Reading Simin Daneshvar's Savushun as a Feminist Novel

Abstract

Savushun first modern Iranian novel written by a female Iranian feminist writer novelist Simin Daneshvar is a special literary work that goes beyond the limits of the period it was written and aptly captures the milieu making it permanently useful. The novel considered the first novel in the Iranian literary canon is partly political and partly a clarion call of an emergent feminist movement. Savashun revolves around women trying to gain voice in a male-dominated society and concentrates on an emancipated woman’s experience. Daneshvar thus through this work makes the Iranian women to have a voice to kick to. The technique is ' documentary imaginative’ (Daneshvar, p.425) and similar to that of the American novelist E. L. Doktorow, specifically in how he treated the contemporary history in his most famous novel Ragtime (1975, Golsiri, p. 181; Esḥaqian, p. 157). Savashun usually uses narrative forms and has a linear plot (Davaran, 159)and is dedicated to Daneshvar's husband Jalal Al Ahmad, a famous fiction writer, whose vigorous fight  against the evil impact of western culture on Iran showed, with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran a few years later, to have been prophetic.