Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Madness

Rahimi Bahmany, Leila (2019): Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Madness. In: Mani, B. Venkat (ed.) : 1920 to the Early Twenty-First Century. A Companion to World Literature, Vol. 5. Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell.

Abstract

This chapter explores the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967) and madness. It argues that Farrokhzad's poetry presents the psychic landscape of a female author, a scene tainted by madness. The poems reveal a close affinity between poetic creativity and madness partly by way of a recurrent surging of a mad double trope. The discrepancies between the poet's self-image and the cultural images of sane womanhood are vividly sketched through grotesque images. Furthermore, the poems expose and critique the social stigma of madness, which aims to de-authorize women as interpreters of their own experience. Moreover, the poetry unveils stigmatization as a political tool of control and marginalization. Farrokhzad textualizes her madness, giving it a name, projecting it, exteriorizing it, and ultimately healing it through the very act of writing. Her defiance of convention, tradition, and authority best illustrated in her explorations of her madness makes her indeed a modernist.

• Item Type: Book Section
• Faculties: Cultural Studies > Department of Ancient and Modern Cultures > Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies; Cultural Studies > Department of Ancient and Modern Cultures > Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies > Iranian Studies
• Subjects: 800 Literature > 890 Other literatures
• ISBN: 9781118635193
• Place of Publication: Oxford
• Language: English