Death and Women in Sadegh Hedayat’s “The Blind Owl” Essay

INTRODUCTIONSadeq Hedayats The contrivance snout is integrity of the most important literary works in Persian language. The original Persian text of The contrivance Owl, marked non for sale in Iran, appe bed as a mimeographed publication in India in 1937. It was assumed at the time that Hedayat feared the repressive rule of Reza Shah he feared in particular that with the publication of this work he might contrive violated the open up norms. He was aware that the propagation of a message that focused on the strangulation of the Iranian people, on the denial of individual gentlemans gentleman rights, and on the need for individual enlighten custodyt would not bide undetected for ever. The central theme of the story is an attempt toward the resolution of the generators dualistic experiences of the real versus unreal, the sensual against the spiritual and death as opposed to life. be his problems are sexual fear, association of women with death (a common theme in literary works) and disgust affiliated with death and women.Perhaps no other modern-day Iranian writer has been claimed by his countrymen more than Sadegh Hedayat has. A tale of one mans isolation, the novel contains a maze of symbols, recurring two-basers, complaisant commentary, allusions to opium-induced states, contemplations of the human condition, interjections on art, and references to literary and religious textsall of which have, for decades, made it rank ground for critical interpretation. The most long-standing theory was espoused by the Iranian communist Party (Tudeh), with which Hedayat for a time sympathized. The Tudehs claim was that the black soundbox fluid in the book is an allusion to life under Reza Shah, who ruled Iran from 1925 until 1941. precisely as scholar Homa Katouzian points out in Sadeq Hedayat The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer, magical spell Hedayat did oppose the shahs tyrannical reign, the book is a far more universal statement more or less a lienation. Often compared to the work of Franz Kafka (whom Hedayat admired), The Blind Owl also brings to nous Fernando Pessoas The Book of Disquiet in its unrelenting meditation on dejection.There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker, begins the book, and in the pages that leave we glimpse this solitude, with the storytellers room, which stands upon the ruins of thousands of antediluvian houses like a tomb with the landscape of crouching, accursed trees, between which on that point are ash-grey houses where no living creature could ever have dwelt and through the fibbers estrangement from the rabble-men who bear an expression of greed on their faces, in pursuit of money and sexual satisfaction. An see-through girl look throughout offers hope. She is the image the narrator paints on his pen cases, a resource he falls in spang with, and the portrait on an ancient jar, inside an almond-shaped panel (perhaps a reference to a mandorla, an almond-shaped contour found around images of Marythe almond representing virgin birth). only the girl has a double nature, resurfacing as the narrators crafty mother, and, later, as his promiscuous wife.SYMBOLISM OF DEATH AND WOMEN IN SADEGH HEDAYATS THE subterfuge OWLThe word manic is important in connection to the story. The narrator wants the aery woman to remain in the world of death. Furthermore, she must remain out of touch and not to be seen by others. Later on, when the ethereal woman and the mother image become the same, one realizes why the narrator is so pre-occupied with woman as a focus of the problem of life and death. Mother is the birth giver. The narrator is mystified by the strange psychical state of his mother. The mother withdraws and there is an intense need to find her. The ethereal woman becomes the mother. How could anyone bear a sex encounter with her, to enter her body? Therefore any suggestion of love intimacy with women in the sexual sense must be avo ided. For him it is not possible. At this point, sexual love becomes the focus of the collapse of security and of being.A tendency for suicide arises when he believes that a world in which it is not possible to distinguish the naive realism from the painted appearance is exists. This weariness with life is a symbol of schizoid suicide, which leads into withdrawal into death, into a ghostly world. In the unconscious, the narrator believes that the corruption of relationships through sexual contact brings nothingness. This again indicates the presence of a schizoid cistron in his mind. A person with a schizoid mind seeks isolation. meat with a woman will not take him into the path of separateness, so he buries the woman. Now he can be free. He is only when barely alive. In the process, he is denouncing the inferior half of himself, the woman in him, the part that he fears may corrupt and make him diseased.He expresses the insufferable perplexity of woman as a focus of appearanc e and worldly concern. But this distrust of women is not misogyny. It is a result of profound pondering of problems of human nature and being. Hedayats association of women with death, his inability to deal with realism through the horror of the tragic, and a paranoid attitude accompanying his inability to anticipate and accept his own mortal reality indicates a form of disassociation from reality which serves as a clue to his existence problem. In the Blind Owl, the writer fails to establish existential authenticity and freedom. This is because in his fight through re-birth, his view of self, others and the world in general is dominated by his rejection of his fe manlike elements of being and knowing. Such rejection is mainly due to his schizoid problems, but it is also magnified by the prevailing attitudes toward women in his native country. closedownTo take you inside such a mind in such a brief book is an achievement up there with Poe and Kafka- to comprehend the hell of iso lation within ones own operate is to show how the narrators madness is an endlessly coherent fantasy of the world. It corresponds to the way that he sees the world- and that vision is not inconsistent or pathetic in its own terms. He functions as a system of epistemology, treat new information, but never progressing and never learning. A feminist recapitulation might stop there- but I dont intend we should- I think there is more to say here about the way he thinks of women and the way that that relates to the way he thinks about truth. The male intellectuals of the period and long after accepting principles of equality and freedom for both(prenominal) the sexes and at the same time growing up with the traditional notions of tidy, non sexual, virgin woman no doubt would have had problems coping with the new image.They did not know whether to be on their knees to her in reverence to her as the good mother figure, or full of sensual contempt for her as the whore. Ultimately, t hese men would be in need of her presence or impelled to prohibit her. Hedayat would have been no exception. His preference for the spiritual, non-sexual contact with women can also be attributed to his inability to cope with the emergence of the new woman. The womanly characters therefore may be seen as dramatizations of endopsychic situations, to be understood as attempts to express the writers attitudes to women and to his own female element, and to embody these attitudes to the female knowledge in order to deal with problems of identity and being. In turn, his cultural experiences and the masculinity of the conjunction in which he lives also influence such dramatizations.In a masculine society, such as Iran, a great deal of the contemporary culture needs to be explained in terms of the development of modes of foolish strength, which are based on a certain male dynamic. Where there is a deep insecurity of existence, this male dynamic is employed as a substitute for the female element of being. In these societies reality is normally located in the masculine paradigm, in which all female elements of being and knowing have been eradicated. In these situations, men will have problems accepting their culturally unacceptable and inferior female element. It should also be noted that men of Hedayats era, for the first time in the Iranian history, witnessed the break of the traditional Iranian women into modern twentieth century womenthe kind who join the ranks of the political parties, rallied, had lovers had abortions and even bore illegitimate children. They also challenged the bipolar image of women as the virtuous versus women as prostitutes.REFRENCES_ Ghotbi, M.I. This is The Blind Owl. 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