Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran Through the Eyes of Malcolm Gladwell

Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran Through the Eyes of Malcolm Gladwell Name Institution Affiliation Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran Through the Eyes of Malcolm Gladwell In understanding people’s behaviors, individuals often pay much attention to the people’s character rather than the environment in which those people have been brought up. Malcolm Gladwell in his work The Power of Context disagrees with people’s usual thought and suggests a theory that people’s behaviors are influenced by their surrounding environment (Lila, 2018). Gladwell’s theory can help literature students analyze Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran using a unique approach. In the Republic of Iran, women are supposed to live according to the Muslim set standards, but this is not the case with the set of women in Nafasi's home after reading the forbidden books in the country. The women risk their lives to explore the freedom they are reading in the books. According to Gladwell’s theory, these women are influenced by their environment, but the theory fails to explain why the women are risking their lives to enjoy their liberty. In explaining his theory, Gladwell gives an example of an experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Experiment, where a group of 21 normal individuals was divided into two groups in a mock prison, one group made to be prison guards and the other group prisoners. Amongst the guards, at the beginning of the experiment, there are individuals who believed that war and violence are unjustifiable, but as the experiment progressed they turned to be cruel disciplinarians. This experiment is a good example power of context theory because the guards' behaviors changed according to the roles they were given, that is, their environment. The influence of the environment on people’s behavior can be clearly seen in looking at Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran through the lens of Gladwell’s power of context theory. According to Nafisi, women in the Muslim society are supposed to be dominated by men, in the household and also women’s bodies should be covered from their heads to their toes save their oval faces and the hands. Nafisi suggests that Muslim women had little power and were not expected to express themselves publicly, according to religious laws of the land. In Nafisi’s house, Nafisi informs the women participating in the reading group that there were no men in the house; this is a suggestion that the women were to control their own actions without the fear of tyranny of men in that house. The group of reading women took Nafisi’s words seriously and started removing their veils every time they are in Nafisi’s house and even expressing themselves publicly. The freedom can be witnes...