In 1936, the Mandatory Unveiling Act forced urban Iranian women to remove their veils in public; in 1937, the Marriage Law was enacted; and in 1940, a penal law that sanctioned the murder of wife, mother, or sister caught in circumstances of adultery or leading up to adultery was passed by the Assembly. Abruptly, traditional divisions between public and private were struck down, the public sphere heterosocialized, and relations of desire codified. In the midst of these bracing reforms, S?deq Hed?yat published his novel B?f-e K?r (The Blind Owl, 1937). The Blind Owl, commonly considered the fountainhead of Persian literary modernity, relates a distorted love story in two parts: the culmination of the first is the violent dismemberment of the narrator’s silent beloved; in the second part, this beloved is reconstituted as the narrator’s garrulous (and adulterous) wife, only to be murdered once more at the novel’s conclusion. Yet, in spite of the gruesome allegory of misplaced desire the novel offers (and the telling coincidence of its publication date), The Blind Owl is rarely read within the context of the specific gender-sited legal reforms instituted at the moment of the novel’s publication. I argue that The Blind Owl, read in tandem with a second canonical novel of the period, Bozorg ‘Alav?’s Cheshmh?yash (Her Eyes, 1952), displays an important but overlooked preoccupation with gender-related reforms of the Reza Shah period and the consequences these reforms had on existing orientations and representations of desire. The seemingly oppositional acts that both novels attend to—dismemberment and reconstitution (or re-memberment) of the female beloveds in the novels—are not only the structuring principles of the novels but of the larger process of re-making women that was underway during the reign of Reza Shah.