This article examines the cage as the central organizing symbol in Jasmin Darznik's biographical novel Song of a Captive Bird (2018), which fictionalizes the life of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. The study investigates how the cage metaphor reconfigures itself across three distinct social domains — the paternal household, the conjugal home, and the psychiatric institution — while maintaining a single underlying function: the systematic containment of female autonomy. Each domain introduces distinct mechanisms of control, namely spatial restriction and physical coercion in the first, normative surveillance and legal dispossession in the second, and institutional pathologization in the third. Through close reading of key episodes, the article demonstrates that the cage symbol accumulates meaning progressively, enabling Darznik to present patriarchal oppression not as an individual misfortune but as a systemic social force reproduced across every institution that governs the protagonist's life.
The Cage as A Multi-Layered Symbol of Female Oppression in Jasmin Darznik's Novel “Song of A Captive Bird”
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References
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