This research explores power relations in Touba and the Meaning of Night, focusing on the gender issue and gender representation in the novel. Studying modal structures and modality is one of the tools provided by Halliday’s social linguistics for examining texts and revealing their ideological functions. Focusing on the role of modality in the production of texts and reproduction of power and gender relations, we study modality in this novel with an analytic-descriptive method. The novel offers a seventy-year-old historical perspective on Iranian women. However, in the course of this seemingly progressive historical movement, Touba, the heroine of the novel, not only does not achieve her ends but also, quite on the contrary, shows signs of regression. In the beginning of the novel, Touba is a self-assured woman who talks and acts decisively, but toward the ending of the novel she turns into someone without certainty or any kind of conviction. Indeed, Touba’s modal structures evolve from external certitude and determination to internal doubt and hesitation. In the end, Touba’s internal evolution and spiritual barrenness are closely related to more general social discursive relations and functions during the Qajar and First Pahlavi dynasties, especially those convictions that prevent women from thinking, speaking, and participating in external practices in the social scene.  
[1] Touba and the Meaning of Night

Keywords: social semiotics, modality, gender, silence, Touba and the Meaning of Night

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