The Dead and / or Dying Marriage.

There were three coffin-like frames in Persepolis II that communicated volumes about Reza and Marjane’s relationship to each other and to the outside world. Information is communicated through the frame shape, line quality, facial expressions, and body language.

Audra’s blog post also prompted me to delve deeper into the relationship between the couple and the outside world: “The thing that made her decision distinctly different were the nations influences that disabled her from say, walking in the park with Reza as her boyfriend. I wondered without these influences would she have made the same decision to marry him?”

Reza enters the story in “The Exam” Chapter and they immediately connect as painters and over “the joke of former soldiers” (276-277). One page later, fourteen frames depict all of their differences, yet Satrapi ends with the line “in short, we complemented each other” which was a contradiction to the opposites that litter the page (perhaps this is referencing the old saying “opposites attract”).

The first large frame that references a coffin is on the next page where the two lovebirds are horizontal, lying on a minimally decorated rug. Marjane looks at Reza while Reza looks up, as if toward the future (280). They are clad in black and the wall behind them is black, like the lid of a coffin closed down upon them.

The next coffin-like image is on page 291. This frame is less coffin-like because it is a square rather than rectangular; however the abundance of black, the thick white lines, their facial expressions and body language communicate a catatonic state / death almost more than the previous frame. Here there is no white rug beneath them, no lines referencing a background (a wall), or anything that grounds them to this earth. The thick white lines trap Marjane and Reza in their awkward position making them static as if they will never move again. Their blank stares are haunting because their eyes are open, pupils positioned in the center, and they stare off into space like corpses. The way their arms awkwardly wrap around each other makes them look like dolls that have been tossed into a corner and forgotten. This frame seems to represent, even more so than the last one, the lethargic nature of their relationship.

The text, “The outside being dangerous, we often found ourselves inside, at his house or at my house. This situation was suffocating me. We couldn’t do anything but close in on each other” (291).

Here, I found the answer to Audra’s question, “I wondered without these influences would she have made the same decision to marry him?” I think not. There is an abundance of evidence in “The Wedding” Chapter that indicates how her wedding was a symptom of her desperation to try to have a normal relationshiop within a claustuphobic society. For instance, the gaze of Marjane, her dad, and her mom is turned toward the reader as if begging for them to intervene on pages 313-314. Maryanne’s father looks at us in the frame on the bottom of 313 with bags under his eyes and worry-lines across his forehead communicating so vividly his concern for his daughter. In the center of the next page, mother and daughter stare out at the reader with eyes wide open as if in shock; again imploring the reader to intervene, pipe up, say what neither one can say. Satrapi raises the stakes of her wedding by putting us in her shoes in the frame on the bottom of 315. Everyone stares at her with expressions of joy but their faces made my stomach knot because I knew (like Marjane) this was the wrong decision; however, I felt that it was too late to turn back. A page and a half later Marjane, “was already sorry! I had suddenly become ‘a married woman’” (317).

The coffin motif makes its last appearance on the top of 319. The coffin-like rectangular frame appears again along with the abundantly black landscape. However, in this frame Reza and Marjane are no longer sharing a coffin, they are tucked into their own on opposite sides of the frame.

Margaret Seelie