Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Madness

AbstractThis chapter explores the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–1967) and madness. It argues that Farrokhzad's poetry presents the psychic landscape of a female author, a scene tainted by madness. The poems reveal a close affinity between poetic creativity and madness partly by way of a recurrent surging of a mad double trope. The discrepancies between the poet's self‐image and the cultural images of sane womanhood are vividly sketched through grotesque images. Furthermore, the poems expose and critique the social stigma of madness, which aims to de‐authorize women as interpreters of their own experience. Moreover, the poetry unveils stigmatization as a political tool of control and marginalization. Farrokhzad textualizes her madness, giving it a name, projecting it, exteriorizing it, and ultimately healing it through the very act of writing. Her defiance of convention, tradition, and authority best illustrated in her explorations of her madness makes her indeed a modernist.