Rahimi Bahmany's study, based on her doctoral dissertation from Freie Universität Berlin in 2012, is a comparative analysis of the works of Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath with the aim of delineating “universal traits of the feminine struggle for self-realization and self-expression across cultural borders and language barriers” (p. 243). The author's approach to the literature analyzed is autobiographical in the framework of a feminist cultural and social criticism, mainly, I think, inspired by works of Julia Kristeva. I will return to the autobiographical approach a little later, and I will concentrate on Farrokhzad's poetry, as I can claim no expertise on Plath's work.

The book is divided into five parts, an introduction, “Women and Their Mirrors” (pp. 11‒20), Chapter 1, “Mirroring in Mythology and Psychology” (pp. 21‒60, the theoretical and methodological part), Chapter 2, “Mirror Imagery in the Works of Forugh Farrokhzad” (pp. 61‒158), Chapter 3, “Mirror Imagery in the Works of Sylvia Plath” (pp. 159‒242), and a Conclusion (pp. 243‒247). Additionally, there is an appendix with Farrokhzad's poems discussed in the study in their original version and in an English translation.

Chapter 1 takes the reader through a presentation of the classical myths about Narcissus, Echo, and Medusa in combination with their modern psychological interpretations by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. This chapter lays the foundation for analyzing Farrokhzad's and Plath's bodies of works as texts which both mirror their authors and are used as mirrors by the authors as an ongoing self-reflection, self-recognition, and individuation, hence the title of Rahimi Bahmany's study Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation. In Chapter 2 about Farrokhzad, Rahimi Bahmany's main finding is that the

Chapter 3 gives a bleaker portrait of Sylvia Plath's works best summarized in the conclusion of the study:

In the Conclusion Rahimi Bahmany shows differences and commonalities in the works of Farrokhzad and Plath, leading to the overall conclusion of which I quote a part: “It is within this space (mirror and text) that these female authors [Farrokhzad and Plath] are engaged in an ongoing debate, on the one hand, between their own selves and the recurrent self-image their culture impose on them and, on the other hand, among the multiple contradictory selves within” (p. 247).

Seen from the view of the Iranist, Rahimi Bahmany's work sheds new light on Farrokhzad's poetry, as the study takes its readers through a very thorough analysis of the author's use of (mirror) metaphors. On the other hand, the general findings in the study under review are also presented elsewhere, for instance in Michael C. Hillmann's two works, A Lonely Woman—Forugh Farrokhzad and her Poetry (Mage Publishers & Three Continents Press, 1987) and Iranian Culture—A Persianist View (University Press of America, 1990) (pp. 145‒172), both of which are also of a broader scope in their approach—not just autobiographical.

It might be this reviewer’s preferences for other approaches to literature than the autobiographical one that makes my evaluation of Rahimi Bahmany's study less favorable than it deserves, but I do think that Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation has too narrow a scope in reading Farrokhzad's poems merely autobiographically. In a short discussion of Roland Barthe's theory of “The death of the author” (p. 54), Rahimi Bahmany chooses not to see a text as (re-)written every time it meets a new reader’s interpreting eyes (the death of the author/the author in control of the text) but the “text as a mirror held up to its author.” This choice makes the author, in casu Farrokhzad, in control of her poems, all parts of her poems. In spite of this, in the entire study Rahimi Bahmany always translates the persona, the voice or the narrator in the poems, into Farrokhzad herself. But is it not so, that the author is on a higher level of consciousness than the persona, and can play with the role of the persona, communicating, so to speak, with the readers behind the back of the persona (also called “epic irony”)? If the answer to this question is yes, the message of Farrokhzad's poems might not just stem from her own life and experiences, and might have a broader scope than the author's own life. That it is so, one can find confirmed in other studies of Forugh Farrokhzad's works. Hillmann, mentioned above, puts it like this: “Farrokhzâd’s poetic growth and development has significant formal and aesthetic dimensions as well … in other words, she does not create them [the poems] out of the raw materials of her own life mirrored, as she once defined poetry for herself” (A Lonely Woman, p. 95). And, “According to Milani’s already cited feminist analysis, in 1958 Farrokhzâd’s “perspectives change and the poet rejects ‘feminine’ and ‘feminist’ writing in favor of a ‘female’ vision, a move toward human rather than strictly female concerns and preoccupations” (ibid.).Footnote ¹

In my opinion, Rahimi Bahmany reduces the world of Farrokzad's (and by inclusion Plath's) poems to only one dimension, the autobiographical. This might be in line with the theories, method, and scope of Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation, but nevertheless it reduces Forugh Farrokzad's importance as both a poet and an intellectual. Still, Rahimi Bahmany's study is both interesting and a valuable contribution to the study of literature, especially the careful analysis of metaphorical language in the works of Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath.