral
tools for regulating social life. Until now, this florescence of scholarship dealing with the Iranian state’s regulation of female and male sexuality has
not been accompanied by a similar upsurge in the field of literary studies, which for the most part does not seriously consider the social construction
of the Iranian self. Amy Motlagh’s reading of Iranian modernist prose (both novels and short-stories) against the background of changes in
normative gender roles aims to intervene in this impasse, and for the most part succeeds.
One of the most innovative aspects of Motlagh’s study is the way she intersperses her chapters on literary texts with brilliant insights concerning the
intimate—and largely unexamined—relation between dominant canons of literary representation and civil codes. “Although the law may disguise
itself as a standardization of existing norms,” Motlagh observes, “laws are more frequently…instruments of social reform” (p. 12). While on the
surface, this argument many seem self-evident, the introduction of literature represents an innovation in a field that has historically shied away from
literature. The dialectic between legal norms and literary form unfolds throughout this book with occasional flashes of brilliance, and is consistently
stimulating and new.
Another strength of Motlagh’s book is the author’s fluency in multiple theoretical traditions and her ability to cross national boundaries, a tendency
all too rare in scholarship oriented to single national traditions. From the introduction, which opens by invoking Jean Franco’s work on the
persistence of dead bodies in Latin American cultura