A Comparative Reading of Positionings within Patriarchy in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Amirhossein Allahyari’s Qorab Jendun: A Lacanian Approach

Abstract

Informed by the Lacanian conceptualization of the Name-of-the-Father, this research investigates Amirhossein Allahyari’s Qorab Jendun (2022) and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982). This study dialogically investigates the two authors’ orientation toward and within patriarchy. It also explores the impact of resisting/accepting the patriarchal system and its consequences, and offers insight into the reverberation of (m)Other’s presence in the process of subjectification. The central questions of this research are: How are the two works situated in the continuum of patriarchy according to Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father? How is patriarchy negotiated with or subverted in accordance with Lacan’s psychoanalytical conceptualization of the Symbolic and neurosis? And what are the two authors’ orientations toward patriarchy? This analysis draws upon thematic textual analysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis to confront Eastern and Western patriarchal systems and ideologies in terms of Symbolic, unconscious, subject, Imaginary, and the Name-of-the-Father. The analysis contextualizes Allahyari’s elegiac writing and Churchill’s prescriptive text in light of the time-space features of their lives and their attitude toward the socio-political milieu of their countries, all of which array the two works as consequential or oppositional within the patriarchy. This study demonstrates the unfeasibility of Churchill’s idealistic Symbolic solution and the necessity of having both patriarchy-oriented and matriarchy-oriented stances for a balanced psyche and a healthy society.