A Sample Analysis of Schizophrenic Women in Persian Postmodern Novels (The Gypsy beside the Fire, Wandering Caravan-Leader, and A Dead Man's Wet Beliefs)

Schizophrenia, in the sense of mental disintegration and split personality, is one of the features of postmodernist characters whose difference from normal persons is shown in postmodernist works. Unlike Oedipal characters, schizophrenic characters, as Deleuze and Guattari hold, do not limit their desire to one object only but, rather, think of different objects and, in this way, are afflicted with disintegration. Existentialist, nihilistic and nomadic characters are afflicted with such disintegration but sometimes their mental disintegration is intensified. The present study concentrates on three well-known Persian novels and regards them as examples of Iranian postmodern works. In these novels all types of women characters can be discerned. Moreover, Daneshvar’s Wandering Caravan-Leader and Ravanipour’s The Gypsy beside the Fire, written by women authors as well as Mohammadali’s A Dead Man’s Wet Beliefs, written by a male author, contribute to the present study’s comprehensiveness. The main aim of this study is to analyse women characters in the novels. Adopting an analytical method, it examines the schizophrenic characters in these three novels to explain that women have a more marginal role in novels with male authors. The article concludes that in novels like The Gypsy beside the Fire, the main characters have a more schizophrenic personality and this is likely to have been caused by men.