An Epiphanic Homecoming: Revisiting Gender Relations in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s "Missing Soluch"

A tour de force about a Khwushnishin family of rural laborers in 1960s Iran, Missing Soluch (1979) is one of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s highly acclaimed works. Centering on the ordeals of the title-character and his family as they confront the repercussions of Land Reform policies of the day, the novel has been exhaustively analyzed in terms of its historical context as well as the issues of gender it urgently addresses. Often arguing that Soluch, Mergan, and their children are the tragic victims of circumstances, studies have either reduced the novel to repressive national and regional politics, or rendered the characters as gendered stereotypes representing or else suffering from patriarchy. With a fresh attitude towards the historical backdrop that informs it, I maintain that Missing Soluch is far from a naturalist novel in the sense of depicting reality as an inescapable force leading only to tragic consequences. Quite the contrary, there is in the novel an unearthed “narrative of hope” which reflects a poignant yet life-affirming picture of the rural landscape. In fact, the development in thoughts and actions of three characters, namely Abrau, Mergan, and Soluch, read in effect as the symbolic subversion of what Peter et al. term “monologic masculinity,” a narrow conception of rural manhood that entails a body of “strictly negotiated performances,” centering on “work and success,” within an androcentric sphere of work (219). In their struggles with the draconian consequences of Land Reform, the three characters suffer from such masculinist winds of change and yet manage to reimagine a new picture of gender relations. In short, Dowlatabadi’s threefold “narrative of hope” entails [1] Abrau’s constructive disillusionment with a performance of hypermasculinity as he outgrows an overambitious mentality that has imbued his actions with violence. Moreover, [2] there is Mergan’s feminine strength, resourcefulness, and capacity to resist authority that constitutes her as a formidable challenge to the patriarchal order prevailing in the village. There is, finally, [3] the homecoming Soluch whose epiphanic return to reach out to Mergan becomes the emblematic moment of envisioning a more “dialogic” conception of manhood in the open-ended denouement of the novel. In the end, my re-reading of Missing Soluch is not only a contribution to the field of gender studies but also an addition to the body of scholarship on Dowlatabadi as it sheds light on aesthetic subtleties hitherto unexplored in the novel.