Women as Mannequins: A Comparative Reading of Hedayat’s “The Doll Behind the curtain” and McEwan’s “Dead as They Come”

One of the integral, controversial issues in literature is the role of women through history and the way they are treated in society especially by men. The degree of this concern varies in different societies based on their tradition, dominant ideologies and many other sociocultural factors concerning the importance of women. In this study, we aim to examine two different perspectives – oriental and occidental – regarding the role of women especially in a romantic relationship. For this purpose, we have chosen “The Doll Behind the Curtain” by Sadeq Hedayat and Ian McEwan’s “Dead as They Come” to make a comparison between them since they share many common grounds regarding their themes and the style of their authors. In both stories we have a sexual perspective towards love and women. Both of these two short stories are about men falling in love with shop mannequins and we aim to study their perspectives towards this passion, women as their love objects, and how their cultures affect the description and narration of aforementioned issues. Moreover, we try to bring evidences of unconscious or conscious conservative stance of a writer like Sadeq Hedayat to write about real inner desires of his characters because of the suppression in the literary community; however, McEwan who represents occidental culture in this study, uses direct sexual descriptions in order to narrate what really happens in his story and the mind of his protagonist. By and large, both stories objectify women; however, the way they treat sexual issues, women, and love differs.

کلیدواژه ها:

McEwan ، Hedayat ، Women ، Object ، Mannequin ، love