Agency and Passivity of women in the novel "Tubaa and Manaay-e shab"

In the novel "Tubaa and Manaay-e shab", the confrontation of tradition and modernity in the contemporary history of Iran in relation to the status of women is in the focus.In this paper, the female characters of this novel,especially the novel’s heroine, Toubaa, have been analyzed from the perspective of agency or passivity in relation with tradition andit has been shown that the desire for women autonomy and activism is suppressed through the processes of education and punishment.This paper is in the field of critical discourse analysis and its theoretical framework has been driven from Simone de Beauvoir’s views on femininity in her book, "The Second Sex", and the textual analysis has been done based on systemic-functional linguistics.The achievements of this research show that in this novel the contrasting pair of agency and passivity is represented in relation to the duality of tradition and modernity,and the process that Beauvoir calls "learned passivity" is institutionalized in the existence of women from childhood by the agents of tradition, in various social institutions, the most important of which is the family.Also, textual analysis indicates that this passivity has been best reflected in the language of the text.