Fiction can smuggle rescue narratives into putatively feminist texts

Evidence

Reading Lolita in Tehran may be viewed as a feminist text, then, inasmuch as it records what is claimed as a form of consciousness raising—the exposure of these browbeaten girls to the fresh air of the Western literary classics to show them that another way of life is possible. Friendship and solidarity between women are invoked against various types of abuse by men, and the literary heroines singled out for praise are those whose quiet rebellions paved the way for better women’s rights within the overall context of advancing human rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—something that Iran is rowing away from but that the West can rescue. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 226

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘West can rescue’ frame parallels the savior-narrative critique the reader is tracking through Hamid/Naqvi reading materials. — connects to: Women’s liberation consciousness made the utopia-maternal link explicit in fiction — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 905; A self-declared antifeminist writer became canonical in women’s studies through her fiction. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1364