Tit for Tat: Confrontational Face Attacks in Monji dar Sobhe Namnak

Face, an image a person adopts for himself/herself in social interactions, can be lost, maintained or boosted and is of two aspects: (positive: will to be self-operative and Negative (will to be approved of by other). In any instance of interaction, face, which is tightly related to power, comes into play. Power has been traditionally set in the males’ hands and this made it easy for them to threaten the face of their inferiors, though this has been sometimes contested. Comparing the FTAs Mahmud Shaygan and his wife do in “Monji dar Sobhe Namnak” (Savior in a Damp Morning) based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model, the present article shows how the female character is different from the gender-cliché’s we have in mind. The findings show that the woman threatened her husband’s face more through disagreement, criticism and confrontation. In other words, the more the male character commits acts that threatens the face of his wife, the more the woman does FTAs to threaten the face of her husband.