THE FEMALE EXPLORATION IN A

PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY AS REFLECTED IN

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S THE VOYAGE OUT
AND HALIDE EDIP-ADIVAR’S HANDAN

(Master’s Thesis)

Muzaffer Derya NAZLIPINAR

Kütahya-2008
 T. R.
DUMLUPINAR UNIVERSITY
Institute of Social Sciences
Division of Western Languages and Literature

THE FEMALE EXPLORATION IN A PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY AS

REFLECTED IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S THE VOYAGE OUT AND
HALIDE EDİP-ADIVAR’S HANDAN
(Master’s Thesis)

Thesis Advisor
Asst. Prof. Dr. Özlem ÖZEN

Muzaffer Derya NAZLIPINAR

005927112105

Kütahya-2008
 viii

Kabul ve Onay

Muzaffer Derya NAZLIPINAR’ın hazırladığı “The Female Exploration in a

Patriarchal Society as Reflected in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Halide Edip-
Adıvar’s Handan” başlıklı Yüksek Lisans tez çalışması, jüri tarafından lisansüstü
yönetmeliğinin ilgili maddelerine göre değerlendirilip kabul edilmiştir.

...../....../2008

Tez Jürisi

Doç. Dr. Petru GOLBAN

Yrd. Doç. Dr. Özlem ÖZEN (Danışman)

Yrd. Doç. Dr. S. Sabriye İKİZ

Prof. Dr. Ahmet KARAASLAN

Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Müdürü

 ix

Yemin Metni

Yüksek lisans tezi olarak sunduğum “The Female Exploration in a Patriarchal Society
as Reflected in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Halide Edip-Adıvar’s Handan”
adlı çalışmamın, tarafımdan bilimsel ahlak ve geleneklere aykırı düşecek bir yardıma
başvurmaksızın yazıldığını ve yararlandığım kaynakların kaynakçada gösterilenlerden
oluştuğunu, bunlara atıf yapılarak yararlanılmış olduğunu belirtir ve bunu onurumla
doğrularım.

Muzaffer Derya NAZLIPINAR

......./....../2008
 x

ÖZGEÇMİŞ

16.06.1977 yılında Kütahya’da doğdu. 1983–1988 yılları arasında Kocaeli

General Edip Bayoğlu İlkokulu, 1988–1994 yılları arasında Kocaeli Tüpraş 50. Yıl
Lisesi’nde okudu. 1994 yılında Hacettepe Üniversitesi, Eğitim Fakültesi, İngiliz Dili
Öğretmenliği Bölümü’nde başladığı yüksek öğrenimini 1999 yılında tamamladı. 1999 -
2001 yılları arasında Kütahya Özel Boğaziçi Eğitim Kurumları’nda İngilizce Öğretmeni
ve müdür yardımcısı olarak görev yaptı. 2001–2004 yılları arasında bu görevine
Kütahya Atatürk Lisesi Yabancı Dil Ağırlıklı Bölümü’nde devam etti. 2005 yılında
Dumlupınar Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatı Anabilim
Dalı’nda Yüksek Lisans çalışmalarına başladı. Aralık 2004’te, halen sürdürmekte
olduğu Dumlupınar Üniversitesi, Yabancı Diller Bölümü’nde okutman olarak göreve
başladı.

Muzaffer Derya NAZLIPINAR

 xi

CURRICULUM VITAE

Born in Kütahya, Turkey on 16.06.1977; her educational experience

includes: (1) primary education at Kocaeli General Edip Bayoğlu Primary School
(1983–1988); (2) secondary education at Kocaeli Tüpraş 50. Yıl Junior High School
(1988-1991); (3) high school education at Kocaeli Tüpraş 50. Yıl High School (1991-
1994); (4) Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language Teaching at Hacettepe
University, Faculty of Education in Ankara, Turkey (1994-1999); (5) MA student in
English Language and Literature at Dumlupınar University, Kütahya (2005 - present).
Her work experience includes: (1) Teacher of English and co-director at Kütahya
Private Boğaziçi Schools (1999-2001); (2) Teacher of English at Kütahya Atatürk High
School, Foreign Language section (2001-2004); (3) Lecturer at Dumlupınar University,
Foreign Language Department (December 2004-present).

Muzaffer Derya NAZLIPINAR

 vi

ÖZET

Bu tez Virginia Woolf’un The Voyage Out ve Halide Edip-Adıvar’ın

Handan adlı romanlarını odak alarak, on dokuzuncu yüzyıl sonu ve yirminci yüzyıl
başlarında ataerkil Viktorya ve Osmanlı toplumlarındaki kadınların deneyimlerini ve
‘yeni kadın kimliği’ ile ilgili olarak ortaya çıkan gelişim süreçlerini incelemektedir.
Romanlar feminist yaklaşım ve sözü geçen dönemlerin koşullarına uygun olarak gelişen
düşüncel yapılar temel alınarak incelenmekte ve değerlendirilmektedir.

Birinci bölümde Viktorya İngilteresi’nde ve Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda

‘yeni kadın kimliği’ ile ilgili olarak gerçekleşen toplumsal değişimler incelenmektedir.
Ayrıca, kadın-erkek arasındaki hâkimiyet ilişkilerini daha iyi aydınlatmak için cinsiyet
rollerinin inşası ve kimlik edinimi süreçlerini inceleyen psikanalitik teoriler üzerinde
durulmaktadır.

Yazarların ataerkil toplumlarda yeni ve bağımsız kadın kimlikleri

arayışlarını konu alan ilk dönem romanlarının değerlendirilmesinde gerekli temelin
oluşturulabilmesi için tezin ikinci bölümünde, Virginia Woolf ve Halide Edip-Adıvar’ın
kişisel yaşam öyküleri ve kadın anlayışları karşılaştırmalı analizleri yapılarak ayrıntılı
biçimde incelenmektedir.

Tezin son bölümünde yazarların ilk dönem romanları – Virginia Woolf’un

The Voyage Out ve Halide Edip-Adıvar’ın Handan’ı – karşılaştırılmakta, kadınların
ataerkil toplumlarda var olma ve kendilerine ait kimlik oluşturma çabaları feminist
psikanalitik yöntemle ayrıntılı olarak incelenmektedir.

Tezin sonunda ataerkil sistemin ve din-ahlaki değerlere bağlı olarak gelişen

diktalarının kadın kimliği oluşumu sürecinde önemli bir rol oynadığı, kadınların
özdeğerliliklerini ve bağımsız kimliklerini elde etmelerinde önlerinde büyük bir engel
teşkil etmekte olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmaktadır. Bununla bağıntılı olarak, bu tür ataerkil
toplumlarda yetişmiş kadın ve yazar olarak Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-Adıvar’ın
da, dönemlerinin sosyal, politik ve etik etkilerinden kurtulamadıkları ve bunun da
kaçınılmaz olarak yazarların edebi eserlerini şekillendiren öznel deneyimlerini ve
kadınsal yaratıcılıklarını etkilediği görülmektedir.
 vii

ABSTRACT

The present thesis examines the female explorations and the emergence of
‘new women identity’ in patriarchal Victorian and Ottoman societies in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage
Out and Halide Edip-Adıvar’s Handan. The two novels are analyzed and evaluated by
putting the feminist approach and the mental attitudes appropriate to the historical
contexts of the mentioned periods in the centre.
The first chapter points to the social transformations in Victorian England and
Ottoman Empire concerning ‘the new women identity’. Moreover, the psychoanalytic
theories related to the construction of gender roles and identity acquisition process are
emphasized to clarify better the relationship between women and men.
In the second chapter, the personal life stories and women perceptions of
Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-Adıvar are studied in details by making a comparative
analysis in order to form a sound basis for the evaluation and analysis of the novels in
terms of new and independent female identity explorations in patriarchal societies.
In the last chapter of the thesis, the precedent novels of the writers, The
Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf and Handan by Halide Edip-Adıvar, are compared and
examined through the feminist psychoanalytic approach to show the existential
struggles and the self-identity explorations of women in their patriarchal societies.
At the end of the thesis, it is concluded that the patriarchal system and its
dictates based on religion and moral values play an important role in the female identity
formation process, and set a bar against women in their search to gain their self-esteems
and independent women identities. Naturally, it is also seen that Virginia Woolf and
Halide Edip-Adıvar, as being women and writers having been brought up in such kinds
of patriarchal societies, are not able to become free from the social, political and ethic
influences of their eras, which affects the subjective experience and female creativity
shaping their literary works.
 CONTENTS

ÖZET............................................................................................................................vi
ABSTRACT................................................................................................................vii
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1

CHAPTER ONE
WOMEN IDENTITY AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS ............................... 12

1.1 Gender Identity and Psychoanalysis .....................................................................13

1.2 Women Identity from Tradition to Modernity......................................................18
1.2.1 The Women Identity in West .............................................................................19
1.2.2 The Women Identity in Middle-East.................................................................24

CHAPTER TWO
THE ISSUE OF WOMEN IDENTITY AS EXPRESSED BY WOMEN
AUTHORSHIP..............................................................................................................32

2.1 The Outcast Writer of British Literature: Virginia Woolf ....................................33

2.2 Virginia Woolf and Her Perception of Women ....................................................38
2.3 The ‘Jeanne D’Arc’ of Turkish Literature: Halide Edip Adıvar...........................42
2.4 Halide Edip Adıvar and Her Perception of Women..............................................52

CHAPTER THREE
THE SOCIAL STATUS AND PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN IN THE VOYAGE
OUT AND HANDAN.....................................................................................................58

3.1 The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf ......................................................................59

3.1.1 Rachel and Her Struggles for Identity in the Patriarchal Society ......................61
3.2 Handan by Halide Edip-Adıvar ............................................................................73
3.2.1 Handan and Her Struggles for Identity in the Patriarchal Society .....................76
3.3 A Comparative Analysis of Rachel’s and Handan’s Female Explorations ...............92

CONCLUSION .........................................................................................................108

BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................117

INDEX ......................................................................................................................125
INTRODUCTION
 2

How are we fallen! Fallen by mistaken rules,

And education’s more than Nature’s fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed.

Alas! A woman that attempts the pen

Such an intruder on the rights of men,
…
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time;
And interrupt the Conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our outmost art and use.
(Lady Winchelsea, ‘The Introduction’, qtd.in A Room of One’s Own , p.59)

From the above quotation, it is easily and obviously revealed that women
were looked down on and forced to stay within the predetermined domestic fields by
males. Though scarcely, whenever women attempted to break the rules of the patriarchy
and tried to get out of the scope of the male-designated roles - being an obedient wife, a
self-sacrificing mother, a good keeper of the household and a guardian of the moral
purity - they were hindered each time from realizing their dreams because of the long-
established false belief that women were imperfect creatures. This was the accepted
tradition in all parts of the world – from West to the East – since the ancient times as
clearly seen in the declaration of Aristotle stating that “the female is female by virtue of
a certain lack of qualities”. Besides being considered as inferior to men, they were also
a major source of temptation and evil. Yet, what was the reason lying behind all of
those beliefs, customs and traditions taught by one generation to the next about the
women nature and identity?

In fact, all through the so-called phallocentric, patriarchal history women have
been made to believe that they are second to man. This traditional belief, shared in both
Western and Eastern cultures, starts with the creation myth, in which woman is not
god’s first choice. Eve, our first mother, is made of Adam’s ribs as an accessory for
him. Then, she suddenly finds herself responsible for man’s fall from heaven due to not
 3

being able to resist the temptations of the serpent. The Eve figure finds her counter in
Greek myth in the person of Pandora. Pandora was also tempted by her passions and
opened the box which the gods had warned her not to open. That is, her curiosity, like
Eve’s in the Garden of Eden, led her to ignore the warnings and thus let loose all the
world’s vices, sins and diseases. In the end, all of these negative events led women be
remembered as blameful figures throughout the time, and the concepts of evil, jealousy,
irrationality, weakness and passion were all associated with the female while the power,
might, reason and wisdom were associated with the male of the species.

Unfortunately, these biased representations of women that emanated from

the mythological ideas of the ancient time gradually turned into rigid sex-role
stereotypes in traditional societies, where it was too difficult to change the moral norms
and established rules. The contrast in the roles allotted to men and women had already
been deepened when reached into 18th century: "Men were aggressive, exploitive,
materialistic, physical, unchaste, impious, and mobile; women were pious, pure,
selfless, delicate, domestic, nurturing, passive, and conservative" (Melder, 1977, p. 7).
In accordance with these allocated roles, women were isolated in private domesticity
and took on the responsibilities of feeding and caring for all members of the family,
because the outside world was not suitable for women due to their supposed nature,
‘dependency’, and due to the construction of sex-role stereotyping based on the practice
of ‘mothering’. Traditionally, both in west and middle-east, girls were taught cooking,
cleaning, and caring for children during their upbringing since these were the code of
behaviour expected of them in their future lives. Briefly, the resulting stereotype was
that ‘a woman's place is in the home’, which largely determined the ways in which
women expressed themselves. This role of women in society was accepted and
advocated by most people in West and Middle-East, men and women, of the times
because traditions continuing through the history dictated that women's place was caring
for the family, and although she may be capable of other things, there was no reason to
even consider them.
 4

Of course, men were pleased with the obedience of women, who had no will
or desire of their own except being servants in thought and deed to patriarchal authority.
Even Freud, the sophisticated father of the psychoanalysis, demanded absolute loyalty
and devotion from his future-wife, Martha, during their five-year engagement. In his
mind, it was his job to command and her to obey because of the fact that Freud also
regarded women as ultimately restricted by their biology. This idea led him to focus on
inherent limitations in women. He saw their role in childbearing, which demanded so
much time and attention, and he saw women's sexual development as an aborted
development based on discovering that they didn't have penises. Therefore, they were
thrown off course for the rest of life by claiming that were biologically the second sex.

However, it is widely known today that the oppression of women caused by

this kind of a stereotyping is not determined by their biology, as many contend. Its
origin is the male-dominated society, or in other words, the patriarchy as Simone de
Beauvoir, the French author and a philosopher, stated in her book The Second Sex:

One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic

fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization
as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between, male and eunuch, which
is described as feminine (Beauvoir, 1969, p,249)

In her book, Beauvoir also clarified her assertion by adding that it was man
that made women feel as the ‘Other’ in the society by putting a false aura of inferiority
around them. Yet, the ‘disappearing woman’ had been a focus of attention - much more
before Simone de Beauvoir - of gradually awakening women who were questioning the
duality of sexes, giving rise to conflict like any duality. They began searching for
logical answers to the questions of how this world had always belonged to the men, and
whether there would be any way to change these masculine-oriented rules or not.
 5

It was only late eighteenth century that people began to view the matters
objectively under the influence of the French Revolution, which opened a new stage in
the history of women. With its new concepts spreading through the world like ‘liberty
and equality’, this revolution had a considerable influence on women to gain conscience
and define their true female identities by getting rid of the male-defined traditional
roles. Then, the Industrial Revolution came into stage and paved the entrance of women
into productive labour where they acquired an economic basis. New kinds of works and
new kinds of urban living prompted a change in the traditional male and female roles’
perceptions. In particular, the notion of separate spheres – woman in the private sphere
of the home and hearth, man in the public sphere of business, politics and sociability –
came to influence the choices and experiences of all women at home and at work. The
‘new woman’, who was now competent, assured and unemotional, began to take over
the typical male role and "stood for self-development as contrasted to self-sacrifice or
submergence in the family" (Cott, 1987, p.39). It was just here that the period started
to witness the new women identity and the birth of feminism, the unprecedented
emergence of women as a collective force in the male-dominated arenas. This
redefining of women’s roles and creating of gender identity came right on the heels of
women’s suffrage. Women were fighting for equal rights as well as equal treatments by
relying on the social, economic and political transformations arisen in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries, as a result of which the traditional societies – male-dominated and
authoritarian – had to keep pace with the modernization process and turn into modern
societies – democratic and egalitarian – at least in the long run.

As it is known, changing the long-established rules and implementing the

novelties in traditional societies have always been difficult. In accordance with this fact,
the social transformations, emerged in West and spread to the East then, were also
received with strong resistance and created an atmosphere of a crisis due to the
continues fluxes in the social forces. Neither the western nor the eastern women were
able to start benefiting from these transformations immediately and obtain their
legitimate claims without pain. Since it is too difficult to involve all the pains and the
transformations that women experienced during their new women identity construction
 6

periods in this thesis, we have limited the study within two societies, Victorian England
and the Ottoman Empire, both of which has been considered as the best representative
of each culture –western and eastern, respectively – concerned with the women issues
and struggles occurred in West and Middle-East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One of the reasons of this choice is that both the Victorian England and the
Ottoman Empire were traditional societies, in which the rules had been previously
determined by males in accordance with the religion and tradition related norms; thus,
the oppression of patriarchy could be felt in every field. As social practice, the
complete submission of the woman to the man was supposed and even forced.
Furthermore, the woman was regarded as the repository of the nation’s virtue - defined
as essentially domestic and private, bound to family, ideals of affection, loyalty, and
obligation to domestic production or housekeeping – and this was the dominant and
consistent version of femininity in Victorian and Ottoman societies. As a result, this
structural presentation profoundly anchored in tradition and customs constituted the
main discriminating factor for the access of the woman to the public and political
sphere.

By relying on the similar women perceptions and the shared feminine role
concepts of the two societies, we will especially try to analyze the emerging ‘new
women identity’ in Victorian England and Ottoman Empire under the light of social
transformations, which provoked the demands of women to get rid of the influence of
the patriarchal traditions and benefit from the profits of modernity. As known,
modernity is generally associated with a concept of rationality based on a belief in the
scientific method, and confidence that society can be changed and reformed by
conscious design. Thus, at this point, an analysis of multi-secular historical context that
constitutes this conscious design and the major transforming powers that create a
complex of changes on women as well as the communities –Victorian and Ottoman –
gain significance. To be able to able to deepen the study and get a more exhaustive
analysis of the subject, it will be first focused on the mental history of those times
 7

because one has to examine the collective mentality to understand the different
outcomes of similar events or the use of similar systems in different societies.
Considering this fact, the mental attitudes of Victorians and Ottomans toward the
concept of ‘new women identity’ will be studied by applying the adequate comparative
investigation methodologies, through which it will be tried to understand whether the
women in Victorian England and Ottoman Empire have experienced the same and/or
different problems during the transformation process from traditional to modernity.

Then, it will be scrutinized on the reflections of these mental attitudes in the

literary works since it is natural that the social and historical concepts and events are
best mirrored in the literature of their time as the famous Ottoman historian Fuad
Köprülü stated: “The historian, while evaluating the changes that had taken place in
societies, should not deal only with bureaucratic archival documents. In order to
understand the past in its totality, he should also deal with letters, memoirs, novels”
(1981, p.25). In this case, the relationship between historical research and use of
literature, mainly the fiction as source material, make the core of the methodology of
this study. Yet, in addition to the history of mentalities of those times and its
intersections with the fiction, another methods and theories are also needed to make an
analysis of women characters in novels, and to understand how women develop from
subservient and selfless situations into independent and self-sufficient beings. At this
point, the feminist psychoanalytical approach allows a great understanding and
appreciation of the female characters in the novels by making use of the instructions of
psychoanalytic criticism, which mainly analyzes the identity acquisition processes and
gender studies, and the feminist criticism, which is interested in the repression of
women under the influence of male dominance.

By taking these approaches into consideration, this study will demonstrate

the female exploration and new women identity construction in patriarchal Victorian
and Ottoman societies related throughout the chosen works of two distinguishing
women writers, both of whom spoke out against the male-dominated ideas of the
 8

patriarchal society that prevented women from realising their creativity and true
potential: Virginia Woolf, the outcast writer of the British literature and Halide Edip-
Adıvar, the ‘Jeanne D’Arc’ of the Turkish literature. , feminist works should not be
limited to those which are produced just by women writers. There were also men writers
writing about the cultural expectations and male dominance that lead the oppression of
women, like John Stuart Mill, during those times. Yet, writing was the only way left to
women to assert their individuality and autonomy since they were excluded from many
social, political and economic activities. Furthermore, it is natural that the female
sensibility is more strongly felt and efficiently expressed by women writers, who have
personally experienced all the pains concerned with the women’s issues.

The novels – The Voyage Out written by Virginia Woolf in 1915 and
Handan written by Halide Edip- Adıvar in 1912 – are purposely chosen from the same
periods, because during these times the ‘new woman’, who was gradually gaining
autonomy and individuality by getting rid of the traditional norms modified by the
patriarchy and domesticity, began to take over the socially constructed females, whose
roles were generally restrained within four characteristics: piety, purity, submissiveness
and domesticity. In accordance with the social transformations, changing ideas and
historical events of their periods, the novels directly reflect the concerns and women
perceptions of the writers. Both Woolf and Edip oppose to the stereotyped image of
women in their societies and try to create powerful and self-confident female
protagonists fighting against the confirmed patriarchy. They believe that the only way to
save women from their imprisoned lives and restore their self-esteems is through getting
the right of education and obtaining financial independence. Thus, in addition to their
personal struggles, Woolf and Edip- Adıvar try to break the patriarchal chains of their
societies and pave the new way for their women fellows with their literary works and
writings.

To prove that these two precedent novels of Woolf and Edip-Adıvar shed
light not only on women’s issues and struggles of their periods but also reflect the
 9

women perceptions of the two writers, it is better to summarize the works. In this way,
it can be shown to the reader as well that the female protagonists of The Voyage Out and
Handan give voice to the Victorian and Ottoman women through their personal
presentations.

The Voyage Out is the first novel of Virginia Woolf. She started a journey
into writing with this novel, whose protagonist – Rachel – is also on a journey like her
creator. Actually, Rachel is somewhat like Woolf, and some critics say the novel has
some autobiographical links to Virginia Woolf and on her “process of the literary
creation” (Hussey, 1995, p.332). Expediently, immediately at the beginning of the
novel, in which Woolf explored many of the distressing incidents of her own youth such
as the loss of her mother, an education far inferior to that of her male peers, extreme
difficulty in relating to opposite sex, it is portrayed ‘a good girl’ having been shaped
according to the rules of the Victorian England. While surviving an ignorant way of life
under the impact of the Victorian society and its patriarchal dictates, Rachel sets out a
voyage which seems to be a liberating one providing opportunities for her to move
away from the sheltered background assigned by her aunts and father into a new
beginning where she can establish her true and independent female self.

However, Rachel realizes very soon that she is different from ‘the other
women’ on the voyage representing the socially-constructed femininity. Not only does
she feel apart from but she also cannot communicate well with them. She has intense
aversions to what her contemporaries consider the normal life for a young woman.
Because her inability to fit in her surroundings, Rachel feels herself out of time and out
of place in her world; in other words, an outcast like her creator. Virginia Woolf
undoubtedly felt she was out of time and out of place in several periods in her own life,
which ended in her suicide, the ultimate expression of one who feels like an outcast to
her world in the most extreme sense.
 10

Unfortunately, in accordance with her own mood, Woolf chooses a similar

end for her first female character. Though struggling hard to be free of both overt
masculine authority and the insidious mind-control of feminine socialization, Rachel
faces with her patriarchal society and its long-established norms again and she is made
to accept the role conceptions of the patriarchy, which is getting married like every
young girl and setting up housekeeping in which she will look after her husband and the
children. Experiencing a conflict between the constraints of her society and realizing her
private needs concerned with the female identity, Rachel gets sick and dies of a
mysterious fever.

In the other novel, Handan, which will be studied in this thesis through the
personally translated excepts from the original text, Halide Edip-Adıvar creates a female
protagonist in conformity with the transition period of the Ottoman Empire into
modernity and the social transformations arisen concerned with the ‘new women
identity’. Thus, this female protagonist, Handan, is not a type of woman that Ottoman
society is quiet accustomed to. With her marvellous mental capacities and skills in the
male-dominated fields like science, philosophy, literature and art, and attitudes contrary
to the socially-constructed femininity, Handan takes the attention of everybody that she
meets but she arouses their suspicious and creates uncomfortable feelings as well,
especially in men. Hence, her making mistakes is continuously waited and even secretly
desired since Handan has dared to resist against the patriarchy with her dissonant
behaviours to the acceptable femininity. Finally, what expected desperately by the
patriarchal society is realized and Handan gets stuck between her feminine desires –
flourishing on the way of constructing her independent female identity – and the
patriarchal dictates of her society – remaining loyal to her husband despite his betrayal –
as in The Voyage Out.

Interestingly, in addition to its thematic similarity, Handan also bears

resemblances to Woolf’s first novel in terms of carrying some autobiographical links to
its creator in that Halide Edip reflected her personal heartbreak which was caused by her
 11

husband’s getting married to a second wife during their marriage (polygamy was
common and legal in Ottomans then) into her novel. Thus, with her recent grief, Halide
Edip also writes about the feelings, passions and dilemmas of Handan about finishing
the marriage and starting a new life and love, or enduring the betrayals of her husband
and continuing to the marriage. Indeed, this was a really brave step to take because a
married woman in the Ottoman society, in which the principles of morality were so
strict and harsh, had to be virtuous and faithful to her husband unconditionally. Though
creating a character out of time and resisting bravely to the harsh criticisms about her
novel, Halide Edip-Adıvar finishes the novel with the death of Handan, like Virginia
Woolf.

Upon the deaths of the female protagonists of Virginia Woolf and Halide
Edip-Adıvar, lots of critics have commented and written about so far. Some of them
have interpreted Rachel and Handan’s deaths as an indication of resisting to patriarchal
system by stating that it seemed less terrible and painless for them to end their quests
than to accept to live as a woman with no self-identity; whereas, the others have
regarded it as self-sacrifice and abandonment before achieving any kind of sexual and
emotional maturity. Taking these comments into consideration and putting the feminist
criticism with the necessary historical contexts and mental attitudes of the mentioned
periods in the centre, this study will reveal the aspirations and struggles of Victorian and
Ottoman women who have tried to get rid of their falsehoods and establish the self-
reliant and independent womanhood, as Woolf stated in one of her speech:

But what is ‘herself’? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I don’t know; I do not
believe that you know; I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed
herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill (qtd. in Snaith, 2000, p.47).
 CHAPTER ONE
WOMEN IDENTITY AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
 13

1.1 Gender Identity and Psychoanalysis

What enrages me is the way women are used as extensions of men, devices for
showing men off, devices for helping men get what they want. They are never there in
their own right, or rarely. The world of the Western contains no women. Sometimes, I
think the world contains no women. (Tomkins, qtd. in Bressler, 1994, p.106)

The issues of women have always been prior topics continuously and
constantly discussed in not only media but also in literature, as clearly seen in the
quotation above. It has taken too much time to prepare an efficient atmosphere to be
able to discuss these problems, because women have been looked down with suspicion
by men for long years. Thus, the male-dominated society has previously determined not
only the social and educational status of the women but also the perception of their
sexuality through the suffocating social and moral norms of the patriarchy.

The woman, half of the mankind or the other side of the man, has always
been the most important bearer of the fundamental values in every society such as
moral, ethic and traditional. Moreover, she has been regarded as the ‘mirror’ reflecting
the social changes and transformations of the society in which they live (Bele, 1968).
Unfortunately, the continuing secret struggle between the two genders – struggle for the
self-identity and the superiority – has condemned women to a lifetime imprisonment,
and excluded them from taking parts in the fields of philosophy, politics, literature and
art. The misconception claiming that the females can be successful if only they are
aided by the males and they are nothing alone has deprived women of taking active
roles in efficient and productive areas in the society. Furthermore, they have been
forced to live in a stable environment ruled by men – firstly by their fathers and then
husbands. Due to all of these obstacles put forward by the members of the patriarchy,
women have gradually lost their individuality and identity. Not only have they
abandoned their rights and true selves just to be able to find a place for themselves in
the society, but they also taken all the responsibilities to make their masters, fathers
 14

and/or husbands, successful and feel comfortable. As a consequence, as having no other

choices, women have had to adopt the roles assigned by men: a housewife interested in
all the household chores, a good mother responsible with upbringing, and a self-
sacrificing wife charged with the comfort of her husband at home and representing him
through the society in a best way.

Even the sophisticated and intellectual men have paid no attention to the
injustice towards women and accepted the women identity defined by their fellow
creatures. Nietzsche was also one of them, and in his book named ‘Beyond Good and
Evil’ expressed his opinions related with the women identity in a harsher way: “En
temel sorun şudur: Erkek’le Kadın’ın ilişkisi sorununda hata yapmak, aralarındaki
uçurumu ve çatışmaların kaçınılmazlığını görmekten gelmek, eşit haklara, aynı eğitime,
benzer iddialara, benzer sorumluluklara sahip olunabileceği rüyasına kapılmak düşünce
yoksulluğunun en açık işaretidir” (The basic problem is this: Making mistakes in the
matter of Man and Woman relationships, ignoring the abyss and inevitable conflicts
between them, dreaming that they can have the equal rights, same kind of education,
similar claims and responsibilities is the clear expression of the lack of thought)*
(Bendason, 1994, p.11).

All of these opinions and feelings clearly show that the man has always
wanted the woman to be a careful, obedient and moral audience in a life play, the roles
of which were defined and limited by himself before, giving her nameless and
insignificant roles although the woman has also worked hard and suffered a lot. In a
patriarchal system like this, the woman has not been able to define her female self and
even not obtained a chance of forming it in a male-dominated society. The social norms
and traditions forbidding the females from being independent individuals who are aware
of their self-existences convert them into senseless and aimless creatures. Consequently,
these women have no other choice but to accept and adopt the roles and rules put
forward by the outside world.

*
The translations of all fragments from Turkish into English belong to Muzaffer Derya Nazlıpınar.
 15

So, what is the reason lying behind the women’s bearing all of these unjust
attitudes and accepting the roles given to them without questioning? Why do the
females and males experience the world and their own selves in very different ways?
Why are women defined primarily through domestic relations such as daughters,
mothers and viwes, but men by position in the social world of work? According to the
psychoanalysts, the unique reason of these differences between the two genders is
emanated from the relationship with the mother that starts with the birth.

In most psychoanalytic theories, self-identity is achieved by separation. The

dependent infant is considered having gained autonomous subjective by the time it
becomes a ‘self’ by breaking free of the primary caretaker – almost always the mother
or another woman – and realizing its own separateness, differences and boundaries.
Thus, the individuality is established through the denial of and separation from the
existence of others. Yet, this separation period is so different for the little boy and the
girl, and generally – according to the most of the psychoanalysts – the little girl cannot
complete it successfully. Freud is one of them. He believes that the girl is condemned to
lack of autonomy, independence and freedom due to the failure in the separation from
the mother. In his opinion, both sexes begin by relating to the mother as their first love
objects. For the boys, the primary interest is given to a member of the other sex whereas
the same situation is not effectual for the girls. Yet, this interest and desire of the little
boy towards his mother has to be repressed because of the fear of castration caused by a
rival, the father, at the oedipal phase. Then, the boy identifies with the father and tries to
find another woman as a substitution of the mother, so the separation from the mother
starts, which is also supported by the mother herself. However, the feminine sexuality is
not so easily resolved for the girls because they firstly have to shift their primary
interest from mother to father, to a different sex. On the other hand, they have to accept
their identification with the mother as a woman, a member of the same sex. During
these comings and goings between the mother and father, the little girl learns that she
cannot have the mother sexually since he has no penis, unlike to her father. Hence, the
little girl returns to the father, in resentment against the mother, but still has to identify
 16

with the mother for her feminine position. Therefore, the girl has no way but to accept
her lack - anatomical inferiority - and roles as a passive receptor, while the boy adopts
the values of the masculinity symbolized by the penis: possession, success and activity.
To sum up, gender is established around the anatomical differences; that is, whether one
has or does not have a penis according to Freud. Beside Freud, another psychoanalyst,
Erikson advocates the anatomical differences in the gender establishment. He goes one
step further and adds that women simply seek men to fulfil due to their anatomy and
need to protect the unique ‘inner space’ of the womb, which must be made safe by the
male through the institution of family (Erikson, 1968).

However, in the work of feminist psychoanalysts, gender is established and

gained through cultural arrangements rather than anatomical ones. For Chodorow, one
of the famous psychoanalysts, the infant cannot seek interest, desire and pleasure since
it is just an object yet. The infant, whether a boy or a girl, longs and looks for the
relationship within the family, through which the earliest construction of the individual
self is established and values are learnt. In this individuation and value-learning process,
the duties are shared by the parents. Because women; that are mothers, carry almost the
only responsibility for childcare, they are inevitably associated with the period of
primary socialization, in which the infants constitute and define their sense of self. The
little girls, since they are perceived by the mother in terms of ‘sameness’, are regarded
as the extensions of her. Due to their identification with mother, daughters get, by
instinct, her ambivalence about being a woman in a society that devalues women. In this
view, the girls keep on deriving their sense of identity from the mother with the
continuous sense of the social inferiority of the feminine. On the other hand, this
individuation process for boys is different because the basic masculine sense of self is
based on separation from mother, while the basic feminine sense of self is based on
identification with her. The boy, realizing his difference from the mother, is encouraged
by his mother – unlike the situation in the girl - for the separation and denial of the
maternal world of infancy full of nurturance and connection, and directed to the father.
However, contrary to Freud’s thoughts, Chodorow claims that the boy’s shift from
mother to father is more difficult than the one happens in the girl because his sense of
 17

identity is formed through a denial of the early connection with the mother and
extended to the denial of those aspects of himself which he has learnt culturally to
associate with femininity. Here, the peripheral figures who are absent during the
primary socialization, fathers, appear much more centrally in the infant’s life during
secondary socialization, in which work, success and autonomy comes to be considered
superior and also masculine. In the end, the process is completed and the identities for
two genders begin to shape: while the boys proceed on their ways to construct their
strong self, the girls get gradually accustomed to becoming the carriers and the
receptacles of the masculine requirements and desires, not subjects in their own right as
Chodorow argues:

[…] a girl continues to experience herself as involved in issues of merging and

separation, and in an attachment characterized by primary identification and the fusion
of identification and object choice. Boys are more likely to have been pushed out of
the pre-Oedipal relationship, to have had to curtail their primary love and sense of
emphatic tie with their mother. A boy has engaged, and been required to engage, in a
more emphatic individuation and more defensive firming of experienced ego
boundaries (Chodorow, 1978, p.167).

The masculine self-image is clearly not constructed around a compulsion to

serve the needs of the others like that in the feminine-self image. Men are actively
discouraged early on from such identifications whereas women are encouraged and in
most cases forced to these. As a result, femininity has begun to be defined with
passivity and the masculinity with activity. Then, how will these women who have been
constantly repressed and forced to adopt the defined roles by the patriarchy find a place
in this male-dominated society by constructing and improving their female-self? How
will they also demolish the common belief among the society that the prior place of
women is ‘home’ due to their basic duties such as mothering and being a subservient
wife?
 18

1.2 Women Identity from Tradition to Modernity

Social, economic and political transformations arisen in the late 18th and
early 19th century spread throughout of the world by creating new facilities and opening
new horizons for women through which they could prove themselves to the patriarchy
and get rid of their strained silences lasting for ages. Scientific revolutions, new
inventions and discoveries forced the feudal systems to take actions by doing a number
of changes. Following the declarations that certify the constitutional citizenship in
France and England, women’s rights-oriented declarations also began to be published.
Thus, encouraged by these transformations arisen currently, women started to demand
to participate into the social areas and become gradually visible through the male-
dominated society.

The common belief that the prior place of women is their home - relying on
the fact that the most important duties of them are being a good mother and a
subservient wife rather than an independent individual – began gradually getting behind
with the influences of Industrial Revolution and the establishment of numerous
factories. Thus, women, totally-isolated from the outside world, felt brave enough to
participate into the male-dominated fields.With the women’s step from their personal
and emotional world into the men’s public and rationialist world, their self-confidence
developed and the first basis of the ‘new women identity’ began to be established. Even
though the women got some part of their rights such as the right to vote, having equal
education, the right of getting divorced, etc. - that they had struggled for, lots of areas
from politics to economy and education were still under the dominance of male
authority overwhelmingly. The fever having created by ‘the idea of equality’ resulted in
disappointment, and this time, women were regarded as the ‘imperfect and tomboyish
females’ pretending to be like males.
 19

However, the 19th and 20th centuries were ‘Ages of Enlightenment’ for all
human beings in the world. And of course, this ‘enlightenment’, though it was not the
case at the beginnings, reached also to the women by providing those expected hopes
and promises. Furthermore, it created a new atmosphere for them to be able to construct
their female identities and find the appropriate places through the patriarchal society.

Yet, how was this ‘new atmosphere’ providing the facilities and
transformations that women had been longing for hundred of years created in the West
and Middle-East? During these transformations in the women identity, did the females
face the same kind of problems and react in the same way to them?

1.2.1 The Women Identity in West

Never were sexual stereotypes, which had been decided about since the
ancient times, so different in Victorian England. Victorian men were said to be self-
sufficient, aggressive, even animalistic, while women were the opposite - dependent,
passive, loving but without passion. They always had to be softer, more moral and pure,
all of which were of highly important for the idealized Victorian society and family.
Man's was the stronger and superior sex whereas, women were the weaker and the
inferior sex lack of certain qualities. If men were at home in the outside world, woman's
world was in the home, and the only respectable occupation for grown women, unless
they were governesses –which was the most common occupation especially for women,
especially for one from the low-class – was that of wife and mother. Dependence was
part not only of woman's supposed nature, but also of English law: Married women had
no legal identity apart from their husbands', whose control of their wives' bodies,
property and children was all but absolute. The system bred abuse, but change came
slowly, because, Murray (1997) says, legislators were hesitant to interfere with ‘wifely
obedience’. Yet, despite all fears and hesitations, the change started.
 20

The beginning of the women’s movements in West clashes with the modern
periods when the bourgeoisie began to express itself by means of its rules and
establishments. The French Revolution, breaking out in 1789, not only enabled the
extension of the concepts like ‘liberty and equality’ all over the world but it also helped
women define their true female identities and social status throughout the patriarchal
society more efficiently.

After the French Revolution, due to the provided atmosphere, lots of work
related with women and their problems in the male-dominated society were published.
‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, regarded as the basis and the masterpiece of the
modern feminism, was written during these periods (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft,
who is one of the most well-known representatives of the egalitarian feminism. In this
book, Wollstonecraft tries to demolish the image of ‘the acceptable femininity’
throughout the patriarchal society and encourage women to construct their female
identities, because she knows well the impossibility of defending the women’s rights
without the establishment of ‘the new and modern femininity’. In the introduction part
of her book, Mary Wollstonecraft addresses to her fellow creatures and explains to them
this new woman:

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of
flattering their FASCINATING graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of
perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true
dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to
acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them, that the soft phrases,
susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost
synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects
of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become
objects of contempt.
Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to
soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite
sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of
the weaker vessel, I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object
of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the
distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple
touchstone (Wollstonecraft, 2001, p. 21-22).
 21

Though emphasizing the idea that the nature of men and women is the same
and this can be proved provided that they are given the same kind of opportunities, ‘A
Vindication of the Rights of Women’ could not gain the expected success when it was
published. Nevertheless, the importance of this book cannot be denied as it helped
women in west take effectual steps in constructing their modern female identities, and
spread the idea of equality between two sexes.

Unfortunately, those women progressing on the way of establishing the true

femininity by gaining their educational and economical freedom were forced to behave
according to the rules of the socially-constructed femininity from time to time by the
patriarchy, because this new and self-conscious woman is not the one that the male-
dominated society has been accustomed. Thus, to be able to prevent the transformation
of the women from traditional concepts into the modern ones, they determine a way like
reflected in the remarks of Kant: “Onlara verilecek dersler, hiçbir zaman soğuk ve
kurgusal olmamalı, daima duygularla ve hatta olabildiğince cinsleriyle ilgili olmalıdır”
(The courses that will be taught to them must never be aloof and analytical; on the
contrary, they must be related with emotions and their genders) (qtd, in Kuşcan, 2001,
p.25).

However, the path of freedom is open now and the transformations for
women have already begun. The egalitarian and reformist atmosphere of the French
Revolution was improved in 19th century with several inventions and developments in
the fields of science and technology. All these movements, without a shadow of doubt,
accelerated the modernity process of the traditional society. As members of this
continuously-improving society, women, who had been treated as inferiors for many
years, began to change on the way of constructing their female selves gradually.
Actually, there were always a few women having proved themselves with their different
and strong personalities in the society through the centuries such as Queen Elizabeth I,
Tsarina Great Katharine, Jeanne D’Arc, Aphra Behn about whom Virginia Woolf – she
is also one of the leading characters among the self-confident women – expresses her
 22

great admiration in her book named ‘A Room of One’s Own’: “All women together
ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but
rather appropriately, …. for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds”
(1989, p.66).

Despite these slight movements observed both in the society and women, it
was not until the mid of the 19th century that ‘the modern women identity’ and the
fluxes related to this concept were accepted by the public. Aiming to take active parts in
the fields of education, science and economy which they had been deprived of for ages,
several women unions were founded in various places. Seminars demanding that
women had to be accepted as separate individuals and given their already deserved
rights from education to politics were started to be held. The first male supporter of
these kinds of activities organized by women was John Stuart, who was both an
economist and a philosopher. He had a great role and influence in both forming and
improving the modern women identity. To be able to create these independent women
and increase the awareness through the patriarchal society towards the women’s
problems, John Stuart wrote a book in 1869 named ‘The Subjection of Women’ in which
he said that all human beings were equal, so they should be given the right to vote
regardless of their sex. However, this proposal of him was overreacted in a male-
dominated society in such a violent way that the women could obtain their right to vote
- which is the basic civic right in democracies - only after the end of World War I.

Despite this disappointment, women did not give up fighting for their rights
and kept on struggling hard to achieve the radical transformations that they longed for
in the society. Among these precedent women, there were impressive writers such as
Jane Austen, Bronte Sisters, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and brave leaders such as
Emma Paterson, who founded the ‘Trade-Union of Women’ in 1874, long before the
appraisal of the law stating that there had to be women and men in equal numbers in
trade unions; Milican Fawcet, who established the ‘National Union for Women
Suffrage’, struggling for women’s right to vote in legal ways without using violence;
 23

and Emmeline Goulden, who formed the ‘Women Social and Political Union’. The
members of this union were also acknowledged as ‘suffragettes’ due to their violent
demonstrations and methods. These divergent women, with their actions against the
socially-constructed femininity, played important and successful roles in not only the
transformation of the western society from traditional to the modernity, but also in the
modernization of women and their constructing female identities.

In the following years, women in west also obtained their other rights,
which they had deserved so many years ago. Firstly, the law enabling women to sue for
a divorce in case they were badly-behaved or betrayed by their husbands was accepted
in 1857. Then, respectively, two laws concerned with marriage and property went
through the parliament in 1870 and 1893. Hence, women obtained the right to protect
their own possessions and share the parental authority of children equally - not only in
the event of divorce but when they also proved the ill-treatments and betrayals of their
husbands.

Meanwhile, women began to take effective steps in the field of education

towards the end of 19th century. Zurich University started to enrol female students in
1865, and Nadescha Suslowa completed her doctoral studies in this university in 1867.
In 1888, Hedwig Johanna Kettler established a reformist women union defending and
bringing up the women’s right of higher education. As a result of these movements and
transformations in the women identity, the disputes about the enrolment of women in to
the higher education institutions gained important places in the Parliament.

Briefly, it is clearly understood that women in West, who were forced to

live an imprison-like life according to the assigned roles of the male-dominated society,
started to resist against the patriarchy, in which they had been ignored and regarded as
inferior parts of the males for ages, towards the end of the 18th century. The 19th century
became the milestone for the women in West. They proved the power and the
 24

decisiveness of women to the patriarchal society. The dominating part of this society;
that is males, realized the fact that if women had been given a chance and right to
benefit from fields that they had been neglected such as science, education, philosophy
and politics, they could have got the higher positions through the society, and even
surpassed the males.

What about the women in middle-east? Were they able to succeed in the
transformations of the women identity from traditional to the modern one like that in
west? Did they experience the same kinds of problems and how did they solve these
problems; in same or different ways?

1.2.2 The Women Identity in Middle-East

The places and the duties of men and women in Ottoman society were
separated from each other in definite terms. The affairs related with outside always
belonged to men while the domestic ones to women. The roles having been assigned by
the patriarchy - being a good mother and a wife - were reminded in every case to
women, and if they showed the courage to go beyond the predetermined limits, these
women were warned and punished immediately by the male-dominated society. In fact,
the sons having been raised according to these norms and mentality were always ready
and willing to display the power of the patriarchy on these insolent women.

The Ottoman society preserved its traditional structure much longer than the
one in West. Thus, the transformation period from traditional to modernization started
considerably late in Ottoman Empire. This modernization process and the innovations
concerned with the new ‘Ottoman women identity’ started in the period of reforms
called ‘Tanzimat’ (1839-1876). The edicts, which were enunciated in 1839 and 1856
due to the equality and independence concepts occurred under the influences of the
 25

French Revolution, are regarded as the first attempts of modernization in Ottoman

Empire. Indeed, these two edicts forced the Ottoman society to make changes in every
field from politics to science, and especially in the social status of women. The
foundation of schools like the ones in West, the increasing number of the literates in
parallel with the innovations in the news printing, translations from the Western
literature and the novelties in the field of law helped Ottoman women release
themselves from the socially-constructed femininity, and obtain their self-confidences.
Moreover, the Ottoman women were involved in population census for the first time in
1844, which was the clear evidence of their visibility throughout the society that they
had been neglected for many years. Besides this improvement, the issues such as the
prearranged marriages, the system of concubine and slavery, polygamy, and the
women’s imprisonment in domestic life without any education began to be disputed.
Then, the concubine was forbidden and the right of inheritance for women was
provided.

In addition to all of these novelties, the women’s right to be educated was

started to be defended to be able to fasten the improvement of the society and increase
the social status of women. Before Tanzimat, the women in Ottoman Empire were
attending to the schools where the scholastic and religious educations were given.
However, these schools were not compulsory for women and the curriculum was
limited to certain subjects, which had been previously determined by the patriarchal
system. Nevertheless, with the introduction of the reforms and the increasing awareness
throughout the society, the women started to facilitate from the secondary education as
well, in schools known as ‘Rüşdiye’ in addition to the compulsory primary education.
Then, the high schools for arts and crafts special to females were established, and
finally, the Ottoman women got the chance of getting higher education in 1848 in the
School of Medicine, where they were given midwifery courses. However, the most
important attempt for the females’ education was made in 1870 with the establishment
of the ‘Darü’l Muallimat’ (Female Teacher Training College). This school had a great
importance and meaning for the coming women generation, because in Ottoman Empire
- due to its patriarchal and Islamic structure - the female students’ receiving education
 26

with their male peers in the same school from the schoolmasters was not approved. This
misconception common throughout the society was giving rise to the Ottoman women’s
imprisonment at homes without any knowledge and education necessary for their own
improvements. Thus, Darü’l Muallimat, with its graduate female teachers, took active
roles in shaping the new and modern Ottoman women.

The increasing number of the newly-established schools in Tanzimat gave

rise to the publishing, especially to the women magazines and newspapers after 1860.
The female writers tried to create and disseminate the concept of ‘new women identity’
through the Ottoman society with their articles, in which they mentioned about the
desires of women to become visible in social life, and the rights of education and
independence like those in West.

One of the other important attempts for women realized in Tanzimat was the
legalization of the ownership in land. Before this law, the daughter was disinherited if
there was a son in the family. Yet, with this legislation, the daughters also began to use
their right of inheritance. Within the same periods, arrangements related with the curfew
and the outward appearances of women were made.

The reforms realized in Tanzimat turned out satisfactory in 1876 and 1908.
These two dates, which are known as ‘Meşrutiyet’ (Constitutional Period), were the
milestones for the Ottoman Empire. During Meşrutiyet, the Ottoman women’s
movement called ‘Hareket-i Nisvan’ ran up thanks to the contributions of the women
having been trained in the modern institutions of Tanzimat. These new and self-
confident Ottoman women like Halide Edip, Fatma Aliye, Emine Semiye, and Nezihe
Muhittin became more active and visible in women charities, clubs and literary fields
such as magazines and newspapers. They gave voice to the silenced and socially-
constructed femininity by repeating their demands, concerned with the facilities of
female education, their active participation into the male-dominated fields with equal
 27

rights, and the demolishing of gender discrimination continuing for a long time. One of
these remarkable and reformist women, Mrs. Arife, clearly explained the aims and
priorities of the new women identity, which was attempted to be constructed, in
‘Şükufezar’, the women magazine that she owned:

Biz ki saçı uzun aklı kısa, diye erkeklerin hande-i istihzasına hedef olmuş bir taifeyiz.
Bunun aksini ispat etmeye çalışacağız. Erkekliği kadınlığa, kadınlığa erkekliğe tercih
etmeyerek, şah-rah-i sa’y-u amelde (çalışmanın doğru yolunda) mümkün olduğu kadar
payendaz-ı sebat (ayak direten) olacağız” (We are such a group of people that have
been always neglected and exposed to the scorns of the males, by being named as
long-haired and short-sighted. We are determined to disprove this misconception .We
will resist, as mush as possible, on the high way to success by not preferring
masculinity to femininity, or femininity to masculinity) (‘Mukaddime’ Şükufezar, 1301,
qtd. in Çakır, 1996, p.26).

To be able to succeed all of these demands and enable the improvements of

the Ottoman women, the charities, among which there were ‘Cemiyet-i Hayriyye-i
Nisvan’, working for the women’s right of education, ‘Kırmızı Beyaz Klubü’, supporting
the women’s finding a place in the male dominated fields, and ‘Müdafaa-i Hukuk-i
Nisvan’, defending the independence of women in all matters, were established. As it is
clearly understood, the modernization of Ottoman women having started with Tanzimat
continued at full speed, as a result of which more concrete steps were realized. For
instance, the institutions providing high school-education for Ottoman women became
widespread in 1911 and in 1914, ‘İnas Darülfünun’, the first university special to
women, was founded. Then, the coeducation in universities was adapted in 1918.

Beside the reforms in the field of education, it was also emphasized the
system of concubine and polyandry, which were common in the Ottomans. With the
family enactment issued in 1917 (Hukuk-u Aile Kararnamesi), the Ottoman women got
rid of all of these injustices that they had suffered from for a long time, and they got
some rights related with the divorce - even limited.
 28

Unfortunately, the Ottoman women were not able to obtain the complete
independence and construct their female identities like their peers in West due to the
patriarchal system and the canonical obligations of Ottoman Empire running for ages.
Though the male-dominated society were well aware of the fact that they had to
increase the facilities for women and accept their visibility through the society to be
able to improve and keep up with the West, the Ottoman males still tried to construct
the ‘new and modern Ottoman women identity’ within the sphere of definite
stereotypes, the limits and rules of which were defined by the patriarchy. During this
definition process, the basic three movements – the Pan-Islamism, Westernism and Pan-
Turkism - that shaped the intellectual atmosphere of Meşrutiyet took active parts. From
the point of Pan-Islamists, these new women taking places in social and public lives
with their European clothes and behaviours unlike the socially-constructed femininity
went beyond the bounds of the Islamic instructions. According to them, the women
could get the chance of education within the sphere of the Islamic values and rules; that
is, to be a good mother, wife and a Muslim. The Westernizers opposed to the Pan-
Islamists by stressing on the importance of the education of Ottoman women to enable
the improvement of the society in every field, and defended the fact that women had to
be saved from the claws of religion and traditional norms. However, the Westernizers
also did not mention about the complete independence for Ottoman women and
circumscribed them within the terms of “enlightened mothers” (“aydınlanmış anneler”)
(Durakpaşa, 2000, p.104) for future generations. The thoughts of the Pan-Turkists
involved the common features of both movements, and they tried to combine the
reformist ideas of the Westernism with the traditional and religious norms of the Pan-
Islamism by adding the national feelings aroused during the wars. Yet, while doing this,
the Pan-Turkists also shaped the Ottoman women in accordance with their needs, and
defined them as ‘mother and sister’ (ana ve bacı), accompanying males in the liberation
of the country and its improvement. In this way, they tried to create the concept of ‘safe
woman’ that was purified from her sexuality and femaleness (Aytemiz, 2001).

As understood, the widely-held opinion throughout the Ottoman society was

the cultivation of women within the boundaries assigned by the males, and these
 29

boundaries were common for all movements, which were motherhood, wifehood and
sisterhood. The quotation of Tezer Taşkıran from the work of Cemal Nuri İleri named
‘Kadınlarımız’ (Our Women) clearly shows these boundaries applied to the women
survived in Ottoman Empire during the reformation periods:

[…] Her şeyden evvel kadınlarımızı ıslah etmeliyiz ki onlar da çocukları, çocuklar da
büyüdüklerinde devleti ve milleti ıslah etsinler. Bir bina yapılacağı zaman çatıdan
başlanmaz. Evvela temel kazılır. Kadın, insanlık binasının esas temelidir” (We should
rectify our women before everything so that they can rectify the children, who are
going to take parts in the rectification of the state and nation when they grow up. It is
not inaugurated with the roof in the construction of a building. Firstly, the foundation
must be laid. The woman is the basic foundation of the mankind) (Taşkıran, 1973,
p.60).

In accordance with the widely-held opinion concerned with the new women
identity, the Ottoman feminists had to adopt a balanced and moderate way in their
movements rather than apply the militarist actions of the Suffragettes and fellows in
west. They were struggling to create better places for their peers, in which they could
realize their individual desires and needs, by demanding equal rights throughout the
patriarchal Ottoman society. Nevertheless, most of the women involved in the Ottoman
feminism preferred to accept the traditional division of tasks and went along with the
idea that their most important duty is to be ‘enlightened and cultivated mothers’. Some
may maintain that this kind of apprehension widespread among the Ottoman feminists
emanates from the traditional and patriarchal structure of the Ottoman Empire. The
effects of the patriarchal system of the society cannot be denied. However, the most
important reason of this division, in my opinion, is the influences of Islam on women.
Due to these influences, the Ottoman feminists felt obliged to balance their dreams
about the new women identity with the religious norms of the society, as Ayşe
Durakpaşa stated in her book named ‘Halide Edip Türk Modernleşmesi ve Feminizm’
(Halide Edip Turkish Modernization and Feminism): “Osmanlı kadınları ve erkekleri,
bu tür İslami ilkeleri, ‘kadın’ ve ‘erkek doğası ile uyumlu toplumsal düzen ihtiyacına
dayanan bir sosyolojik formülü kullanarak rasyonel gösterip meşrulaştırmaya
çalışmışlardır” (The Ottoman males and females have tried to legitimize and rationalize
these kinds of Islamic principles by using the sociological formula which depends on the
 30

need of a social order that is harmonic with the nature of a ‘woman’ and ‘man’) (2000,
p.105). Moreover, these claims about the influences of Islam on women will be
analyzed in depth in chapter III, while analyzing the novel ‘Handan’ written by Halide
Edip-Adıvar, one of the most important advocators of the Ottoman feminism, and it will
be seen that even a brave woman like Halide Edip-Adıvar has had to retreat and kill her
woman protagonist [Handan] in the novel due to her contradictory behaviours and
features of a newly-constructed femininity.

To sum up, the modernization period of the Ottoman Empire by getting rid
of its patriarchal and traditional structure has taken longer than that of in the West and
realized in much more problematic cases. The periods that the Ottoman Empire
experienced since the Balkan Wars, run of disasters and crisis as a consequence of these
wars, a series of reforms to keep up with the West like Tanzimat and Meşrutiyet have
always tried to be adopted in accordance and harmony with the Islamic principles. That
is, the social transformations have established and adjusted according to the religion
rather than the needs of the people living in that society. As per usual, the most
susceptible group from all of these experiences and transformations are women.

The Ottoman women were well-aware of the fact that they had no status and
place for themselves throughout the patriarchal and Islamic Ottoman society. However,
as they were acquainted with the improvements and novelties having realized in west,
and as they learnt the struggles of the westerner females concerned with the women’s
rights, the Ottoman women also started to complain about their situations and
treatments that they had been subjected to for ages. Nevertheless, the modernization of
the Ottoman women and the construction of the independent female identity were not
able to be established within the definite order and reforms, like the one in West. The
women had always affected with the movements of Westernism, Pan-Islamism, and
Pan-Turkism. The transformations started with the idealization of the European women
left its place to the idealization of the women in Turkish clans with the period of
Independence War and influence of the Islamic principles. That is, the Ottoman women
 31

were not able to get rid of the effects of the patriarchal and religious system of the
society, and the establishment of the new and modern women identity in Ottoman
society was not totally realized, unfortunately, till the foundation of the Turkish
Republic in 1923.
 CHAPTER TWO
THE ISSUE OF WOMEN IDENTITY AS EXPRESSED BY WOMEN
AUTHORSHIP
 33

2.1 The Outcast Writer of British Literature: Virginia Woolf

Among the most influential pioneers of the emancipation movements of

women is Virginia Woolf, a critic, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and one of the
women leaders of the 20th century. She was born in London in 1882 as the daughter of
Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a famous Victorian literary critic and publisher, and Julia
Stephen, who was such a tolerant and careful mother bridging the gap between her
children – Vanessa, Julian, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian, respectively – and her husband.
Virginia and her sisters and brothers made use of the privileges of being one of the
members of the high-class society and the elite circle of London. Though Sir Leslie
Stephen was among the famous writers and critics of Victorian Age, Virginia and the
other children were not brought up according to the suffocating norms and conservative
rules of that period. Unlike the general atmosphere of Victorian Age, the Stephens did
not also raise their children under the constraints of the religion, and as a consequence
of that neither Christianity nor the deity carried importance for Virginia Woolf in her
whole life.

Virginia Woolf could get and read whatever she wanted through the wide range
of his father’s library, and Sir Leslie Stephen was letting her daughter use his books
without putting any obstacles unlike most of the Victorian fathers. However, Leslie
Stephen, who was a respectable academician at Cambridge and the publisher of more
than thirty books, was depressing his daughter, Virginia, with his strong personality.
The critical and crushing attitude of Leslie Stephen, which was emanated from his
personality, awakened the feeling of hatred in Virginia – besides the feeling of
admiration - towards her father. It is an undeniable fact that these sub-conscious feelings
nourished by Virginia towards her father played an important role in the shaping of her
feminism. She mentioned about her father, who died in 1904, with a great anger and
hatred in her work, ‘Moments of Being’: “[…] He found it difficult to die of cancer at
 34

seventy-two” (1985, p.133). In her [Virginia] opinion, her mother’s early death at the
age of forty-nine by sacrificing herself for the sake of her husband and children’s
goodness without thinking her private needs was not acceptable when it was compared
with her father’s death at the age of seventy-two without suffering enough. Even
twenty-four years after her father’s death, Virginia‘s hatred grew much more rather than
lessen day by day as she clearly stated in her diary dated 28 November 1928. To her,
she could not have written even a word if her father had not died: “He could have been
ninety-six… But mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What
would have happened? No writing, no books” (qtd. in Batchelor, 1991, p. 109).

As it is understood clearly, Sir Leslie Stephen stamped deep-rooted dislike

in Virginia’s mind, and she got rid of this hatred and complex towards her father only
after finishing her famous book, To the Lighthouse, in 1928. Through the protagonists
Mr. Ramsay [the father, Leslie Stephen] and Mrs. Ramsay [the mother, Julia Stephen],
Virginia reconciled with her parents; and furthermore, she mentioned about her father,
whom she had never loved, and mother, whom she had always loved, with great
admiration and affection on December 22nd, 1940 – a few months before committing
suicide:

How beautiful they were, these old people… I mean father and mother…How simple,
how clear, how untroubled. I have been dipping into old letters and father’s memoirs.
He loved her. Oh was so candid and reasonable and transparent. How serene and gay
even their life reads to me: No mud, no whirlpools. And so human (Urgan, 1997, p.
14).

The one that stamped deep-rooted dislike in Virginia’s mind was not only
her father but her step brother, George Duckworth. This man, who always molested
Virginia when she was a little girl, was the principal person in her indifference towards
men. The influences of this molest performed by her step brother resurfaced in her
future life and the marriage with Leonard Woolf. Even she was married now and shared
her life with a man, Virginia’s attitudes and thoughts related with males did not change,
 35

and her feminism grew day by day. She was full of affection and admiration towards
her husband, Leonard, but did not nourish sexual and fleshy feelings concerned with
him. Virginia even did not avoid confessing to her husband the fact that she was feeling
no more than a rock when he kissed her. Besides, she always preferred the humiliating
word ‘copulation’ while she was talking or thinking about sexuality, and expressed her
amazement when she saw “people making such a fuss about marriage and copulation”
(Urgan, 1997, p. 17). These kinds of feelings of Virginia Woolf were so deep that she
even conveyed some of them to the characters that she created in the novels, like in ‘The
Voyage Out’, which will be studied in the next chapter. The protagonist of The Voyage
Out, Rachel, saw Arthur and Susan [the engaged couple in the novel] while they were
kissing and making love in the forest. The thoughts and senses of Rachel were, in fact,
the inner voice and confessions of Virginia, undermining the conventional assumptions
about heterosexual relationships. In the novel, Arthur is described as “butting [Susan] as
a lamb butts a ewe”, and Rachel is unable to decipher “from her expression whether she
was happy, or had suffered something” (The Voyage Out, 1915, p.82). In the end of this
scene, Virginia clearly states her uneasy feelings about carnal and fleshy desires of
human beings straight through the mouth of Rachel, saying that “I don’t like that” (82).

Virginia hated all men line of descent from several points, not only just
because of their fleshly desires. She claimed that males always looked down on females
and never trusted in them. In their opinions, the females were simple-minded creatures;
thus, Virginia believed that women were merely able to get on well with other women.
That is, with their own peers: “To be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the
relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write
about it? Truthfully?” (Urgan, 1997, p.26). Virginia could not state her feelings and
thoughts clearly since lesbianism was a taboo in those years. Yet, her repressed feelings
and subconscious arouse in her works and the protagonists of them. For instance, in
Mrs. Dalloway, one of her world-famous experimental novels, Clarissa [the protagonist]
fell in love with her best friend, Sally Seton in her adolescence. Moreover, in To the
Lighthouse, her masterpiece for most of the literary authorities, the spinster artist Lily
Briscoe was excessively fond of the housekeeper Mrs. Ramsay. And of course, in The
 36

Voyage Out, the novel that is going to be analyzed in this study, young Rachel preferred
two women over men – Helen Ambrose and Clarissa Dalloway, in her female identity
search and the realization of her private needs.

There would not be any husband, except Leonard Woolf, who could tolerate
the frigidity and the hatred of Virginia towards the male genders – that had been
aroused due to the molestation in her childhood and the oppressive attitudes of her
father. Their marriage, based on friendship rather than sexuality, was progressing well.
Leonard Woolf founded a publishing house after a few years of their marriage, which
was a great chance for Virginia. Indeed, Virginia herself, was well aware of this fact as
stated in her diary: “Yes, I am the only woman in England free to write what I like”
(1973, p.43). For Virginia, the woman writer needed a press of her own as well as a
room and money to support herself, and as being a lucky woman unlike to her fellow
creatures, she had this opportunity. Nonetheless, she was uneasy, depressive and
withdrawn in her emotional life despite all these facilities. Even the support and the
protection provided by her husband were not able to deter Virginia from becoming
insane day by day. The molestation she faced in her early years, the authority and the
oppressive attitudes of her father, but especially the deaths of her beloved mother when
she was thirteen, then Stella, whom Virginia substituted in her mothers place, and lastly
the unexpected death of Thoby, her favourite brother, caused unhealed wounds in her
life. She experienced lots of grieves that were too many for her to endure that she
gradually alienated from outside and isolated herself from the people around.

Virginia Woolf was diagnosed as manic-depressive. Nevertheless, she never

accepted the professional help till her suicide since she did not ever believe in the
methods applied by the psychiatrists and the psychologists. She was always in a
depressive mood lest she would loose her mental death at any moment:

Woke up perhaps at three. Oh it’s beginning, it’s coming…The horror…Waves crash, I

wish I were dead- I can’t face this horror anymore. This is the wave speaking out over
me” (Urgan, 1997, p.31).
 37

This difficult situation was irritating and aching for Virginia, but at the same
time, it was also affecting her character and caused frustration and alienation. Day by
day, she was becoming merciless and insensitive towards people around her. In her
diary, dated June 27th, 1923, Virginia clearly expressed her hatred towards human: “I do
not love my kind, I detest them” (1973, p.119). The more she was deprived of her
reason, the more aggressive she became towards everybody and everything around, not
only to her nearest of kin. She had been already infamous with her anti-Semitic attitudes
towards Jewish people and unfortunately, these kinds of behaviours did not change even
after her marriage with Leslie Stephen, who was also a Jewish. However, Hitler’s - who
did not like the Jewish, either - holding the whip hand, the dominance of fascism in
Italy and Germany, and lastly the being murdered of her niece, Julian Bell, by the
fascists during the war pushed Virginia Woolf to write against the fascism and fascists.
She was considered as the undesirable person and taken into the blacklist by the Nazis
due to her article named ‘Why Art Follows Politics’ (1936). She believed that fascism
would drag people into a big catastrophe and cause the destruction of the whole
civilizations on earth. Indeed, Woolf completely lost her hope when the World War II
broke, because wars were brutal massacres for the human kinds in her opinion. This
hopelessness was so dense that Virginia and her husband, Leslie Stephen, decided to kill
themselves by being poisoned with the exhaust gases of their car.

The depression caused by the World War was not the only reason that
leaded Virginia to take the decision of ending her life. She got anxious about her talent
as a writer and thought that she was losing her creativity. She even regarded her last
novel, ‘Between the Acts’, as “completely worthless” (Urgan, 1997, p.45) and wrote her
diary about her doubts that nobody was reading her novels anymore: “No audience. No
echo. That’s part of one’s death” (1973, p.199).

While trying to survive in a word full of disasters and wars, and cope with
the anxiety of not writing anymore and the fear of losing her mind at any moment,
Virginia gave up her whole hope about future and life. She committed suicide in April
 38

near the river Ouse by filling her pockets with stones. Indeed, Virginia Woolf always
used the symbols of water and sea that flow, flood or become rough nearly in her all
novels as if she had already known her own death. The corpse of Woolf also swam
through the water for a long time, and was able to be found only after fifteen days.

2.2 Virginia Woolf and Her Perception of Women

At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get
two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand
pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our
mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses?
Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were some
photographs on the mantelpiece. Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—may have
been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church),
but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face.
She was a homely body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a large
cameo; and she sat in a basket–chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera, with
the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that the dog will move directly
the bulb is pressed. Now if she had gone into business; had become a manufacturer of
artificial silk or a magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred
thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease to–night and the
subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the
nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography” (A Room of One’s
Own, 1989, p.20-21).

Virginia Woolf, as it is understood from the quotation taken from A Room of

One’s Own, got frustrated while thinking about the difficulties that Mary Seton (one of
the women reformists and activists) and her friends had faced during the women
movements in 1860s, and blamed the previous female generation for not having
established a better future for their fellow creatures, or more clearly for their daughters,
sisters and friends. According to Woolf, the only way for women to be able to get a
status and a place throughout the society was to get an economic independence by
working. The woman, who did not have that kind of independency, for Woolf, was the
inferior being that had already accepted the failure and nonexistence without struggling.
Yet, most women, like Mary’s mother in the quotation above, had wasted their times
 39

with junky things and unimportant details despite thinking more carefully about the
lives of future generations and struggling for their social status. Woolf believed that the
main reason of the scarcity in the number of the sophisticated and working women was
the previous female generation, who just dreamt for good marriages, rich husbands and
lots of children. The more she thought about these aimless women, the more she got
enraged:

If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of
making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers
before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships
appropriated to the use of their own sex […] We might have been exploring or
writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the
steps of the Parthenon, or. going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at
half–past four to write a little poetry” (A Room of One’s Own, 1989, p.21).

Virginia Woolf was right in her declarations, but was the previous female
generation the only guilty part? That is, would it be fair to proclaim these women as the
chief culprits, and accuse them because of their not getting beyond a previously
determined life style, and searching for the possibilities for their independency and
productivity? In fact, the reason why all of these women were in poor conditions and
lack of their legal rights was clear: The commonly-held misconception regarding
women as the inferior parts of the human beings by claiming that that they had no
personality at all. , the hidden fact lying under all these prejudices and thoughts against
women - starting with the myth of Eve and expanding through the ages – was the
masculine desire to get the control over females and satisfy their superiority complex.
The selfish men always wanted to feel themselves powerful in every condition, and the
ones that would enable these needs of males were, without any doubt, the females by
playing the role of magnifier: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-
glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at
twice its natural size” (A Room of One’s Own, 1989, p.35). To be able to realize their
looking-glass vision and functions as magnifiers in a perfect way, women had to stay
behind men because if they gave up telling lies and began to tell the truth “ the figure in
the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished” as Woolf stated in ‘A Room
 40

of One’s Own’ (1989, p.36). Due to this fear, men always prohibited women from
taking their own decisions and improving themselves, and only left a limited scope to
them in which the main control was in the hands of men. This previously determined
area was firstly governed by fathers and then husbands. Women had to serve them as
being obedient daughters, faithful wives and good mothers.

For Woolf, due to all these restraints by the male descendants, even the
women that belonged to the higher-classes were not able to break their limitations and
find a way to escape. Actually, the quotation taken from the Duchess of Newcastle,
Margaret, who wrote poems, plays and essays in the 17th century, explained the status of
women in the society and supported the statements of Woolf: “Women live like bats or
owls, labour like beats, and die like worms” (Urgan, 1997, p.47). Woolf also claimed
that women lived not only in previous ages but also in the 19th century, the age of
Enlightenment, were not able to obtain their rights. They, unfortunately, had to keep on
struggling hard, and sometimes compromise to be taken into consideration. For
example, the brilliant women like Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Mary Ann Evans
had to change their names as Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and George Eliot respectively to be
able to have their works published and take the attention of men. However, Virginia
Woolf declaimed against this idea and wanted women writers to write by using their
own names by reflecting the women sensitivity and without emulating to men.
Moreover, in one of her seminars held in Cambridge, where the best woman student
used to be considered intellectually inferior of the worst man, encouraged young
females to take active roles in literary world, and to write poems, reviews, philosophical
and scientific works as well as the stories and novels. Nevertheless, Virginia Woolf
knew very well that all of these could be realized if only women had their own rooms
and obtained their financial independencies, as she stated clearly in her extended essay,
A Room of One’s Own. However, was this independency possible for women, who had
been always left aside in social systems and never given any right or opportunity to take
part as much as men, to improve themselves by taking education at high quality, find a
place in public life through working and trying to earn their own lives, or just have a
room to write and express their feelings – just Woolf stated in her works? Were there
 41

really any probabilities for these women to realize their dreams while they were still
ignored and scorned by claiming that “a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on
his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all?” (A Room
of One’s Own, 1989, p.54)

Unfortunately, few women were as lucky as Virginia Woolf, who had a

room and a press of her own as well as an understanding husband. She, in fact, knew
that she was the only woman in England free to write as she admitted in her diary.
Indeed, this was the point that Woolf differed from other feminists. She preferred to
focus on the problems of the women writers rather than join the women movements or
organizations demanding equal rights and independence for all women. In her opinion,
having a room of one’s own and obtaining financial independency was much more
important than the efforts of the Suffragets, who tried to change the electoral system and
get the right to vote: “Of the two–the vote and the money– the money, I own, was
infinitely the more important” (A Room of One’s Own, 1989 p.37). However, as Mina
Urgan stated in her book named ‘Virginia Woolf’, it was not possible for a woman to
have a private room and enough money to live without electing the people that would
govern her, and making radical changes in the social system. Nevertheless, Virginia
Woolf did not accept this fact and gave the examples of Aphra Benn, Jane Austen,
George Eliot and Bronte Sisters, who succeeded to earn their lives through writing.
Although these brave women writers were also suppressed by the patriarchy and forced
to abandon their writing, they kept on resisting and managed to reflect ‘the new women
identity’ through their female protagonists. Thus, they set a good example to the
repressed and misdirected women. It is no doubt that Virginia Woolf was one of these
leading women writers. For Woolf, women could only construct their independent
female identity through literary activities, where they were able to express their private
needs freely:

Oh, but they can’t buy literature, too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow
you …. to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate,
 42

no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind (A Room of One’s
Own, 1989, p.75-76).

During her whole life, Virginia Woolf struggled hard to prove this fact to
the women who had been imprisoned and silenced in male-dominated societies. She
tried to encourage these miserable women to break their chains through her works, in
which she created powerful and self-confident female protagonists fighting against the
confirmed patriarchy. She never claimed that women were superior to men, or
propagated the male hatred if her radical novel, Three Guineas, in which she called
women to rebel against the fascism and wars created by males is excluded. Indeed, on
the basis of Woolf’s feminism, there was no predominance of women over men. On the
contrary, she always defended that the creative mind was androgynous, like
Shakespeare’s mind “as the type of the man-womanly mind” (A Room of One’s Own,
1989, p.99). In this way, the integrity and the peaceful society in which both men and
women lived in harmony were able to be enabled:

The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony
together, spiritually co–operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain
must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her […] It
is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.
Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is
purely feminine, I thought (A Room of One’s Own, 1989, p.98).

2.3 The ‘Jeanne D’Arc’ of Turkish Literature: Halide Edip Adıvar

The prolific Turkish writer, journalist, pioneer feminist, nationalist and

educator, Halide Edip Adıvar, was born in 1884 in Istanbul during a period in which
there were lots of struggles and deep-seated conflicts between Middle-East and Western
culture. Even in such a depressing period, Halide Edip, like Virginia Woolf, took the
advantage of opportunities available to her due to being a daughter of a high ranking
Ottoman official.
 43

Indeed, the life story of Halide Edip bears resemblances to that of Virginia
Woolf. She also lost her beloved mother when she was quite young. Then, Halide Edip
began to live with her father, Edip Bey, who was a strict and a dominant character, and
his two wives. As it is known, polygamy was legal in Ottoman Empire and Edip Bey
never hesitated to take the advantages provided to men by the patriarchy despite his
modern way of life and attitudes. Without a shadow of doubt, this unpleasant event had
a profound effect on Halide Edip and her later writings. However, all of this most likely
led to her being educated in a most unconventional way since she had to move between
her grandmother’s, Nakiye Hanım, home and father’s houses. At Nakiye Hanım’s
home, Halide Edip was raised according to the rules of Ottoman traditional way of life
and Islamic harem. On the other hand, Edip Bey, by being the representative of the
Western way of life and the Anglophile, insisted that Halide Edip had to receive a
Western education. Thus, he hired an English governess and also private tutors in the
field of social sciences, philosophy, mathematics, literature and psychology. Then, he
sent Halide Edip to the American College for Girls in Istanbul, from which she
graduated in 1901 as being the first Turkish and Muslim student.

As clearly seen, the upbringing and education issues of Halide Edip gave
rise to unsolvable conflicts between her father and grandmother. In fact, this tension at
home was the basic dissent of the period; that is, the tension between the traditional and
modern. Consequently, Halide Edip witnessed personally these conflicts aroused during
the social transformations in 19th and early 20th centuries as Selim İleri, Turkish writer
and critic, stated at the end of the book named ‘Mor Salkımlı Ev’, in which Halide Edip
wrote her memoirs: “…. küçük bir kız çocuğu, doğu ve batı kültürlerinden beslenerek
usul usul büyür; kah Mevlevi bir anneannenin yakarışlarını dinler, kah alafranga bir
babanın hayran olduğu İngiliz terbiyesini varlığı üzerinde hisseder”(.... a little girl is
growing up slowly, being nourished by both the eastern and western culture; she either
listens to the prayers of her Sufi grandma or feels the influences of the English
discipline that an occidental father admires) (2005, p.300). On the other hand, having
this kind of a life involving different people from different cultures and life styles
 44

enabled Halide Edip to compare various mentalities and create colourful atmospheres in
her novels.

After graduating from American College, which constituted a footstep in her

later life to establish a self-confident female identity and enable the chances of meeting
independent women models, Halide Edip married her former tutor, the mathematician
Salih Zeki Bey, who was twenty years older than she was. Her married life was full of
fruitful activities that she could make use of her intellectual background. With the
support of her husband, Halide Edip created a room of herself, like Virginia Woolf, in
which she studied on Western and Eastern literature. Meanwhile, she made translations
for the encyclopaedia of mathematics that Salih Zeki researched on. Beside all of these
intellectual studies, Halide Edip, unlike Woolf, also gave importance to her
housekeeping duties and tried to satisfy the needs of her husband, most probably due to
her grandmother’s traditional way of education. Unfortunately, her prosperous married
life was impeded in 1902 with her illness during which she alienated from outside world
and her relatives. The notes that she took while waiting for her death reminds the words
of Virginia Woolf: “[…] Her insanın yüzünde, karşıdakini nasıl öldüreceğini düşünen
bir maske var…İçimden bir ses, bu cinsten ayrılmak, kurtulmak istiyordu. İçimdeki
öfke değil, kin değil, insanlıktan tiksintiydi” (On face of each person, there is a mask
thinking about how to kill the other. My inner voice desires to separate, get rid of this
species. What is inside is not the anger or hatred but the detestation from human
beings) (qtd. in Paralı, 2001, p.119).

Halide Edip got over this critical period by clinging to her intellectual
studies and researches. Indeed, in 1907, her articles were published in the newspaper,
Tanin, under the name of Halide Salih. After the proclamation of the Constitution in
1908, the number of the periodicals in which there were also women writers increased
considerably, and Halide Edip began to send her writings to different periodicals. These
were predominantly about the issues concerned with the education of Ottoman women
and the improvements of their social status throughout the society. She, apart from the
 45

periodicals in her own country, also sent an article to The Nation Magazine in England
entitled The Future of Turkish Women, and took the attention of the leaders of the
women movement, one of whom was Isabel Fry.

Besides her writings on women rights and issues both inside and outside,
Halide Edip also took active roles in various women organizations with the excitement
of independence created by the Constitution. She established the ‘Teal-i Nisvan’ (the
Society for the Elevation of Women) in 1909 and was involved in relief efforts,
especially in the field of women education. Unfortunately, Halide Edip was considered
unfavourable person as progressive by the reactionist due to her opinions and articles
published in Tanin and other reviews. Thus, she had to flee to Egypt during a religious
fundamentalist uprising on March 31st. She explained that day in her memoirs, ‘Mor
Salkımlı Ev’, like in the following:

31 Mart sabahı uzaktan gelen silah sesleri ile uyandığım zaman bilmem neden
Shakespeare’in Jul Sezar’ındaki “Martın 15’inden sakının” – Beware the Ides of
March – cümlesini kendi kendime tekrar ettim. Bizim sokakta da 31 Mart’ın güneşli, o
parlak göğünün altında, aralıklı gelen silah sesleri hakimdi (I do not know why but I
repeated the sentence of Shakespeare from Jules Cesar - “Beware the Ides of March”
– when I woke up with the shooting sounds on Mach 31st morning. In our street also,
the shooting sounds coming at intervals were dominant under the sunny and brilliant
sky of March 31st) (2005, p.155).

While in Egypt, Halide Edip received an invitation letter from her close
friend in England, Isabel Fry, and set out for London alone by leaving the children to
her husband, Salih Zeki Bey. She was met with great enthusiasm in England by the
well-known artists, scientists and the forerunners of the women movements, and also
gave a conference on women rights upon request. On her return, she kept on working in
the fields of education. She taught for a while in Darülmuallimat (Female Teachers
College), and then served as an inspector of schools under the Ministry of Religious
Foundations to bring up to date the conditions and education rights of female students.
 46

Halide Edip, unfortunately, was not able to reap a great success that she
obtained in public areas in her marriage. Though her marriage was mostly based on the
concurrence of opinions, like the one in Woolf’s marriage, she got disappointed when
her husband wanted to take a second wife. Upon this unacceptable desire of her
husband, Halide Edip divorced immediately in 1910. The fact that two progressive-
minded and intellectual men – her father and husband – never hesitated a moment to use
the advantages provided to them by the patriarchal system injured Halide Edip’s
feelings and pride deeply. Indeed, it is said that Halide Edip wrote her novel ‘Handan’
during these frustration and depression days, and there were lots of similarities between
the protagonist of the novel and herself: “Meğer Halide Hanım ilk evlilik hayatında
Handan gibi bedbaht olmuş, aynı ruh krizlerini geçirmiş ve çok bağlı olduğu kocasından
ayrılmak zorunda kalmış ve hala da bu durumun acıları içindeymiş” (Apparently,
Madam Halide was very unhappy in her first marriage like Handan, had the same
hysteria and had to leave her beloved husband, and she is still suffering)
(Karaosmanoğlu, 2000, p.259).

After her divorce, Halide Edip kept on taking active roles in public life with
increased efforts. Like other prominent intellectuals, she fell under the influence of Ziya
Gökalp, a Turk sociologist and writer, and participated into the ‘Turkish Hearth
Association’ in 1912. During the years spent in this association, Halide Edip started to
construct the basis of her “new women” conception by mostly borrowing from Ziya
Gökalp’s thesis on the status of women in pre-Ottoman Turks in which both of the
genders shared equal rights and places. Moreover, she portrayed this new woman in her
novel, Yeni Turan, written in this period: “Bu eser, kadınların oy sahibi olacağı, hayat
ve insan münasebetleri makul ve muntazam olabileceği bir devri tahayyül ediyordu”
(This work imagines the age in which the women will have the right to vote, and their
life and human relations will be reasonable and settled) (Mor Salkımlı Ev, 2005,
p.187).
 47

With the beginning of the Balkan wars, Halide Edip began to look after the
wounded soldiers and served as a nurse with other women in the organization that she
had established. Besides these nursing activities, she also worked for the announcement
of the dreadful effects of the war to the whole world and the protestation of the passive
spectators. Indeed, this was the first time for Halide Edip to face with a different west.
Now, she was trying to awaken and strengthen the national feelings of people with her
conferences in the Association and writings in various reviews. However, Halide Edip’s
activities in Association and opinions about the Turkish nationalism – the strongly
marked intellectual phenomenon of that period – was mainly a cultural awakening
rather than a racist apprehension as she also stated in her book ‘Turkey Faces West’
published in 1930. Due to these dissidences with the Association, she broke off from
her works for a while and went to Syria upon the offer of the Ottoman Government to
open new schools and make some innovations in the field of education there. While in
Syria setting up schools and orphanages for girls, Halide Edip met her second husband,
Doctor Adnan Adıvar, and they got married in 1917. Then, in March 1918, she returned
permanently from Syria with her husband. Indeed, this date on which the motherland of
Turks was occupied officially with the signing of Mondros Truce was a new beginning
for Halide Edip. She was not what she used to be anymore. She was now in the process
of reshaping of her identity throughout the history of the nation occupied:

İşte, garip bir surette ‘Ben’ denilen şeyin tamamıyla milletin içine karışmış olduğunu
en çok o zaman hissettim. Millet göçerse, ben de onlarla birlikte gitmek istiyordum.
Bence kendimin, bir küçük parça olmamın hiçbir önemi yoktu” (I felt mostly that time
that the so-called ‘I’ had been strangely integrated into the nation completely. If the
nation could collapse, I would like also to go with them. In my opinion, there was no
meaning of my own identity or being a little part) (qtd. in Paralı, 2001, p.97).

With these feelings, Halide Edip returned to her work in Turkish Hearth
Association. However, she was still in touch with her friends in West and the United
States to prevent the rising racist movements in the Association. Moreover, she
struggled hard for her country’s dreadful situation and justifiability to be known across
the world, and in this matter; Halide Edip regarded the United States as the main actor.
 48

In fact, this belief of her was proven with the publishing of the ‘Wilson Principles’,
stating that each nation had right to govern itself. As a consequence, the Wilsonian
League, of which Halide Edip was the active member, was established in December
1918. Beside the Wilsonian League, she also became the members of several other
secret organizations to resist the occupations throughout the country, and provide
ammunition and equipment for Mustafa Kemal and his fellow soldiers in Anatolia.

The occupation of İzmir by Greek forces was the straw that broke the
camel's back for the national resistance committees. The meetings began to be held
consecutively to protest the occupations. Halide Edip was the first woman speaker
addressing a mass crowd publicly in these meetings held in 1919 in Istanbul. The most
famous of these meetings was the ‘Sultanahmet’, where Halide Edip declared that all
self-conscious Turkish women abandoned their individual identities and became the
part of a unique ideal for the sake and independence of their country:

İnanıyorum ki, Sultanahmet’teki Halide her günkü Halide değildi. Bazen en mütevazı
ve tanınmamış bir insanın büyük bir milletin büyük bir idealini temsil edebileceğine
inanıyordum. […] Ben İslamiyet’in bedbaht bir kızıyım ve bugünün talihsiz, fakat
aynı derecede kahraman devrinin anasıyım. Atalarımızın ruhları önünde eğiliyor,
onlara bugünün yeni Türkiye’si adına sesleniyorum ki; silahsız olan bugünkü milletin
kalbi de onlarınki gibi yenilmez kudrettedir; Allah’a ve haklarımıza iman ediyoruz…
[…] Yüreğimizdeki kutsal heyecan milletlerin hakları ilan edilinceye kadar sürecektir
(I believe that Halide in Sultanahmet was not the usual Halide. Sometimes, I also
believe that the most modest and least known person will be able to represent the holy
ideal of a great nation.
[…] I am the miserable daughter of Islam, but also the mother of heroic age though
unfortunate today. I bow down in front of the souls of our ancestors and speak to them
in the name of the new Turkey of today: the heart of the today’s armless nation has the
same unbeatable omnipotence like them. We believe in God and our rights.
[…] The holy excitement in our hearts will continue till the nations declare their
rights) (Paralı, 2001, p.102-103).

It was impossible for Halide Edip, who became well-known after the
meetings as the Supreme Mother of Turks and the Patriotic Turkish Woman, to stay in
Istanbul. She was under the custody of the allied forces. Upon the official occupation of
 49

Istanbul on March 16th, 1920, she passed to Anatolia with her husband, Adnan Adıvar,
to participate in the national struggle. When they arrived at Ankara, Mustafa Kemal met
them in the station. This was the first time for Halide Edip to meet Mustafa Kemal, the
great leader and the founder of new Turkey. On the fifth day of their arrival to Ankara,
Halide Edip and Adnan Adıvar settled in one of the rooms of the Land College used as a
headquarter. In this headquarter, she worked like a perfect intelligence officer and
conducted the counselling business of Mustafa Kemal. With the news agency that she
had established to announce the voice of Ankara to Turkey and abroad, Halide Edip
took the attention of the foreign presses and was acknowledged throughout the world.
Indeed, she was defined as “the Turkish Jeanne D’Arc” in a front-page editorial
published in The New York Times Magazine (qtd. in Koloğlu, 1998, p.57).

While working at the general staff headquarters, she was later moved to
Eskişehir with ‘Hilal-i Ahmer’ (Red Crescent) to help the wounded soldiers in the front.
During the time spent in this association, Halide Edip grabbed the opportunity of
comparing different women from different background and past, such as the Anatolian
women who were reserved and self-distrust due to having little or no education, and the
women of Istanbul who were well-educated and active in public life. The syntheses that
she obtained from this comparison lent effective help to Halide Edip to construct her
women of perception and the female identity, as it will be clearly seen in the next
section.

For Halide Edip, being called to Ankara by Mustafa Kemal during her
nursing in Eskişehir, the active service in the fronts was about to start. She was sent to
the Western front and granted the rank of corporal, sergeant and the first sergeant
respectively because of her eminent services. While it was not the first time Turkish
women had helped the army, this was the first time one was given a rank. The
observations and the experiences that Halide Edip obtained in the fronts during the war
formed most of the themes of her works, and she narrated the war through the eyes of
women and children as Virginia Woolf did. With Turkish Army’s entering İzmir, the
 50

Independence War finished and the National Assembly that had won the national
struggle with a great success was in the process of founding the ‘New Turkey’ now.
Unfortunately, Halide Edip and her husband, Adnan Bey was at issue on this foundation
period with Mustafa Kemal. After the establishment of Turkish Republic, Halide Edip,
Adnan Bey and like-minded friends founded the ‘Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası’
(Progressive Republican Party) in 1924 as the major opposition party. The conflicts
among the national struggle staff came up the surface with the establishment of this
party. Following a ban on Progressive Republican Party in 1925, the Adıvars had to go
abroad and spend their fifteen years in foreign countries. Firstly, they lived in Europe,
and then moved to the United States. Being a well-known person across the world due
to her activities both in news agency and the fronts, Halide Edip was still arousing the
interest of the foreign press. Thus, she kept on conveying the facts about New Turkey
and her comments on revolutions realized there. In her article published in The Yale
Review in 1929 titled ‘Dictatorship and Reforms in Turkey’, Halide Edip supported the
reforms of the republican period in the fields of secularism, caliphate, polygamy, civil
law and women rights but criticized their short-length of time to be realized. In her
opinion, this kind of a sudden change might create some problems as she stated below:

Reformlar son yüzyıldır başlanan, son yirmi yılda hızlanan batılılaşmanın sonucudur
[…] buna karşılık bir gecede gerçekleştirilmiştir. Değişme için verilen süreç saçma
derecede kısaydı. Bunun geçmişle kültür kopukluğu yaratma tehlikesi vardır (The
reforms that have started in recent ages are the outcomes of the westernism gaining
momentum in the last twenty years [...] Yet, they have been realized in one night. The
time given for the change was foolishly short. This may create a culture gap with the
past) (qtd. in Koloğlu, 1998, p.53-54)

Besides her articles, Halide Edip also participated in the conferences

organized by the American Williamstown Politics Institute upon their invitation, and
had repercussions with the title of the first woman performing the inaugural speech and
the management of these conferences. She gave lectures on modern Turkey and its
problems, and tried to break down the prejudices of west against Turkey, especially on
misconceptions about harem life and polygamy. By being the symbol of the changing
lifestyle in middle-east and the leader of the Turkish women movements, Halide Edip
 51

created a contemporary Turkey in minds. Two years after, she published her book
named ‘Turkey Faces West’ in 1930, composed of the review texts of these conferences
and lectures that she had given. Then, she was invited by the Columbia University as a
guest professor to lecture on women issues and the intellectual history of the middle-
east. In 1935, Halide Edip went to India upon the call of Mahatma Gandhi to teach in
New Delhi, and she compiled her studies in this country in two books named ‘Conflict
of East and West in Turkey’ and ‘Inside India’.

The Adıvars were able to return to Turkey only after the death of Mustafa
Kemal in 1939. Halide Edip headed the chair of English Language and Literature in
Istanbul University after her returning, and then served one term as an independent
deputy from İzmir in 1950 with the transition to multiparty system. She, as usual,
struggled hard in the fields of educational matters and took active roles in parliamentary
commissions and plenary committees to realize various development projects. Halide
Edip, who felt lonely after her husband’s death in 1955, died on January 9th, 1964 in
Istanbul.

As clearly seen, Halide Edip achieved lots of things in an eighty-year

lifetime and was acknowledged widely both in Turkey and abroad. She was a rebel
against traditions of the patriarchal society, and threw herself into the struggle of her
nation and female descendents for life and liberty. She was the ‘Jeanne D’Arc of Turks’,
but never ceased to be aware of the moral and cultural facts of her time. In the next
section, it will be focused on the basis of her women perception and the ways to
construct the new modern Turkish feminine identity throughout the conflicts and crises
of her country.
 52

2.4 Halide Edip Adıvar and Her Perception of Women

Türk kadınının resmen kafes arkasında yaşaması gerektiği bir devirde Halide Edip
ayağındaki yasak zincirlerini koparmış, bir vatandaş olarak omuzlarında hissettiği ağır
görevi taşımaktan yılmamıştı (In an age in which a Turkish woman had to live behind
the cages, Halide Edip broke the chains around her feet and never gave up carrying
the heavy burden that she felt on her shoulders as a citizen) (Nadir Nadi, Cumhuriyet
1960 qtd. in Durakpaşa, 2000, p.152).

Then, how did Halide Edip succeed to become a public figure dedicated to
the rights of women and their emancipation, and also the Jeanne D’Arc of Turks
struggling for the liberty of her nation in a male-dominated society by getting rid of the
traditional femininity imposed on Ottoman women? What were the origins and
processes that shaped her women perception and ‘ideal female identity’? In this section,
it will be focused on the answers of these questions.

Ottoman women, at least the ones belonging to the upper classes, began to
be more visible in public and educational areas with the influences of the reforms in
various fields and the westernization policy of the previous age. Halide Edip was one of
these luckiest women of her period thanks to the high-class position and the
occidentalist father providing her all the educational facilities. The years spent in
American College enabled her to meet independent women models and have friends
abroad, as a result of which Halide Edip created lifelong intercultural relations.
Moreover, she snapped the chance of observing the western world and the women
movements realized there through her travelling facilities, and met lots of intellectuals
and academicians.
 53

However, these western women models were not the only factor that
influenced and shaped the new female identity of Halide Edip. As mentioned in the
previous section, her grandmother representing the Ottoman traditional life, the women
from different countries and classes she met during her educational utilities, the other
forerunners in women organizations such as Nezihe Muhiddin, Nakiye Elgün, Fatma
Aliyye, and lastly the Anatolian women that she acknowledged during the
Independence War enabled Halide Edip to evaluate the status of various women and
establish a specific viewpoint on independent and strong female identities.

However, Halide Edip’s affiliating with different women from different

backgrounds caused her to experience contradictions. The traditional women that she
spent her childhood with in a typical Ottoman mansion, the modern and independent
women in the college, and the Anatolian women that she met during the national
struggle period were of basic importance in Halide Edip’s life and women perception.
She tried to construct an ideal female identity by combining the women models that she
had met so far. However, the national struggle and the Independence War became a
turning point for Halide Edip since she realized the prospective value of nationalism for
the liberation of women. Thus, we believe that it is better to analyse the conception of
the ‘new female identity’ of Halide Edip as prior to and after the Independence War.

Halide Edip began her writing career in 1908 under the name of Halide
Salih. In her articles, the basic issues were about women and their liberation
movements. For the pioneers of the Ottoman women movement like Halide Edip, the
idea of liberty and freedom were the means of hope and improvement in other fields of
life. By relying on this idea, she always established a relation between the modernity
and the improvement of women, and also emphasized the role of education in the
modernization of the society and the women as well.
 54

In her early stage writings, the base of which were the women education and
their improvements, Halide Edip took the Anglo-Saxon education system as a model for
Ottoman women due to the influences of her education and independent intellectual
teachers in American college. She even sent a letter to The Nation Magazine published
in England, which demanded that the English had better found new schools in Turkey
and educate the Turkish women like themselves. The underlying fact that lay behind
Halide Edip’s insistence on education matters was her criticisms against the traditional
femininity lasting for many ages. In these criticisms, it is possible to see the influences
of classic texts of liberal feminism in west, like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman. Like Wollstonecraft, Halide Edip also opposed the stereotyped
image of women – the objects of pleasure and illiterate creatures imprisoned at home
with the duties of motherhood and wifery – and defended that women could only get
over this enforced traditional life through education. However, there were also some
disagreements between the West feminists and the Ottoman feminists, one of whom was
Halide Edip. While the women’s rights defenders in West were concentrating on the
individuality of women and trying to prove their competences over male-dominated
society, the Ottoman feminists were struggling to portray women as ones having social
responsibilities that would enable the continuity and the improvement of the socio-
cultural system. Halide Edip was defending the idea that women had to be educated and
active in public life to sustain the national development. Thus, she did not feel
sympathetic towards militant feminists claiming the superiority of women over men and
declaring fight against the male gender. Furthermore, she defined the acts of
Suffragettes as “feminist breakouts” (feminist patlamalar) (qtd. in Durakpaşa, 2000,
p.197), and claimed that these kind of actions were not suitable for the Turkish culture.
In her opinion, the unique and honourable case was to work for the national
development. Thus, by involving the opinions of her against the traditional femininity
and in accordance with her aims, Halide Edip constructed a new female identity for
Turkish women: “enlightened motherhood” (aydınlanmış annelik) (qtd. in Durakpaşa,
2000, p.200). In this conceptualization of Durakpaşa, the notion ‘motherhood’ was not
only limited within the domestic life; on the contrary, it was used as getting over the
domestic purposes in order to build the nation and bring up the new generations. Hence,
the misconception of ‘harem’, which was widespread in West, was smashed in a way.
 55

The basic principle of this new female identity constructed by Halide Edip
was to arouse the sense of social responsibility throughout the society with the
enlightened intellectual Turkish women. In her early periods, the emphasis related with
the social responsibility was on westernization and civilization. During the second
Constitution period, Halide Edip struggled hard for the elevation of Turkish women not
only with her writings on women issues published in various magazines but also with
heroic actions in women organizations. Moreover, she persisted in her demand of
education by taking active roles in educational activities realized at home and abroad,
and became the forerunner of this new female identity that she idealized. However, the
accent shifted from westernization to national unity after the Balkan wars within the
parallelism of Turkish nationalism. Thus, gradually, the feminism of Halide Edip started
to “bear the marks of popular nationalist feminism” (popular milliyetçi bir feminizmin
izlerini taşıyordu) as Durakpaşa stated in her book named “Halide Edip Türk
Modernleşmesi ve Feminizm” (Halide Edip Turkish Modernization and Feminism)
(2000, p.197). That is, the second phase of life started for Halide Edip. After 1910s, she
was also recognized with her activities in Turkish Hearth Association and voluntary
services in Balkan frontiers. Her fame extended wide after her famous Sultanahmet
mass meeting and roles during the Independence War.

Consequently, Halide Edip began to define her new female identity within
the framework of Turkish nationalism. In other words, another woman model that ran
after the national unity and ideals was added to the model of ‘enlightened motherhood’.
Halide Edip got in touch with lots of women from different regions now, not just with
city-dwellers as she did previously. Especially, she gave much importance to the
Anatolian women and invited all females to give their supports to the national struggle,
because it was the time of fighting for an independent life with the whole nation. Halide
Edip believed that with the winning of this war a new country and new identities were
going to be established and “[…] nobody would prison a woman, who involved in life
with her pencil, weapon, ox-cart and heart, into homes once more” ([…] Kalemi, silahı,
 56

kağnısı ve yüreği ile hayata karışan kadını bir daha kimse eve hapsedemeyecekti)
(Özakman, 2005, p.136).

Then, what happened after the Independence War? Did everything become
real as Halide Edip struggled for? Could Turkish women manage to be visible
throughout the patriarchal Ottoman society by bursting their fetters? From the point of
Halide Edip and her ‘new women identity’, the answer is positive. The issues that
Halide Edip struggled for were the education rights of women, their visibility in public
areas and the abolishments of the limitations on their participating into the social life.
Thus, gradually, she obtained what she had fought for Turkish women so far, and during
the modernization period, Turkish women gained the possibilities of employment and
extended their visibility in public areas. Halide Edip also encouraged Turkish women to
become intellectual and conscious individuals. However, what Halide Edip emphasized
about ‘conscious individuals’ was different from that of mentioned in west though it
was similar in some ways due to the influences of the college atmosphere and the
independent female models there. Indeed, the effects of this period and Halide Edip’s
comings and goings about the idea of individual female identity will be clearly seen in
the next chapter while studying the protagonist of her early period novel ‘Handan’.
Nevertheless, it was before the Independence War, and then, the access shifted from
individual freedom to the national independence and unity as explained previously.
Indeed, Halide Edip made clear why Turkish women had to be ‘conscious individuals’
in her article published in Mehasin:

Kadınlar, erkekler kadar öğrenmeye, her şeyi öğrenmeye muhtaçlar. Bu hususta

kadınların mevzuu erkeklerinkinden başka olamaz… Fakat bunları vezaif-i
hakikiyelerinden, hatta yemek pişirmekten bile çekindirecek tarzda temessül
etmemeli. Bildikleri şey ne kadar yüksek olursa olsun vezaif-i nisviyyelerine,
muhakemelerine, mürebbiyelik rollerine ahenktar bir mükemmeliyet vermelidir […]
Bir kadın evvela Osmanlı, bir vatanperverdir… vatanın hukuku kadınlık hukukundan
bin kat mühim ve muhteremdir. Onun için kadınlar bugün hukukumuz diye
haykırırken bunu kendileri için değil, vatana yetiştirecekleri evlada lazım olan
terbiyeyi verebilmek için olduğunu der-hatır etmelidir (Women need to learn as much
as men do, need to learn everything. In this case, the key concern of women cannot be
different from that of men… Yet, these new learnings should not realize in a way that
 57

encourage women to avoid fulfilling their principal responsibilities, even cooking.

However important is what they have learnt, it must be in a perfect harmony with their
responsibilities, discretion and the role of governess […] A woman is an Ottoman, a
patriot in the first place… The rights of a country are a thousand times more
important and honourable than those of women. Thus, while crying out for their
rights, women must remember that these rights are for the breeding of the child that
they will bring up for the country) (qtd. in Demirdirek, 1993, p.38–40).

As clearly understood from the quotation above, Halide Edip recreated the
well-established roles of women in the patriarchal Ottoman society rather than
challenge them. One of the reasons of her not challenging the patriarchal modes, the
only reason in my opinion, was the religious structure of the Ottoman society. In this
traditional Muslim society, the fields had been separated according to the genders long
before and there were definite sexual and moral codes previously determined. Religion
was of great importance for everybody, so was Halide Edip (unlike Virginia Woolf). As
a consequence, Halide Edip constructed a ‘virtuous and moral womanhood’ in harmony
with the patriarchal modes of the Ottoman society by regarding the sexuality and
feminine desires as taboo and immune. In fact, the opinions and conflicts of Halide Edip
about these points were reflected in her novel Handan. Halide Edip had to kill her
protagonist who experienced a fatal love and so got stuck between living in accordance
with her private needs and the rules of the patriarchy. We think it will be totally
understood how strict and strong were the religious and moral codes while analysing the
struggles of the protagonist, Handan in next chapters.

To sum up, Turkish women were not able to get their individual freedom as
the women in West did and could not find a way to establish their independent life by
relying on their own choices. Nevertheless, Halide Edip was an important figure for
Turkish women and in their modernization. She managed to open the ways of getting
further education and becoming visible in public life for Turkish women, and became a
model for the next female generation with her strong personality and womanly pride.
 CHAPTER THREE
THE SOCIAL STATUS AND PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN IN THE VOYAGE
OUT AND HANDAN
 59

3.1 The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

When women are not recognized as unique entities but accepted as the
passive and interchangeable parts in the social mechanism, unquestioning the culturally-
dictated roles, they soon get accustomed to living in the restrictive Victorian society and
do not wish or hope to have another position. They try to achieve fulfilment by doing
the tasks and roles assigned by the society. Nevertheless, Woolf has never been one of
them. Neither has she accepted the given position and the roles nor has she trusted her
society and let it make choices for her. Instead, she sees herself as an outsider, a woman
wishing and hoping to live apart from the restrictions and the value system of the
Victorian society.

Though never dictating what truth is, Woolf thinks that the interaction
between the reader and the text will bring the discovery of truth into the realm of
possibility. Thus, through her art, she tries to establish the values of the new age which
she really desires and attempts to refuse the established order of patriarchal society and
the identity and experience it imposes. She knows very well that “[An] emphasis on
experience and identity reinforces the continuation of the stereotypes – ‘woman is …’,
‘women are …’ – by encouraging us to remain within these very categories which are
responsible for our oppression and repression”(Marks, 1981 qtd. in Reese, 1996, p.82).
With this knowledge, Woolf has created heroines, entrapped in externally-imposed
situations, who reject these dictations and suffocating social norms and search for
various escape manoeuvres to release them. Rachel Vinrace, the protagonist of Woolf’s
first novel, is the precedent of these searchers.

The Voyage Out, printed in 1915 after its many revisions between 1908 and
1913, is an interesting and important first novel of Virginia Woolf. It is generally
accepted as a consciously experimental work, which cost her great labour and
psychological suffering despite not being able to totally create the new novel that she
 60

desires to write by rejecting the traditional and Victorian ways dominant in English
novel. However, it can still be viewed as an attempt or a transition from traditional to
modernity as Lytton Strachey wrote to Woolf in her letter for “being very very
unvictorian” (2005, p.56).

Although not as radical as her later fiction, as it has been mentioned above,
The Voyage Out has also a great importance due to the fact that it anticipates the mature
novels of Virginia Woolf. John Batchelor clearly proves this fact by combining the title
of Woolf’s first novel – The Voyage Out – with the great novel of her maturity – To The
Lighthouse – in one long title: “The Voyage Out To The Lighthouse” (2000, p.19).
However, apart from these, the wider concern of Woolf in The Voyage Out is to reflect
the influence of ‘New Women writing’ since it subverts the established genres, the
male-oriented narrative of voyage and romance, and resists the traditional closures
associated with them. She desires to demonstrate the differences between the
possibilities open to men both in the Victorian and the early twentieth-century, and
those open to women in the same periods.

The Voyage Out can be literally interpreted in that it covers the journey from
England to South America on the Euphrosyne, the name of the ship. Yet, with the
frequently-appeared metaphors such as the Euphrosyne, travelling like “a bride going
forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men” (16), it is clearly understood that this is
Rachel’s journey into maturity and womanhood. Woolf, experiencing the Victorian
period, is aware of the perplexities in the condition of being a woman. There were
‘voyages out’ for men whereas there were just ‘voyages in’ for women: voyages into the
marriage and domesticity (Peach, 2000). It was usually the men being able to decide
about their movements and destinations while the women were the subjects of these
travels having been chosen for them. However, with The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf
tries to depict what is to be a woman under patriarchy and offer a more sophisticated
version of women’s position in a male-dominated society with Rachel’s experiences.
 61

Whether she becomes successful to challenge the expectations of patriarchy in this

novel with Rachel will be studied in the following sections.

3.1.1 Rachel and Her Struggles for Identity in the Patriarchal Society

Father’s birthday. He would have been … 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like
other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely
ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; -- inconceivable. (D,
Wednesday 28 November 1928, qtd. in Batchelor, 1991, p.109)

Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that if her father had survived into his
nineties, she would never have been able to become a writer. Indeed, there is nothing
surprising here, because in the Victorian period, a certain standard of behaviour and
socially-dictated roles were being expected from women. Like Virginia Woolf, Rachel
Vinrace, the protagonist of her first novel The Voyage Out, describing the impact of the
Victorian society and patriarchy on females, had to lead the lives of conventional
Victorian women.

Rachel, whose mother died when she was eleven and she is 24 now, was
raised by her maiden aunts, who are amorphous in their ministrations, and by the ship-
owner father, who is quite possessive and chiefly absent during her upbringing. Though
being capable of music, herself a pianist, she is unformed and incomplete in her social
and emotional development, damaged by unevenness of her early years. This young
budding musician sets out a voyage on her father’s ship - the Euphrosyne. This voyage
seems as if it is going to be a liberating one providing opportunities for Rachel to move
away from the sheltered background assigned by her aunts and father. On the voyage,
she establishes a good relationship with her uncle’s wife, Helen Ambrose, whom she
has encountered for the first time, and gains her sympathy and counsel. Then, under the
 62

protection of her aunt Helen, the direction of her voyage turns to the South America for
adventure and self-fulfilment.

After having embarked on, from the starting point London to the finishing
place – a south American country – Rachel encounters with four events affecting her
identity development in an enormous way: her encountering with Helen and efforts to
complete herself with her; her being kissed by the mischievous politician Richard
Dalloway, one of the passengers on the ship, during the voyage to the South America
and observing Richard Dalloway’s relationship with his wife, Clarissa Dalloway; her
stay in a villa in a South American country and her experiences with English visitors to
a nearby hotel, as a consequence of which she falls in love with Terence Hewet, the
aspiring writer; and an expedition upriver which is followed by Rachel’s death from
fever.

As Rado argues, The Voyage Out foregrounds “a universe … that does not
allow the articulation of female subject at all” (2000, p.150). Then, what is involved in
this universe for females if there is no self-expression? The answer is clear: the
constraints of the Victorian society, the stability, patriarchal marriage and its dictates
such as being a good mother for the children and an obedient wife for the husband.
However, has Rachel ever and really tried resisting these social dictates or has she
accepted them without questioning and chosen to be the inferior part of the patriarchal
system? The answers of these questions will be given in the following parts.

In the first part of the novel, during the voyage across the Atlantic to South
America, Rachel, raised and educated as a “well-to-do girl in the last part of the
nineteenth century” and allowed to “learn nothing but music” (The Voyage Out, 1915,
p.16-17), begins to realize that the women have been shaped according to the rules of
the patriarchy in which she has been living for a long time. Nonetheless, she cannot
 63

make up her mind whether it is better for her to struggle against these constraints or
reconcile with them.

Indeed, her dilemma is clearly understood on her first appearance in the

novel. Rachel, as her father’s daughter, has to welcome and entertain her uncle, Ridley
Ambrose, and her aunt, Helen Ambrose because the social obligations cannot be
avoided. These obligations can also not be accepted, so while being prepared to meet
them, she regards her duties with discomfort, as something to be acquiesced in distaste
as a tight-fitting shoe or a cold, damp draft from an open window (Reese, 1976).

With the coming of Helen, her uncle’s wife, Rachel shifts her concentration
to her aunt. She begins to analyze her whether Helen – even she is married – has
experienced the same feelings since she is also a female like herself. Unfortunately,
Rachel understands very soon that Helen, seeing her as an “unlicked girl” (The Voyage
Out, p.21), tries to shape her like the others – her father and maiden aunts. She assesses
Rachel as a poor material with which to work, since like most girls, Rachel is also too
emotional and changeable. Thus, Helen takes the responsibility of moulding Rachel into
a satisfactory piece of artistry and a proper hostess, who is “highly trained in promoting
men’s talk without listening to it, could think—about the education of children, about
the use of the fog sirens in an opera” (The Voyage Out, p.7). Rachel, with great
disappointment, realizes that Helen has also accepted the system “in which things went
round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think
about it” (The Voyage Out, p.18).

One week later, they drop anchor in Lisbon and the Dalloways - Richard
Dalloway, a pompous and sentimental politician, and Clarissa Dalloway, his obedient
wife - embark on the Euphrosyne. This time, in the person of Clarissa Dalloway Rachel
tries to find ways to understand and reconcile with the life surrounded her.
 64

As a lady of quality, impressive in her manners, Clarissa provokes Rachel’s

admiration and presents her with a tempting alternative in her quest for self-expression
and true values:

Clarissa, indeed, was a fascinating spectacle. […] She was astonishingly like an
eighteenth-century masterpiece – a Reynolds or a Romney. She made Helen and the
other look coarse and slovenly beside her. Sitting lightly and upright, she seemed to be
dealing with the world as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this way
and that beneath her finger (The Voyage Out, p.24).

However, as happened in her unification with Helen, Rachel again

understands that Clarissa, regarding herself as the inferior counterpart and satellite
revolving around and reflecting the glory of her husband, is just an illusion and not an
answer to her questions: “Dick [Richard], you are better than I am. You see round
where I only see there. […] What I like about you is that you’re always the same, and
I’m a creature of moods” (The Voyage Out, p.27). Her surprise and disappointment
increase when she hears Richard Dalloway’s version of their marriage. She sees that
Clarissa’s life has been one of the confinements in a cocoon-like existence, performing
the helping functions providing the necessary structure to maintain her husband’s social
and political power:

I never allow my wife to talk about the politics….For this reason. It is impossible for
human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals. If I have
preserved mine, as I am thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due to the
fact that she has spent her day calling, music, play with children, domestic duties—
what you will; her illusions have not been destroyed. She gives me courage to go on.
The strain of public life is very great (The Voyage Out, p.36).

In depth, indeed, Clarissa senses that there are mistakes and violations in her
life, even in her apparent conformity to the roles she must play. She wonders “whether
it is really good for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior. […] It
 65

makes one so dependent” (The Voyage Out, p.28). Yet, she still adopts the life given by
her husband. In addition to all, this man, whom Clarissa admires most and deifies,
betrays her by kissing Rachel. Instead of being ashamed of his action and apologizing,
he accuses Rachel of ‘tempting’ him and treats her as if she should feel grateful since he
has not gone further. What is more traumatizing for her is that not only is her body
blamed for this attack but also this shameful behaviour has been realized by the deified
husband of Clarissa Dalloway, whom Rachel regards as a hope and solution in her
quest.

Since she cannot talk about this attack with Clarissa, Rachel turns again to
Helen with the hope that this time she can create a way to find an answer to her
questions. Yet, Helen advises her “to think no more about it” (The Voyage Out, p.46)
and she cannot restrain herself from laughing and finding strange that at the age of
twenty-four, Rachel, hardly knows anything about men and desires. Yet, in our opinion,
the behaviour of Helen is so strange here because she also knows very well that
Rachel’s ignorance about sex and her lack of proper education stem from the same
social assumption of the masculine world that Helen has been exposed before. Thus, she
is not even permitted to conceive herself as ‘victim’ and following the kiss, symbolizing
the male desire for possession and entrapment, Rachel sees a nightmare:

She dreamt that she was walking down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow by
degrees she could touch the damp bricks on either side. At length the tunnel opened
and became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever she
turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with
long nails (The Voyage Out, p.44).

Here, it is obviously seen that the female body represented by the tunnels
and a damp vault is repressed by the lust of patriarchy represented by a deformed man
with long nails, and Rachel is held as a prisoner forever.
 66

Consequently, Rachel is also not successful in this attempt and rejects

Clarissa, too, like rejecting Helen. After all of these failures, she decides to give a pause
to her attempts for her quest until she reaches the country in South America. However,
she still so powerfully feels the vision of her personality in her inner that she admits to
Helen though she stammers: “I can be m-m-myself […] “ in spite of you, in spite of the
Dalloways and Mr. Pepper [one of her father’s friend on the ship], and Father, and my
Aunts, in spite of these” (The Voyage Out, p.48).

Rachel, seeking knowledge about herself and identity, continues her

searching when she settles down the villa San Gervasio, situated in the Amazon region
of South America, with her uncle, Ridley, and aunt, Helen. Indeed, Rachel’s voyage to
the Amazon region – through which Virginia Woolf tries to reveal the long history of
male efforts to invade and colonize the female territory, in which the powerful and free
women lived previously, by using the indications of the myth – is full of restrictions and
violence. The ship voyages to the Amazon jungle where, some three hundred years ago,
“hardy Englishmen, […] with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh […] soon
reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment. Here a settlement was made;
women were imported; children grew” (The Voyage Out, p.51).

As clearly seen, this land – violently invaded and occupied by the hardy
Englishmen, who replace the free and powerful women with imported women, who
accept the structures of patriarchy like Helen Ambrose and Clarissa Dalloway – does
not promise and offer the truth and knowledge that Rachel desires to find. Furthermore,
in this land, she encounters with other imported women, who survive the lives in “the
little boxlike squares” (The Voyage Out, p.59), except Helen and Clarissa --bending
their minds to their husbands’ needs and silencing their own voices for the sake of them.
Most of these obedient women display the different kinds of existence available to
females who are a part of a conventional and philistine society. For example, for the
married ones like Mrs. Eliot and Mrs. Thornbury, the most important things are
arranging five-tea parties, gathering together and talking about the routine duties of the
 67

day. They think that their life is satisfactory and secure as they are married and do not
have to earn their lives like the unmarried women. For the married women, the life
without marriage is the hardest because it is the duty of the husband not the wife to
afford the expenses of the households. Susan Warrington, who has grown up with these
kinds of ideas provided by the women like Mrs. Eliot and Mrs. Thornbury, tries to get
married as soon as possible both to get rid off looking after her selfish aunt, Mrs. Paley,
and “to join the ranks of the married women […], to escape the long solitude of an old
maid’s life” (The Voyage Out, p.82) like Miss Alan, the kind academic spinster – having
no other choice but to absorb in books since she does not have a husband and any
children to be interested in. There is also a liberating flirt, Evelyn, who seems to be a bit
more confident than the others because she has to look after herself mostly as being lack
of parental care. However, in her depth, she is also unhappy and insecure. Even not
confessing loudly, Evelyn also tries to find “somebody great and big and splendid” (The
Voyage Out, p.113) in her all life.

To sum up, all the women that Rachel has encountered so far – including
Clarissa, who regards her husband as a deified creature and admits this totally by saying
“I feel for him [Richard] what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ”
(The Voyage Out, p.28), and Helen, who abandons her children behind her in London to
be able to realize her husband’s needs – are passive receivers of the roles given by the
male-dominated society. As Simone de Beauvoir, the famous French author and
philosopher, argues in her book The Second Sex, these women are the tool for
representing – the mirror – portraying the men at twice their normal size and
diminishing the female-identity:

One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate
determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a
whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is
described as feminine (Beauvoir, 1962, p.249).
 68

However, the obvious fact remains that historically and psychologically

men and women have experienced both the world and their own selves in very different
ways, in which the male characters in the novel The Voyage Out clearly prove this fact.
They are the indications of the unassailable male fortresses, politics and scholarships,
and of the male assumptions of privilege and domination in sexuality and in intellect;
whereas the women are the victims of the society - which exploits women intellectually,
sexually and socially and leaves them as the inferior parts of the men – having been
imported into the homes for the purpose of bringing up children and meeting the
demands of their husbands (Lee, 1977). The relationships between Helen and Ridley,
and Clarissa and Richard are the perfect examples representing the established system
of the patriarchy as stated above. Both Ridley and Richard, whose lives are full of
movement, access to education and power very easily. They are representatives of a
particular class of men being able to attend to ‘both universities’ as Richard boasts in an
arrogant way to Rachel, “I was at both universities. It was fad of my father’s” (The
Voyage Out, p.35). He feels no need to name them since his class is so closely linked
with Oxford and Cambridge – but not through for hard work but because of a ‘fad’ of
his father, which is impossible for daughters. Thus, there are not so many alternatives
for Helen and Clarissa to choose that they accept the roles assigned by their husbands as
they are incomplete both intellectually and socially.

Rachel experiences the same feelings when she first meets St. John Alaric
Hirst, one of the three cleverest men in England educated at Winchester and Cambridge
and got scholarships everywhere, and stammers while speaking to him. First of all, they
talk about dance and music, about which Rachel feels herself secure and better, but
then, when they start to talk about books and Rachel admits that she has not read many
classics, Hirst masculine acquirements induce her to take a very modest view of her
own power: “D’you mean to tell me you’ve reached the age of twenty-four without
reading Gibbon?” and leaves her alone by saying “It’s no good; we should live separate;
we cannot understand each other; we only bring out what’s worst” (The Voyage Out,
p.91-92). His behaviour makes Rachel feel outraged because he has patronizingly
 69

assumed that she will not be able to understand ‘Gibbon’, the literary preference of the
male tradition.

Hirst’s blaming Rachel for not reading many classics and even not knowing
Gibbon is nonsense, because she has no chance to choose the way of her upbringing or
education. Neither her father nor her aunts ask Rachel about her special needs and
interests but they just expect her to behave according to the social conventions and
norms. Thus, she gets what has been given to her, which is too little compared to that
having been given to men. However, this reaction of Hirst makes Rachel think about the
truth she tries to find. There are two ways put forward to her to be able to reach that
truth she is searching for: either she will listen to her inner self and choose to realize her
private needs or she will do what most of the other women do and live according to the
public needs. Unfortunately, Rachel chooses the second one as she has been used to
living within a microcosm of the conventional English way of life since her childhood,
ensuring her ignorance and inexperience. However, the real reason hidden behind
Rachel’s choice is her being under the influence of Helen, for whom the only possible
way to reach the true values is through union with the human community, or more
accurately with one single individual; that is union with male. Thus, during one of the
occasions arranged by Helen, Rachel meets Terence Hewet, a young inspiring writer,
and decides to be unified with him like Helen and Clarissa - unified with their husbands,
Ridley and Richard. She chooses the ideology of romantic love and naturally the
marriage as a possible basis for her true values.

In their initial relationship, attempting to imitate the relationships of the

other women with men surrounded her, Rachel thinks highly of him, because unlike St.
Hirst, Terence seems to adopt the feminine point of view and makes her feel confident
of herself and talk however she enjoys without the fear of being discredited of her
ignorance:
 70

At first he moved as a god; as she came to know him better he was still the centre of
light, but combined with this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring and
confident of herself. She was conscious of emotions and powers […] (The Voyage
Out, p.135).

This power – instead of letting her experience the freedom and creative
growth which she hopes to find in Terence – inevitably becomes an unwelcome attempt
to control Rachel’s mind as well as her entire being as their relationship becomes more
intimate. Terence begins to display what has been taught to him since he was born
toward Rachel --the desire for control and mastery on women. Convinced that “women
… don’t think” (The Voyage Out, p.177), while thinking on his novel in silence, he
allows Rachel to indulge in her music as long as what she plays is “helpful to [his]
literary composition” (The Voyage Out, p.177). Rachel says nothing at first but then
shows the books on the table and tries to defend herself by claiming that there are some
words nonsense compared to sounds. Having looked at the books that Rachel shown,
Terence answers in an aggressive way and imposes his own value system on her:

God, Rachel, you do read trash! … And you’re behind the times too, my dear. No one
dreams of reading this kind of thing now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing
descriptions of life in the east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry,
Rachel, poetry, poetry, poetry! (The Voyage Out, p.178)

While Rachel tries to understand the changes in Terence toward her and
waiting for an apology for his harsh treatment, he offends her once more by exclaiming
that she will never get the truth and understand the facts as she is “essentially feminine”
(The Voyage Out, p.180) and throws her to the floor “where she lay gasping and crying
for mercy” (The Voyage Out, p.182). Thus, Rachel loses her last hope. Whatever she
does, she cannot find the answers to her questions about herself and the female identity,
and the place of the women in the society. Firstly, she relies on the women she
encounters with the idea that they are also the females and, most probably, they have
experienced the same feelings and problems that Rachel has faced. Maybe, they can
find a solution to Rachel and show a place for her in the society that she has been
 71

seeking for a long time. Unfortunately, she finds out that they have already accepted the
given and they are satisfied with the life they survive. The women that Rachel meets in
the hotel are happy with their woven substance of life with its meals, parties,
households; that is, all the punctualities and routines. Clarissa with her vision of male-
female unity continues to support her husband as an inferior part in this unity. At the
same time, Helen with her idea of social conformity and the union with the human
community keeps on arranging parties and dinners and meanwhile – since the most
important part in this union is to find a male partner – tries to create opportunities for
Rachel for her future husband. Finally, after the several occasions arranged by Helen,
Rachel decides on Terence Hewet, the most disappointing part in her quest. She thinks
that he is the answer to all her searches, because he seems to be different from the other
men - her father and uncle, Richard and Hirst. He listens and talks to her without
criticizing, and makes Rachel feel important by this way. He knows much about the
problems of the women and he is sensitive to the injustice toward them. Even one day,
while again talking about the harsh treatments of men to women, he surprises Rachel by
saying “If I were a woman, I’d blow some one’s brains out” (The Voyage Out, p.128).
Yet, as they get closer and decide on marriage, everything changes and Terence
becomes possessive and demanding as he will be the husband and Rachel has to know
her responsibilities from now on.

Rachel realizes that none of them – Helen, Clarissa, Terence and the others
– is an answer to her quest. She still has difficulties in believing that no one knows the
truth and the answers she is searching for. However, what surprises her most is that how
all of these people survive a life like this, which is really disturbing for her, and accept
everything without questioning. Yet, they do not feel compelled to revaluate their own
lives and values:

No one feels—no one does anything but hurt. I tell you, Helen, the world’s bad. It’s an
agony, living, wanting—[…] the lives of these people […] the aimlessness, the way
they live. One goes from to another, and it’s all the same. One never gets what one
wants out of any of them (The Voyage Out, p.157).
 72

Rachel wonders whether there are any people ever feeling what she feels or
she is the only one experiencing these conflicts. However, in her opinion, this is just a
‘dream’ because there cannot be any human beings who do not think, care or feel but
just exist. Rachel decides to struggle against them since she is “the best musician in
South America”, even if not in Europe or Asia, and she will not have “eleven children
[…] the eyes of an old woman” (The Voyage Out, p.177-179). She wants to be creative
and independent rather than one representing a feminine passivity. To prove this, she
offers Terence to break the engagement off, which will lead her into a patriarchal
marriage and then a subservient life in the future. Yet, later, she loses her courage to
realize her private needs due to the fears of reactions to come from the restrictive
society and the servants of it: the women like Helen, Clarissa and the others for whom
this kind of life is the only and the best way to survive. Rachel feels lonely because
nobody – even the women – feels and thinks like herself. The men live in a privileged
world which is so different from theirs. The single women long for marriage to be able
to find a place for themselves and take their lives under guarantee, and the married ones
sacrifice everything to be able to keep what they have obtained with marriage lasting.

Despite all the conflicts she experiences, Rachel decides again to try living
and feeling like other women and joins the expedition upriver, in which she takes the
roles of the socially constructed femininity such as taking parts in the preparation of
meals, pretending to be listening to the speeches of the men and accompanying Terence
everywhere he goes. However, towards the end of the expedition, while Terence reading
a poem aloud from Milton about a water nymph, Rachel’s mind fixes upon the words
“curb”, reminding her repression she feels and “Locrine and Brute” --they are the father
and the grandfather of the nymph, respectively--, representing the patriarchal world she
must inhabit (The Voyage Out, p.173). In this state of mind, preceding her illness, she
feels the contradiction and pressure so immense that she resolves the conflict by
withdrawing into the state of alienation. The outer world becomes far away and she is
“completely cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated
alone with her body” (The Voyage Out, p.205). In fever, she begins to see hallucinations
 73

and nightmares in which she depicts herself as a ‘little deformed woman’. All the efforts
performed by Helen and Terence cannot bring her into consciousness and day by day
she gets worse. They get another doctor to examine her but it does not work. Indeed,
Rachel is gradually approaching to the end of her voyage, starting on the Euphrosyne
from England to the South America. Throughout her journey, she is constantly
reminded the powers of the patriarchy she is against. Instead of experiencing creative
growth and realizing her private needs for her feminine identity, Rachel has had to
endure the “agony, living, wanting” (The Voyage Out, p.157) of an unfulfilled desire.
But now, she is in the end to finish her agonies and conflicts. She understands that she
will not be able to find a proper place for herself in this society, dominated by men and
their sacrificing women. Now, she voyages even further out creating her own universe:

At last the faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which
eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint
booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all
tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled at the bottom of
the sea. There she lay; sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now
and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea (The Voyage Out, p.215).

Rachel is now happy with her new situation and loneliness and she wants no
one to disturb it now. However, whether is this one she has been searching through the
whole voyage and has she succeeded her female exploration despite the restrictions and
the dictates of the patriarchal society?

3.2 Handan by Halide Edip-Adıvar

When the sovereign power in the world begins to change and the old inside
conflicts with the new outside, the people living in that society have to pass a crisis and
a depression period, and in accordance with that, they have to search for their new
identities. The Ottoman society, trying to replace its traditional system with the modern
 74

Turkish Republic, has also faced with these kinds of problems and identity crisis.
However, these changes and so-called improvements have realized in a state of
colonization named ‘westernization’, worsening the situation for the Turkish people.
While the Ottoman intellectuals are trying to harmonize the relationship between the
east and the west and lessen the impacts of the west, the new identities having aroused
as a result of these changes and conflicts begin to shape. However, like in the west, the
most agonizing changes have been experienced and felt in the formation of the new
women identities while passing to modernity from traditional way of life.

The new Turkish women identity has been formed – from the beginning – in
a defined modernization, in which the restrictions have been specified by the male-
dominated society. Though desiring to provide freedom for women, the patriarchal
system immediately determines a scope of undesired in which the rules for this
independency are written. Furthermore, these sophisticated men continue to take
decisions on behalf of the women about how much visibility they can get and also in
what measures they can be represented. Yet, being aware of the fact that they cannot
obtain the freedom they desire under the dominance of the men, the women decide to
keep on their struggling. Halide Edip, a leading character of the modern Turkish
women, is one of these brave women deciding about their own futures. She personally
has experienced all of these crises, taken active roles in the whole developments and
furthermore, with her literary fame and works related with the experiences of women,
struggled for both the formation and the representation of the new women identity
having been a subject matter to warm debates. During her whole life, Halide Edip has
fought against the traditional concept of femininity and tried hard for women to run
away their prison-like lives in which they become the servants of the men, because in
her opinion, such a kind of life makes women lazy and useless toys.

As a result of the education she has taken and under the influences of her
western women teachers having independent and distinctive personalities, Halide Edip
believes that the only way of liberation for Ottoman women is education. In parallel
 75

with this opinion, she states the ideal female in her article that she has written with the
name of Halide Salih in her first years named ‘Beşiği Sallayan El Dünyaya Hükmeder’
(The Cradle Swinging Hand Rules the World): “Bizi rafa konup bakılacak gözlerinizin
hazzı için imal edilmiş biblolar yahut evinizde istirahat-ı maddiyetinizi temin edecek
hizmetkarlar sırasına koymayınız. Biz… kavi iradetli, mesul kadınlar olmak isteriz” (Do
not consider us an ornament specially-made for your visual gusto put on the shelf or
servants assuring your comfort at home. We … desire to be strong-willed and liable
women) (Salih, Halide, Tanin, August 6th 1908 qtd. in Enginün, 1991, p. 450-51).

In Handan, which was written in 1912 and the well-known one among her
early stage novels, Halide Edip narrates a sophisticated young woman who takes the
attention of everybody not only with her knowledge and culture that is even more
excellent than men, but also with her contradictory behaviours with the socially-
constructed femininity. She has such a strong and affective personality that Halide Edip
uses her name as the title of the novel to prove these strengths of the woman who is
conscious about her identity. This novel with its anomalous theme has had a great effect
in society and been criticized severely by claiming that - due to the common
characteristic features and social status between Halide Edip and Handan – the
protagonist of the novel has significant touches from Halide Edip and indeed, it is
totally the narration of her life. In relation to these criticisms, Yakup Kadri
Karaosmanoğlu, without knowing the heartbreaks of Halide Edip that she has
experienced, goes far and embroiders the novel as an autobiography: “Meğer, Halide
Hanım ilk evlilik hayatında Handan gibi bedbaht olmuş, aynı ruh krizlerini geçirmiş ve
çok bağlı olduğu kocasından ayrılmak zorunda kalmış ve hala da bu durumun acıları
içindeymiş” (Apparently, Madam Halide was very unhappy in her first marriage like
Handan, had the same hysteria and had to leave her beloved husband, and she is still
suffering) (Karaosmanoğlu, 2000, p.259).

Actually, these judgements are true somewhat because Halide Edip has
written this novel immediately after she divorced from her first husband [Salih Zeki],
 76

who wanted to get married to a second wife during their marriage. Thus, with her recent
grief, she focuses on the feelings, passions and experiences of Handan, whose husband
has a tendency towards other women and extramarital relations. Though arousing
admiration in everyone and being an intellectual woman, Handan has to bear her
husband’s betrayals and insults because of the dictates of the society. She tries to get rid
off these conventions and ignore the social morality by choosing to realize her private
and feminine needs through a new love. However, if Handan is able to break the walls
of the patriarchy and achieve what she desires, or has to obey the rules and choose the
socially-constructed femininity imposed to her will be studied in details in the following
sections.

3.2.1 Handan and Her Struggles for Identity in the Patriarchal Society

In this novel, literally a narrative about the feelings and the experiences of a
woman explained through the letters written among the characters – Handan, Neriman,
Refik Cemal, Server, Hüsnü Paşa and Nazım –, Halide Edip, who knows the restrictions
and prohibitions applied on women by the Ottoman patriarchal society, tries to create an
ideal female character through the protagonist Handan, who is conscious about her
existence, identity, and strength to be successful in the male- dominated fields from
education to politics. Also, Halide Edip gives a clear description about the struggles of
Handan to obtain a status and a voice in the society in which she has been forced to
survive a prison-like life for a long time with the male-defined roles, such as the
sacrificing wife to her husband and a good mother to her children. However, is Halide
Edip able to create the new women identity that she longs for in her novel Handan, or is
her protagonist giving the name to the novel also defeated and becomes an easy prey to
the patriarchy like the other women?

Handan is always an attractive and interesting person for everybody around

her, and the common opinion among them is that how talented, sophisticated and
 77

different she is. Apart from the others, Handan has a special place for her cousin,
Neriman, who is quiet and moderate; that is, totally contrary to Handan. Neriman does
not avoid expressing her admiration and devotion towards her and accepts that she is
the most important person in her life. Handan’s influence on her is so great that
sometimes she feels as if she had no subjective existence:

“Handan ta dünyayı görebildiğim zamandan beri duygulanma tarzlarıma bile o kadar

hakim olmuş, o kadar benliğimin her zerresine sarılmış, o kadar şahsiyeti ile
şahsiyetime istediği rengi ve şekli vermiştir ki, adeta bende onun bir resmi yaşar ve
çok zaman bazı şeyleri görüp işiten Handan mı, ben mi bilemem” (Ever since I was
born, Handan has always had a dominant influence on every part of me, even on my
feelings, and also with her personality shaped and coloured mine in such a way that I
sometimes feel as if a portrait of her lives in me and cannot decide whether she or me
that sees and hears) (Handan, p.40-41).

Handan is gradually introduced to the reader with her influences on others,

especially on Neriman. However, this passion and admiration of Neriman to her cousin,
is very worrying for her husband, Refik Cemal, who is a young intellectual official in
the foreign affairs adopting the western way of life. In his opinion, Handan is “a very
strong and distinctive person for a woman” (bir kadın için fazla kuvvetli bir şahsiyet)
(Handan, p.22) and he fears that she may affect Neriman, who provides him the peace
and silence in their marriage with her obedience, in a negative way. Yet, as their
marriage is going forward, Refik Cemal begins to get bored of Neriman, whom he has
chosen as his wife due to her silence and obedience and accepts her as the symbol and
representative of happiness, because she is not adequate enough to discuss and talk
about the philosophy, history and sociology. In his opinion, she is just “…. a herb, a
flower, a thing!” (…. bir ot, bir çiçek, bir şey!) (Handan, p.22).

Indeed, here, the social transformation process of Ottomans and its effects
on men and women is clearly observed. On one hand, the man desires the continuation
of the social system that he has been accustomed to living in which the woman is
responsible with households and upbringings. On the other hand, he dreams about a
 78

modern woman who can keep up with the changes in the society and discuss about these
changes and improvements with him. As a matter of fact, Refik Cemal, experiencing the
same coming and going, senses the impossibility of realizing these dreams in a male-
dominated society. Yet, his ideas changes when he has to leave his country and
pregnant wife due the political upheavals in that period, and goes to Europe, where he
meets Handan, who seems to be able to fill the qualities that are missing in Neriman.
Even in their first meeting, Handan, about whom Refik Cemal has had to know through
the opinions and definitions of others so far, confuses his mind with her excellent
knowledge in philosophy, economy, politics and concern to the matters in the world.
Yet, this time - though complaining about the lack of knowledge in Neriman and having
a chance of meeting a sophisticated and learned woman like Handan – her way of
shaking hands “like a man” (bir erkek gibi) and “…. self-confidence that should not be
in a woman” (…. bir kadında olması lazım gelmeyen bir kendine güveniş) (Handan,
p.33-34) irritates him and in his letter to his wife, he mentions about his dilemma related
with Handan:

Evet, Handan pekiyi, nazik, akıllı bir kadın; fakat kadın da pek diyemeyeceğim.
Lakırdı söylerken, düşünürken onun kadın olduğunu bile insan düşünemiyor
[…]Acaba gayrı samimi bir mahlûk mu? (Yes, Handan is a nice, kind and a clever
woman, but actually I cannot exactly tell that she is a woman. While watching her
speak and think, one cannot imagine her as a woman […] I wonder if she is an
insincere creature?) (Handan, p.34–37)

Then, who is that woman, the differences of whose everybody is aware from
the other women in the society, but nobody can give an exact definition about her?

Handan is one of the “occidental daughters” (alafranga kızlarından biri)

(Handan, p.7) of Mr. Cemal, who is a member of the upper-class Ottoman society. As
being an intellectual man and knowing the value of education, he wants his daughters –
Handan, Neriman and Şehper – to be raised in accordance with the standards of
European way of life. With this aim, he provides all kinds of facilities and the chance of
 79

having the best education available in that period for them. However, among the three
sisters, Handan is the most intelligent one and she is immediately recognized by the
people around her with her ambition and self-confidence. Her unique purpose is to
know and learn about everything happening all over the world. Despite being supported
by her father to realize her needs, her step mother, Mrs. Sabire, who is an old sort of
Turkish woman thinking nothing but the comfort and peace of her husband at home, is
always an obstacle for Handan. In her opinion, every girl reaching at a certain age must
marry because being a learned and sophisticated one is not necessary in a marriage.
Now, since Handan is twenty, her immediate aim must be the marriage, not the
education:

Tahsili bitirmek bir kız için ne demek? Bir kaç lisan biliyor, artık kâtip olacak değil
ya! Hele bu yaşta kendisinin koca düşünmemesi pek acayip; […] Kızın bir erkekten
çok akıllı olduğuna şüphem yok, onda eksik olan şey akıl değil ki. Zaten hep bu başka
kızlara benzemeyen halleri onu evde bırakacak diye korkuyorum. Bu delilikleri
affettirecek kadar bari güzel olsa! (What does it mean for a girl to complete her
education? She knows a few languages and this is enough. She won’t be a clerk.
Furthermore, it is very strange for a girl at her [Handan’s] age not to think about
marriage. […] I have no suspicious that she is even much wiser than a man, but the
missing thing in her is not the wisdom. I fear that she will be the girl on the shelf with
these strange behaviours not common among the other girls. I wish she had been
beautiful enough to be excused from all her fiddlesticks!) (Handan, p.62–63).

Although she is continuously forced to get married immediately and

complained about her strange behaviours by her mother, Handan does not give up
struggling and keeps on doing her best to realize her private needs. Instead of escaping
from men, which is a recommended behaviour for all young women at a certain age in
the patriarchal Ottoman society; she participates in the meetings of Mr. Cemal [her
father] with his friends, listens to their discussions and tries to learn something new. In
one of those meetings, Handan meets a young intellectual man named Nazım. She is so
influenced by his extreme knowledge and talents that she does not want to lose any
opportunities to talk with him. However, though she enjoys being with him and
broadening her mind with his help, Handan begins to feel inferior since Nazım is better
than her. At first, she suffers from this feeling but then decides to struggle instead of
throwing in the towel:
 80

Bütün sabahtan beri birkaç saat içinde bu kadar muhtelif kabiliyetlerini tanıdığım bu
adam beni kendi nazarımda ne kadar da küçülttü. […] Ve sanki ayağımın altındaki
kum dağları yıkılmış, ben de öteki fanilerle aynı sahneye inmiştim. […] Fakat elbet bir
gün onun yanına tırmaşacağım, onun benden çok olan on dört senesini ben mutlak bir
senede atlayacağım (This man, whom I have known about his countless talents for a
few hours since the whole morning, makes me feel so inferior. […] And I feel myself as
if the mountains of sand lying under my feet had fallen and I had been descended to
the level of other mortals. […]Yet, I am sure that I will catch up with him and
complete my deficiencies in one year that he has achieved for fourteen years)
(Handan, p. 49-50).

With this desire of being like Nazım and ambition to go beyond him, she
begins to take private courses from Nazım on sociology, philosophy, literature and art.
At first, Nazım hesitates to study with Handan because he is not sure about whether she
is capable enough to do this. Then, his masculine feelings to shape a woman overpower
him and decide to educate her in accordance with his own ideals: “Handan Hanım’ı
okutup yetiştireceğim” (I will teach and train Miss. Handan) (Handan, p. 52). Of
course, this education will be the one designed not for the needs and desires of the
women but for the male satisfaction. Yet, these masculine acquirements cannot
discourage and hinder Handan from going further; on the contrary, help her realize her
female existence: “Ben de varım, yaşıyorum, düşünüyorum. Her şey Nazım’ın dediği
gibi değil” (I am also the one who exists, lives and thinks. Nothing is exactly the same
as Nazım has said) (Handan, p. 56).

Very soon, Nazım is also attracted by this ambitious, self-confident and

determined woman like the others around her, and proposes a marriage. Yet, there is
something strange and missing in this proposal. Like Refik Cemal, who has chosen
Neriman as his wife due to the fact that she has the features of being a self-sacrificing
wife and a good mother that will provide the peace and comfort at home, Nazım also
exhibits the same kind of male selfishness while proposing to Handan. He desires to
possess a woman, in this case, Handan, who is intelligent and learned enough to be a
companion to realize his aims and ideals. That is, he proposes to her to satisfy his own
 81

needs – saving the country from the imperialists and establishing a socialist system –
not because to love her:

Sizi tetkik ettim, gördüm ki siz mesleğe, paraya değil hayata, efkâra, büyük maksatlara
arkadaş olacak kızlardansınız. […] Memlekette belki bir gün büyük şeyler olacak ….
belki ateş, kan, duman, ve ölüm, pek çok ölüm. Siz, siz de bu ateş, kan, duman ve
ölüm yapanlardan olur musunuz? (I have been observing you for a long time and
realized that you are one of the few girls who can be a companion to the life, opinions
and great purposes, not to occupations and money. Maybe in one day, there will be
great things in the country …. fire, blood, mist, and death, lots of death. Will you be
the one of those creating fire, blood, mist, and death?) (Handan, p.72-73).

Handan refuses his proposal since she is aware of the fact that Nazım wants
to get married not to Handan but to a woman who will be the servant to him in realizing
his political aims. Such a kind of behaviour of Nazım, whom Handan really admires and
confides in, creates a sense of disappointment and distrust towards men. Meanwhile, she
encounters Hüsnü Paşa, who is a rich and retired ambassador having lived in Europe for
along time. He is not as learned, skilful and kind as Nazım, but there is something
different in his behaviours making Handan feel different. Whenever she enters a room,
Hüsnü Paşa turns all his interest and care to her, but this time, not due to her being more
intelligent and intellectual than the other girls. He creates a sense of being appreciated
in her as a beautiful woman to be looked at:

Bana bir arslan kafesine girer girmez arslanı kediye döndüren kızların hissi geldi […],
senelerce Avrupa’da dolaşmış, bütün familyasının ve dünyanın gözünü korkutmuş bir
adama hâkim oluvermek hissi! Bu iyi bir şey, oturduğum müddetçe başka tarafa
bakarken, teyzemle konuşurken bile benimle meşgul olduğunu hissediyorum (I have a
new kind of feeling present in such women having the ability of changing the lion into
the cat whenever they enter a lion cage […] A feeling of having and ruling a man, who
have travelled in Europe for several years and frightened all his family and the world.
This is good, while sitting or looking at another side and even talking to my aunt, I
feel that he is interested in me) (Handan, p.77).
 82

Handan, experiencing this kind of feeling for the first time, is happy to
attract a strong man’s attention and appraisal, like Hüsnü Paşa, and suddenly she
decides to marry him. Her quick decision surprises and saddens everybody in her
family, except Mrs. Sabire, desiring her daughter to get married immediately, because
Hüsnü Paşa is so different from Nazım with his behaviours and tastes. They warn
Handan about this marriage and try to dissuade her but she does not listen and marries
“…. even without wearing wedding-dress and veil” (gelinlik ve duvak bile giymemiş)
(Handan, p.78). Her quick decision about marriage to Hüsnü Paşa, in our opinion,
results from the fact that Handan tries to regain her wounded self-esteem, created by
Nazım having not regarded her as a woman to be loved. That is, however strong and
different from the other girls with her special skills, Handan is still a woman, who needs
protection, affection and safety. Unfortunately, Handan makes one of the biggest
mistakes in her life by thinking that she can obtain all of these through the institution of
marriage provided by a male, Hüsnü Paşa. She realizes her mistake very soon but there
is nothing so much to do. Even though she has refused the proposal of Nazım before in
order not to be a prisoner in his world full of political views and socialist ideals, she,
this time, turns herself into an object and just a sight by accepting to marry to Hüsnü
Paşa. Everybody that knows her agrees on the point that she has changed a lot though
she tries to seem happy. Even Neriman cannot understand the expression on her face
after getting married. There remains nothing from the cheerful, self-confident and
ambitious Handan, but instead, comes a new woman who is quiet, absent-minded and
reserved. Hüsnü Paşa has also changed, yet in a different way, after being sure that he
has totally grasped Handan, a woman proceeding on the way of completing her female
identity: “Handan her gün daha asabi ve sakitti. Hüsnü Paşa bilakis her gün daha şen,
daha Handan’a hâkim görünüyordu” (Day by day, Handan is becoming more nervous
and quiet. On the other hand, Hüsnü Paşa is more cheerful and dominant on Handan)
(Handan, p.82). Indeed, Handan is conscious about her own enslavement and
degradation. She is likely to perceive herself as a shadow. If she were the old Handan,
she would fight against all of these obstacles hindering her being a self-realized female.
Unfortunately, marriage turns out to be a failure for her.
 83

Yet, since she is a married woman now, Handan has to behave according to
the rules of the acceptable femininity in the society; that is, she must be faithful to her
husband, play the role of a happy woman for the sake of the status of her husband in the
society and fulfil the requirements of the marriage. This kind of life makes Handan
become a mere tool in the hands of her husband, Hüsnü Paşa, and she gradually begins
to lose the control of her own life. Besides, Hüsnü Paşa knows the privileges of being a
man in a patriarchal society and uses this power without hesitating. Whatever he does,
he is sure that Handan will always be loyal and devoted to him because she is not
‘Handan’ but his ‘wife’ now: “Sen benimsin ve benim kalacaksın. Hiç kimsenin
olmayacaksın” (You are mine and will always stay as mine. You won’t belong to
(Handan, p.149). For Hüsnü Paşa, Handan is nothing except a possession, but these
rules are not valid for him. He has already kept lots of mistresses although he is just
married and wants devotion from Handan, because he is a man and in a marriage, there
is not such an obligation that he has to obey. Furthermore, he does not avoid confessing
his betrayals and faithfulness towards the institution of marriage to Handan: “İzdivaç
nedir ki? İnsanın hasta, bedbaht ve yalnız dakikalarında bir ihtiyaç değil mi? (What is
marriage? Isn’t that just a necessity for a man when he is sick, sad and alone?)
(Handan, p.133).

What is more surprising is that such a sophisticated and independent woman

like Handan behaves as if there is nothing to worry and ignores whatever Hüsnü Paşa
says or does. Actually, she is aware of everything that is happening around, but decides
to carry the burdens of life alone since this kind of life is her choice. She blames herself
for having refused Nazım formerly by thinking that he proposed just for her intelligence
suitable to realize his aims, and for having accepted Hüsnü Paşa because of her female
narcissism. That is, by chasing after her fleshy desires awaken by Hüsnü Paşa, she has
become one of those ordinary women and a prisoner of the male-dominated society.
That woman, Handan, who takes the admiration of everybody with her strong
personality and extraordinary knowledge, is like a living dead now. Meanwhile, while
trying to put up with these problems and get accustomed to living as an obedient wife,
Handan is greatly weakened by the death of Nazım. After having been arrested and
 84

having decided about his exile to Fizan [a place in the southwest of Lebanon] by the
political powers in Ottoman, Nazım commits suicide in the prison by leaving two letters
to Handan written after her marriage to Hüsnü Paşa. In these letters, he accuses Handan
by saying “You left me empty, cold and in ruins, Handan!”(Beni bomboş, soğuk ve
harap bıraktın, Handan!) (Handan, p. 85) immediately before his suicide, which leaves
Handan in conscience smitten that caused great depression and breakdowns in her.
Thus, Hüsnü Paşa takes her to England by claiming that a weather change may be better
for her but his real intent is to create opportunities for himself to meet his mistresses
much more easily.

And at last, Refik Cemal meets Handan in England. However, the woman
that he has met is not the cheerful, self-confident and strong woman about whom he
hears much from Neriman and the others but on the contrary, the quiet, reserved and
ignorant one. She, who is continuously mentioned about her divergent behaviours and
skills against the acceptable femininity, cannot even imagine now leaving her unfaithful
husband and establishing a new independent life. In fact, waiting for a different reaction
from women having been suppressed for a long time is a great fantasy even they are
educated and conscious about their existences as individuals. Handan, like her fellows,
feels the pressure of the socially-constructed femininity ongoing for ages which forces
her to live according to the social dictates and the morality instead of realizing her
private needs and feminine identity.

In her opinion, the marriage is a sacred relation unlike her husband because
the woman identity exists largely as being for others rather than being for herself. Due
to these reasons and also the sense of the social-inferiority coming from the birth,
Handan feels obliged to bear her husband’s betrayals with lots of different women. She
never thinks of accusing Hüsnü Paşa and keeps on waiting for his return because
without him she feels herself insecure:
 85

Hayatımın bu dikenli ve fena yolunda, her şeye rağmen, … aynı kola dayanmış
başımla geçip gideceğim zannediyordum. Ve bu yola kendisiyle girdiğim arkadaşı
kaybetmemek için ne uzun, ne uzun, ne sefil ve aynı zamanda ne ulvi fedakârlıklara
katlandım […] Şimdi senin arkandan bakarken… benliğimin seninle beraber gittiğini
görüyorum […] Mevcudiyetine karıştırdığın kadını bıraktın, gidiyorsun; … ve
giderken beni, benliğimi götürüyorsun (I was thinking of surviving in this thorny and
miserable way of my life with my head leaning on the same arm despite everything. I
endured lots of difficulties that are so long, so long, so miserable and lofty sacrifices
as well not to lose my life companion […] Now, while looking at your back, …. I see
that my individuality is also going with you […] You are going by leaving the woman
whom you involve in your existence …. and taking me, my individuality as you are
going) (Handan, p.125–126).

Handan’s only consolation is her cousin, Neriman, who immediately comes

to England as soon as she learns about Handan’s situation in letters written by Refik
Cemal. Handan tries to forget all her troubles with Neriman and her newly-born baby
whose name becomes Nazım upon the request of Handan. While spending most of her
time playing with little Nazım and Neriman during the day, she talks with Refik Cemal
about literature, politics and history in the evenings and returns her old days on which
she has felt so strong and self-confident once. Yet, she still pretends as if there is
nothing to worry and ignores all the humiliating behaviours of Hüsnü Paşa, shouting as
“You are not a woman in any case, you even know nothing about households ….!”
(Zaten sen kadın değilsin ki, evine bakmasını bilmezsin ki ….!) (Handan, p.115).
Neriman and Refik Cemal are so amazed and cannot give any meanings to Handan’s
indifferences. Even Refik Cemal, despite being a man himself, is frustrated with Hüsnü
Paşa and unable to fathom how a sophisticated and self-confident woman like Handan
degrades into a miserable situation: “Handan’ın gözlerinde, tavrında bir bıkkınlık, adeta
buna tahammül etmek için elim bir mücadele görünüyordu. İtiraf ederim ki ben bu
kadını anlayamıyorum” (There is weariness in Handan’s eyes and behaviours, and she
is almost struggling to bear all these. I confess that I cannot understand this woman)
(Handan, p.105).

Finally, “the chain that [Handan] is not able to break” (kıramayacağı (m) bu
zinciri) (Handan, p.130) is broken by Hüsnü Paşa, who has left Handan by leaving a
letter behind stating his desire to live with one of his mistresses, Maud:
 86

Bence izdivaçtan daha manasız bir kelime, bir bağ yoktur. Seni temin ederim ki senin
bu kadar şiddetle hissettiğin sıkı ve mukaddes evlilik bağının kutsallığını, bağını ben
hiç hissetmedim […] Altı ay, üç ay, üç gün, beş gün, beş saat, ne bileyim, namütenahi
kadınlarla yaşadım. Bunlar aşağı yukarı çok muhtelif şekilde aynı şey idiler: Bir
kadın! […] Öyle rabıta, öyle ocak bence yoktur. Seni de bir kadın diye sevdim, bir
kadın diye sevmediğim zaman bıraktım (In my opinion, there is not a more
meaningless word and relation than a marriage. I confirm you that I have never felt
the marriage bond which you passionately feel and consider as sacred […] Six
months, three months, three days, five days, five hours, I do not know, I have lived
with countless women. These are all nearly the same things: A woman! […] I do not
have such kind of concepts related with marriage bond and family. I have also loved
you as a woman, and left when I do not love you as a woman anymore) (Handan,
p.148-149).

This last event becomes the end of her endurance. On the one hand, the
pangs of guilt about Nazım, and on the other hand the insensitive and remorseless
Hüsnü Paşa exhausts and brings her into the breaking point. At last, Handan gives up
struggling and submits herself to the patriarchal dictates: “Fakat ben hasta idim; bir
paçavra gibi, bir avuç toprak gibi idim” (Now, I am ill; I feel myself like a rag, like a
handful soil) (Handan, p.135). The male-dominated society shows its powers on women
again. Handan, who is portrayed as a strong woman interested in the male-dominated
fields, such as science and philosophy, and behaves contrary to the accepted concepts of
socially-constructed femininity, is transformed into a needy, miserable and dependent
woman on men whom she makes feel irritated and annoyed instead of soothing and
comforting by obeying the rules of acceptable femininity. The one that will look after
this miserable woman is of course a man, Refik Cemal, because Neriman, her cousin,
has to be interested in her little son and provide the necessary comfort for her husband.
Yet, the most important reason for her not being able to show concern for Handan is
that Neriman is not capable and skilful enough to do that. Anyway, Refik Cemal has
started to alienate from his wife since she cannot complete him mentally although he
has chosen her due to the fact that Neriman is “an obedient child” (itimatkar bir çocuk)
(Handan, p.17). Furthermore, he is now happy and never feels guilty with his usual
male selfishness while trying to fill these mental gaps with Handan, whom he can talk
about every subject that Neriman is not interested in any time. Indeed, Neriman,
accepting and also adopting the roles assigned to her by the society, confesses to Refik
 87

Cemal in an innocent way that she is inadequate in satisfying his needs related with
science and philosophy and adds that Handan would be a better wife to him: “Refik,
keşke sen Handan’ın kocası olaydın, birbirinize daha uyardınız […] Senin ne efkarını ne
de hislerini dolduramıyorum. O senin ruhunda hiç boş yer bırakmayacaktı” (Refik, I
wish you were the husband of Handan, you would complete each other […] I can
complete neither your thoughts nor feelings, She [Handan] would not leave any spaces
in your soul) (Handan, p.116). However, Refik Cemal silences her by saying that
Handan is a companion to his thoughts while Neriman is the woman having his heart.
Being unaware of how she has been humiliated by her husband, Neriman, who “strives
to submit herself to the beloved man” (sevdiği adama itaat etmek için çırpınan)
(Handan, p.18), bursts into tears and never thinks about asking to herself whether Refik
Cemal really fills her own needs.Meanwhile, Handan still waits hopefully for Hüsnü
Paşa, who has left her with his mistress, instead of establishing a new and free life.
From time to time, she writes letters to him stating that she is becoming worse day by
day and begs Hüsnü Paşa to return her: “Gel, Hüsnü, yine eskiden iyi olacağım anladın
mı? Ne istemezsen olmayacak” (Come Hüsnü, I will be like in the good old times. I will
not do anything that you do not want) (Handan, p.147). Suddenly, she remembers the
strong and independent woman inmost struggling for her feminine identity against the
patriarchy and resists to the socially-constructed femininity: “…. hayır, gelsen, bir gün,
üç gün geçtikten sonra yine eski hayat ve yine eski Handan” (…. no, even if you come,
there will be the old life and old Handan again after one day, three days….) (Handan,
p.147). Unfortunately, having been stranded between her private and the public needs,
Handan completely falls ill with Hüsnü Paşa’s letter stating his violent and devastating
intents: “Seni sürükleyip yerlere yatırmak, seni ayaklarımla ezmek, senin başını
çamurlara sürüklemek hevesiyle yanıyorum. Onun için, seninle yaşayamayacağım” (I
am burning furiously to lie down you by dragging, to crush you under my feet, and to
rub your head in the mud. That’s why; I won’t be able to live with you) (Handan,
p.149).
 88

According to the diagnosis of the doctors, Handan has lost her memory due
to the meningitis and now she lives in the realm of fiction. Even in these dreams, the
only thing filling in her mind is Hüsnü Paşa and his life with his mistresses:

[…] güya Hüsnü Paşa’yı kendine çekmek için onunla öteki kadınların hüviyetine
giriyor, onlar gibi söylüyor, yaşıyordu.Ve hezeyanları arasında en çok dikkat ettiği şey
bu ruhunu kemiren kabusa kendisinin Handan olduğunu belli etmemekti […]Sonra
birdenbire, güya Hüsnü Paşa bunun Handan olduğunu anlamış hissiyle, mahvolmuş
bir kadının feryadıyla uzun uzun inliyor. Artık kendi düzgün Türkçesi’yle:
— Bekle Hüsnü, bekle. Yeni bir kimyager gözleri boyuyor. Gözlerim mavi, saçlarım
sarı olacak. Ellerim de tıpkı onunki gibi ince ve damarlı. ([…] to tempt Hüsnü Paşa,
she pretends as if she were the other women, and she is singing and living like them.
And during her deliriums, the only thing she pays attention most is not to show to this
nightmare, which gnaws her soul that she is, Handan actually […] Then, suddenly,
she moans with the howling of a miserable woman as though Hüsnü Paşa understood
that she is Handan. Later, in her clear Turkish:
— Wait Hüsnü, wait. A new chemist is dying the eyes. My eyes will be blue and hair
will be fair. My hands also will be delicate and veined, just like hers) (Handan, p.169–
170).

Even in her miserable times, Handan still thinks about her husband, and
ventures to behave and resemble like his mistresses to be able to obtain him back by
ignoring her identity.

The degradation of a woman like Handan, who has been portrayed as

strong, talented and divergent to the socially-constructed femininity at the beginning of
the novel, is the strong evidence of the male-dominated society and its phallocentric
dictaticism on women. As having been an antagonist to the male authority, Handan is
now in a miserable situation in which she needs the help of a man, Refik Cemal. He
takes the responsibility of caring Handan because in his opinion, to save her is his moral
obligation towards his wife, Neriman. Yet, the real reason behind is totally different and
Refik Cemal admits it in one of his letters written to Server, his friend:
 89

Meğer Neriman, meğer çocuklarım, meğer alem ve bütün sevgili fikirlerim ve

ideallerim hepsi Handan’dan gelen bir nurla o kadar cazip ve sevgili imişler! O
sönerse onlar da sönecek, her şey sönecek! Sönsün ve isterse bütün kâinat yok olsun!
Asıl ben çıldırıyorum, Server! (Apparently, Neriman, my children, the world, my
whole beloved ideas and ideals are so charming and nice because of the coming light
from Handan! If she fades, the others do as well; everything will fade! I do not care if
they all fade and the universe disappears! I am getting crazy in actual fact, Server!)
(Handan, p.173).

Refik Cemal begins to feel warm interest towards Handan, whom he has
regarded before as an arrogant and distant creature lacking of the virtues that a woman
must have such as tenderness, compassion, and obedience. Furthermore, he has blamed
her for the death of Nazım for a long time but now, he cannot help thinking about
Handan. Since he is aware of the impossibility and immorality of this love, Refik Cemal
prays to be able to get rid of “the vile and ferocious demon in [his] soul” (ruhumdaki
sefil ve azılı ifrit) (Handan, p.163). This demon– like Eve causing Adam’s falling from
the paradise by making him eat the fatal fruit – is Handan, who engenders the feelings
of guilty in Refik Cemal arousing from the fatal love. While struggling with the pangs
of conscience, he is afraid of Handan’s recovering from this illness and gaining her
memory back because now, Handan “just belongs to [him], entirely belongs to [him]”
(yalnız benim, tamamen benim) (Handan, p.194). In his opinion, they survive the life of
Adam and Eve before their fall due to their sins: “O, yanındaki adam için vücut bulmuş,
yaratılmış ve ondan başka, ona boyun eğme ve muhabbetten başka, ona sığınmaktan
başka mevcudiyetinde bir şey olmayan Havva! Ben de onun sevdiği Âdem!” (She
[Handan] is Eve that has been shaped and created for the man [Adam] near her and
has nothing else in her existence but just the feelings of obedience, affection and being
protected by that man! I am [Refik Cemal] Adam also that she adores much!) (Handan,
p.194). As clearly seen, the male selfishness desiring to possess the woman, who will
just belong to him under his protection and service, is an ongoing process since the
previous times, and now Refik Cemal, who leaves neither Neriman nor Handan, shares
the same feelings with his former fellows.
 90

In the meantime, Handan is completely oblivious to the outside except Refik

Cemal, who has taken her to Italy upon the recommendations of the doctors. Day by
day, she starts to make him the centre of her life because by instinct, she considers him
a companion to both her womanly feelings and mental ideas. Actually, the already
existing feelings towards Refik Cemal, which have been repressed so far due to her
marriage with Hüsnü Paşa and affection to Neriman, come into the surface during her
illness. Not remembering who she is and what kind of relationships she has with the
others now, Handan happily spends time with Refik Cemal and tries to recover from her
illness. However, an unexpected event – seeing the photograph of Neriman with the
little Nazım – happens and Handan begins to remember some parts of her life. This
process is a very aching one for her and the more she remembers the more uneasy she
becomes. Handan, firstly, denies all she remembers: “Handan, Handan o başka idi, ben
değildim” (Handan, I am not Handan, she was a different woman) (Handan, p.208).
The denial is the only way for her to escape from the feelings of guilt and pangs of
conscience, because the moral norms determined by the patriarchy are certain and very
strict for a married woman having extramarital relationship. Though her love towards
Refik Cemal stays in the spiritual level and nothing physically happens between them
except kissing, Handan regards herself as a sinful, vile and inferior creature since she
has loved her cousin’s husband and betrayed Hüsnü Paşa, having left her to live with his
mistress. Her guilt is so intense that she identifies herself with Judas betraying the Jesus,
which clearly shows the loss of established moral connection between her inner and
outer:

Ben artık zelil ve sefil bir günahkar oldum. Ben artık tarihin en mel’un çehresi
Yehuda’ya nazire oldum […]Ben o kadar kokmuş, o kadar çürümüş bir leke, bir et
parçasıyım, başka bir şey değil. Değil cennet hatta cehennem, cehennemin en yakıcı,
en işkence eden derinlikleri bile beni kusup atmalı. Ben ebediyen hiçbir yerde
kendime yer bulamamalıyım. Hava, deniz ve esir beni reddetmeli, vücudumu tabiatın
hiçbir unsuru kabul etmemeli […]kirli yüzümü, günahkâr ruhumu örtmek, saklamak
için bucak bucak gitmeli, sürünmeli, kahrolmalıyım! Çekil Handan, senden
iğreniyorum (I am a low, miserable sinner now. I am like Judas, who is the most
accursed man in the history […] I am such a rotten and putrid blemish, a piece of
meat but nothing else. Not the paradise but even the hell, the most mordant and
torturing depth of it, must throw me up. I must not find any place for myself forever.
The air, sea and land must reject me, none of the elements of the nature must accept
my body […] I must escape to hide my dirty and sinful soul, lead a miserable existence
 91

and be damned! […] Go away Handan, I am disgusting with you) (Handan, p.215–
216–217).

While Handan struggles with these feelings of guilt and she gets gradually
depersonalized, Refik Cemal is in his usual male selfishness. His only fear is not to
depress Neriman but to lose Handan, because he is sure that whatever happens, Neriman
will forgive him, like Handan’s forgiving Hüsnü Paşa millions of time. Indeed, both
Handan and Neriman have to forgive their husbands because the betrayals of a married
man are not only accepted naturally in the society but there are also no sanctions for
them like those on women, such as being isolated from and humiliating in the society by
being claimed faithless. Furthermore, the women are depended on the men to be able to
survive and have a status in the society.

Having learnt all these conflicts and insincerities applied by the male-
dominated society, Handan does not want to survive anymore and gives up resisting.
Now, she knows very well that there is no use struggling against the patriarchal dictates
and moralities, because these conventions on women will somehow hinder Handan
from establishing her own world whatever she does and however strong she is. In the
end, the male-dominated society wins again and succeeds to demolish a woman on the
way of realizing her feminine identity. Handan, who is forced to live according to the
rules assigned by the patriarchy, gradually gets insane and dies. Is her death an
indication of her defeat against the patriarchy, and the intimidation of the male power to
the other women who desire to be like Handan? Or else, is it Handan’s free will and
evidence of her self-realization because she prefers to die instead living under the
constraints and dictates of the patriarchy? The answers of these questions will be
studied in the following section, where the protagonists of the two novels, Handan and
Rachel, are compared and contrasted in their struggles to find a place in the restrictive
society that they try to live.
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3.3 A Comparative Analysis of Rachel’s and Handan’s Female Explorations

We, daughters of the educated men, are between the devil and the deep sea. Behind us
lies the patriarchal system, the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its
hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with
its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The one shuts up like slaves in
a harem; the other forces us to circle like caterpillars head to the tail, round and round
the mulberry tree, the sacred tree of property (Three Guineas qtd. in Waugh, 1989,
p.125).

How can an independent and true female identity emerge and be improved
in a society like the one stated above? It seems impossible. However, there are still
some women who believe that there might be a ‘true self’ which may be discovered
through lifting the misrepresentations of the oppressive social system, and provide
nurturance and fuel for revolutionary hope and practice. Virginia Woolf and Halide
Edip-Adıvar, who faced the continual conflicts with the patriarchal value system of their
societies, were among these women. They both struggled hard to visualize a future
society based on a different conception of the relations between men and women. To
bring about these changes was not easy to initiate, yet Woolf and Edip-Adıvar decided
to realize their dreams and aims through their arts as both of them believed in the
interaction between the reader and the text that would bring the discovery of the truth
into the realm of possibility.

Both of the writers have given emphasis on the subjects such as the place of
women in the patriarchal society and the oppression of it on women in their literary
works by mentioning that the women have always been assigned with the definite roles
given by the male-dominated society and when they attempt to break loose from all the
control of patriarchy, those women are warned immediately and severely. To be able
show their reactions and increase the awareness and conscious of the women, Halide
Edip-Adıvar and Virginia Woolf have tried to reconcile the women in their novels with
the ones living in that society, and bring the problems of them in the foreground within
the conditions of that period. However, the transition periods – like the one here from
 93

traditional to modernity – are always agonizing and the writers, unfortunately, have felt
these conflicts and the oppression of the society. Thus, they reflect the effects of this
transition period, and the problems related with the identity crisis and the new women
identity in their first novels. Despite all these negative influences on them, is it still
possible for Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-Adıvar to be able to create the ‘new and
modern woman’, for which they have struggled during their whole lives, in their novels
‘The Voyage Out’ and ‘Handan’ that they wrote in the same periods and mentioned
about the transformations related with the women identity from traditional to
modernity?

In fact, for a short time, both Rachel and Handan seem to be carving out the
places for themselves that would allow for autonomy, fulfilment, and independence
from the patriarchal ways. Rachel tries to improve herself both mentally and
emotionally to establish her ‘true self’ by realizing the imperfections in herself and
resisting the education given according to the rules of the “well-to-do girl in the last part
of the 19th century” (The Voyage Out, p.16). Furthermore, she refuses to get married
with Terence and declares her decision to him bravely despite all the expectations and
oppressions of the people around, because Rachel is well aware of the fact that this
expected marriage will hinder her from establishing the ‘separate self’. She does not let
the patriarchy capture and assign her the predetermined roles such as the self-sacrificing
wife and a good mother. On the other hand, Handan has much more facilities unlike
Rachel in view of getting education and becoming visible throughout the society. She is
a self-conscious woman who trained herself in the male-dominated fields like science,
philosophy, literature and art. Furthermore, she is more comfortable with males in her
relations since she has regarded herself as sophisticated as to compete with them. With
all of these features and skills, Handan arouses interest in everybody that she meets.
She, like Rachel, resists the compulsions of her mother and the environment related
with the marriage for a long time and ignores the “fiddlesticks of the old women about
marriage” (bu eski kadınların evlenmek deliliklerine) (Handan, p.62).
 94

Moreover, Rachel and Handan both challenge the expectations of patriarchy

and the way in which they are represented in their traditional Victorian and Ottoman
societies. Rachel proves her freewill to her Victorian society by saying “I can be m-m-
myself…. in spite of you, in spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my
Aunts, in spite of these” and Handan to her Ottoman society by stating that “I also exist,
live and think” (Ben de varım, yaşıyorum, düşünüyorum) (Handan, p.56).
Unfortunately, these two distinctive women, Rachel and Handan, are to be an easy prey
for the powerful patriarchy very soon by becoming the subjects of the destinations that
have been chosen for them. The male-dominated society does not satisfy with shaping
them with regard to its needs but it punishes them severely as well since Rachel and
Handan has dared to resist the dictates and norms put forward by the patriarchy. At the
end of the novels ‘The Voyage Out’ and ‘Handan’, the protagonists of Virginia Woolf
and Halide Edip-Adıvar die.

These deaths occurring at the end of the novels have been interpreted
differently by the various writers and the literary world. For instance, Ellen Bayuk
Rosenman in her article named ‘The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the
Mother-Daughter Relationship’ (1986) and Hermione Lee in her book named ‘The
Novels of Virginia Woolf’ (1977) regard the deaths of the protagonists as an indication
of their resisting to the patriarchal system. According to these writers, the deaths of
Rachel and Handan not only offer solution to their estrangement by escaping from the
dependence and sexual threat presented by the patriarchal society but allow them to
achieve an ultimately remote perspective on the world as well. On the other hand, there
are also some writers, like John Batchelor (1991), who regards their death as self-
sacrifice before achieving any kind of sexual and emotional maturity. We also agree
with Batchelor because in our opinion, the death cannot be an evident of a resistance to
the patriarchy but an acceptance of its dictates. Anyway, the reactions of the other
people in the novel to the deaths of the protagonists show the ignorance of the Victorian
and Ottoman societies. In The Voyage Out, when the death of Rachel is announced, the
ones in the hotel show no interest and even do not remember who she is: “Dead? […]
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Miss Vinrace is dead? Dear me … that’s very sad. But I don’t at the moment remember
which she was” (The Voyage Out, p.230).

Like in the The Voyage Out, Handan’s death creates pleasure instead of
affliction, because she has deserved this punishment with her contradictory behaviours
to the acceptable femininity and to the moral norms of the society. The remarks of one
of the people coming to the funeral prove this extensive belief: “Cemal Bey’in alafranga
kızlarının büyüğü değil mi? İmansızlığın sonu budur, efendi. Acımana şaşıyorum”(Isn’t
she the eldest of the occidental daughters of Mr. Cemal? It is the final destination of
disbelief, sir. I am surprised that you pity her) (Handan, p.231).

Thus, the importance of Rachel’s and Handan’s existence has been

irrecoverably lost in the trivia of commonplace of life, and they are completely lost.
Yet, why could not these women, who are flourishing on the way of realizing their
female identity, succeed and why were they repressed to the suicidal drive?

One of the reasons of their deaths is that Rachel and Handan are still
dependent on men economically – a husband or a father – to survive, no matter how
sophisticated and self-conscious they are. Because the place of the men and women
were separated from each other, and the affairs outside were left to the men whereas the
affairs inside to the women for years, it is now impossible for Rachel and Handan to be
productive and visible in public. Even a learned and talented woman like Handan has to
take no notice of the betrayals of her husband, Hüsnü Paşa, and wait for his return
though he has left her for another woman. The most important reason of her bearing this
humiliating situation is that - besides the restrictions applied by the Ottoman society to
the married women such as the devotion and the fidelity to their husbands whatever
happens - Handan is well aware of the economically difficult situation she will face if
she gets divorced. She is obliged to Hüsnü Paşa financially, and while he spends his
 96

time with his mistress happily, Handan “does not even go out in order not to spend
money” (masraf etmemek için sokağa bile çıkmaz) (Handan, p.129).

This economic dependence is not so different for Rachel. Since she was
born, Rachel has been brought up in accordance with the rules of being a “well-to-do
girl” (The Voyage Out, p.16). She is not allowed to receive any formal education except
music and fine arts, because her father has decided the point that this kind of education
is not necessary for Rachel. The only thing that she will need in the future is to learn
how to do the domestic works in a neat way and to satisfy the desires of her husband
since her financial needs will be met by him. That is, Rachel feels the torment of
domestic imprisonment at the very early age. Indeed, this imprisonment is enforced not
only by her father but also by her maiden aunts, who tell Rachel that her place is in the
home, with the influence of the ideology that has been previously taught to them. Thus,
these powerless aunts convey their niece the only truth which they know very well:
being obedient to the patriarchy in all respects. As a result of this, it seems impossible
for Rachel to be financially active and visible in a society, the rules of which have been
determined by the masculine power.

Besides the economic dependence and the restrictions of the male-

dominated society, the passivized women, who adopt the rules and dictations of the
patriarchal society and accept the dominance of the men without questioning, are also
the hampers to the women trying to establish their independent female identity, like
Rachel and Handan. Most of the women characters in The Voyage Out desire one thing:
to be able get married and “join the ranks of the married women […], to escape the long
solitude of an old maid’s life” (The Voyage Out, p.82). According to the married ones,
like Helen and Clarissa, the only way for salvation is to be unified with males though
they know by instinct that they are the inferior counterparts of their husbands. Yet, they
still try to mould Rachel with regard to these beliefs. Same kinds of problems are seen
in the novel Handan. The most important thing for Mrs. Sabire, Handan’s step-mother,
is not her daughter’s education and future but her not being stigmatized as a spinster.
 97

Even Neriman, Handan’s cousin, restricts Handan and feels irritated with her mannish
behaviours from time to time. For example, when Handan wants to go out alone one
day, Neriman stops her and evinces not to approve this kind of behaviour: “Sen nasıl
yalnız gideceksin? Refik beraber gelsin” (How can you go alone? Let Refik come with
you) (Handan, p.99). This kind of a reaction clearly proves that not only men but also
women – who can also be called as ‘patriarchal women’ – are not ready yet to see such
women like Rachel and Handan, who are on the way of establishing their self-esteems.

Beside the ones caused by the patriarchal women and repressive men, it is
believed that the most vital reason of the protagonists’ failures in their search for
identity is the fact that both Rachel and Handan are motherless. Yet, before moving to
the effects of the motherlessness on the protagonists, we think it is better to construct
the basic structures concerned with this concept.

As known, in psychoanalysis, the mother-daughter relationship describes

the strong bond between mother and daughter as one enabling or inhibiting the daughter
from establishing her own identity. It is an undeniable fact that the first bonding in
infancy is with the mother and this initial bonding is true for both sexes. However, boys
break away at an early age to identify with their fathers and they come to speak the
language of the Father –the law of phallus within Lacan’s logic. Unfortunately and as
usual, this separation that enables the complete differentiation from the mother and lets
the infants learn their own boundaries is not as an easy process for the female infant as
the one realized for the male infant. The mother, who re-experiences her own
daughterhood through the relationship with her daughter again, cannot encourage her
daughter for a full-separateness which is required for the independent female identity
construction. Thus, as Nancy Chodorow, a pioneer in researching mothers and
daughters, stated “[…] A daughter continues to identify with the mother” (1978, p.292)
and since their individual boundaries are not always clear, daughters struggle all their
lives to separate from their mothers. Like Chodorow, Vivien Nice, the psychoanalytic
writer, has touched upon a question of separation process in female infants. Nice in her
 98

book ‘Mothers and Daughters’ explains that mothers teach their daughters to be
dependent by transmitting their inherent deficiencies and fears:

…. Mothers are seen to teach [daughters] …. to meet men’s needs and suppress their
own. Girls are taught to be attractive and caring, not to outshine men intellectually….
and to look for approval […] Each mother has to transmit the rules of femininity to her
daughter to help them survive in the world as she knows it (1992, p. 46-83)

These two teachings, dependency and code of behaviour, contribute to

conflict and to making the separation more difficult for the female infants.

Beside the theories of Chodorow and Nice that have been widely influential
in contemporary feminist writing, there is also a well-known theory called ‘mirror
stage’ represented by Jacques Lacan. It was his first official contribution to
psychoanalytic theory by reformulating the work of Sigmund Freud. According to
Lacan, this stage is the first step in the identity formation since the infant starts to
develop awareness of her potential as an independent being at this stage. As the infant
still experiences itself as the fragmented and lacking boundaries of self, Lacan argues
that it is fascinated with the unified image presented in the mirror, which is most
obviously, at first, the mother’s face. Through this reflected image of the mother, the
infant observes herself as a discrete unit within the space of the world, or in other
words, a unified and capable whole. Yet, this image is also profoundly alienating as the
infant is still dependent on the others and its motor skills have not developed yet.
Moreover and most importantly, it has envisioned this unified self by identifying with
an image -- the reflection on the mirror.

Lacan refers this early identification as ‘misrecognition’, in which the infant

mistakes her dependent existence for a unified and independent image. After realizing
this misrepresentation, the infant moves on the next stage that Lacan named as
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‘Symbolic Order’. It is at this stage, according to Lacan, that the child comes to separate
herself from the mother and the mirror image starts to function “as formative of the I as
revealed in the psycho analytic experience” (1977, p.4). When the child is able to state
‘I am’ and the mother becomes the mirror of the child’s self, she consciously identifies
a self and awareness of her existence as an independent being. Through the break and
separation from the imaginary unity with the mother, the child gains a self of self. Yet,
as it has been mentioned above while scrutinizing the assertions of Chodorow and Nice,
this separation task is not simple for the female child again. While the male child forms
the sense of an independent agent easily, the female child fails to accomplish a full
individuation, which means “the development of a range of characteristics, skills and
personality traits which are uniquely one’s own” (Nice, 1992, p.51) since her separation
is not supported by the mother. As a result, the struggle between the separation and
symbiosis keeps on going through the rest of her life by causing the daughter lots of
ambivalences and thus, the absolute female individuation never comes to the fruition.

To put it simply, all women are daughters and they must resolve the
conflicts inherent in mother-daughter relationship if they are to understand themselves
and ultimately establish their own identity. However, this does not describe the situation
of most young adult women like in the case of Rachel and Handan, the female
protagonists of the novels The Voyage Out and Handan, since they both lost their
mothers when they were too little. That is, neither Rachel nor Handan has ‘a first object’
to bind and separate then that is necessary for their unified and coherent identity. If the
psychoanalytic theories stated above are related with the identity formation period of
these two protagonists, it can be easily concluded that Rachel and Handan are lack of
two vital steps – binding and separation – required for the next one, which is
‘individuation’. As a consequence, their needs, especially the emotional ones, have gone
unmet, resulting in impaired self-development. Then, what have they done to get rid of
the deeply unresolved feelings of being motherless and to realize the process of female
development and individuation?
 100

There has been an only possible way for Rachel and Handan, which is
transferring their symbiotic needs into another person. That is, because of the acute lack
of mothering and a loss of an idealized pre-oedipal bond with their mothers, Rachel and
Handan seek to discover, in identification with idealized others, through other.
However, those chosen to substitute with the missing mother, are the passive and
silenced women who have sacrificed and devoted their whole lives to the husbands by
accepting the male-assigned roles. Thus, these mother-substitute women hold back the
individuation process of females by carrying the massive cultural expectations of male-
dominated society, and they project the feminine neediness and weakness, or in other
words, the implicit inferiority of women into their step-daughters. Hence, these young
females, Rachel and Handan, learn the long-established dictates of the patriarchy from
the beginning through these passivized patriarchal mothers, as explained in the
assertions quoted of Nice (1992).

Since their developments go through the bind with the other females around
them, Rachel and Handan act as they have been instructed. Under the light of these
instructions, they both try to find the love and care that they lack since their childhood
through males. That is, this time, Rachel and Handan seek the way of making up for
their feelings of incompleteness and disbelief resulted from being motherlessness with
the help of males. Terence Hewet [the fiancé of Rachel] and Hüsnü Paşa [the husband
of Handan] take the role of becoming shelters for Handan and Rachel to help them get
rid of the physical and psychological grip of their mothers. Indeed, they both very soon
realize that there is something wrong in their relationships. Confined by the masculine
power, Rachel and Handan begin to lose their self-esteems. Handan, who used to be
strong, self-confident and ambitious before getting married, has changed a lot and
turned into a trifling object in the hands of her husband. With Hüsnü Paşa, “[…]
something has perished” in Handan (birşeyler kırılmış gibidir) (Handan, p.80) She
surrenders unconditionally into the hands of male-dominated culture and sacrifices her
wishes and expectations for the future. The situation is not so different for Rachel. Since
her engagement with Terence, she ceaselessly sees the same nightmare in which she
“[…] found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little
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deformed women sitting in archways playing cards” (The Voyage Out, p.336), which
clearly shows the oppression of women under the influence of masculine power.
Surprisingly, Rachel – who seems to be weaker in personality than Handan – acts more
bravely than Handan – who has accepted the male dominance resulting in her loss of
touch with her real self and proceeds in getting out of the constraints of the socially
constructed femininity by declaring her engagement off. Unfortunately, Rachel is not
strong enough to resist the long established conformities.

In fact, it is a bit fantasy to expect from these protagonists to fight against

the patriarchal dictates of the society as their separate and true self is not well-
constructed due to their being motherless. Neither Rachel nor Handan has had a healthy
mother-daughter relationship which “allows for the growth of each, leading to mutual
self-esteem and mutual empowerment” (Özen, 2002, p.64).The women whom the
protagonists have adopted as the mother model and the men that have been considered
possible solutions for their unmet needs did not help Rachel and Handan construct their
separate and true selves in any way. On the contrary, both these patriarchal women and
repressive men have given rise to their self-distrust by forcing them to choose between
the private and the public needs. Unfortunately, Rachel and Handan choose the public
needs of their societies by getting unified with males instead of the private needs that
will establish their separate self. Were they to have a mother to identify first for a
successful individuation, they would complete their unified and coherent identity
necessary to construct the next step: the female identity that women need to discover
and must fight for. It is an undeniable fact that, for individuation, one firstly must bind
and then separate from her mother. If she cannot complete her individuation by
separating from the mother successfully, it is useless to expect her to create the female
identity. Briefly, it is clear, within the framework of psychoanalytic theories, that
Rachel and Handan are not able to realize their dream about establishing the true female
identity in the patriarchal society as they do not have a mother to identify required for
their first identity formation; that is, obtaining an independent and a separate
individuality.
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Apart from all these reasons stated above concerning the protagonists’ not
constructing their female identities and their deaths before finding the desired places for
themselves in the society, the most forceful reason is the creators of these characters:
Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip- Adıvar. In our opinion, these writers also are not able
to establish their own identities and get over the useless coming and going regarding the
identity crisis and the new women expression of the era that they live. Although both of
them sense the repressiveness of the Victorian and the Ottoman gender roles, they
nonetheless remain passive, unable to respond, or prevent these roles and dictates from
utterly incorporating them. The reason is clear. Not only the society which experiences
the transition period from tradition to modernity is ready for this kind of change, but the
writers who are expected to defend this new and modern women identity are powerful
and determined enough to resist the conformity. As much as they try to escape their
cultural entrapment, Woolf and Edip- Adıvar cannot totally become free from the social,
political and other ideological influences, which shape one’s subjective experience and
freedom. For both of the writers, as every other artist in every other age, the absolute
freedom from such dictates and forces is a great fantasy, and neither Woolf nor Edip-
Adıvar writes a female character out of these oppressions and norms of the patriarchy
until the 1920s. Indeed, Woolf clearly states these constraints and conflicts in her diary:
“I’ve struggled and rebelled against them all my life, but their integrity always makes
me their slave. Much though I hate Cambridge, and bitterly though I’ve suffered from it,
I still respect it” (qtd. in Reese, 1976, p.78).

As clearly understood from the quotation, no matter how well educated and
strong Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-Adıvar were in comparison with the other
passivized women of their age, the writers themselves also felt the painful effects of the
social burdens and negative inferiority complexes that the male-dominated society has
imposed upon them. Naturally, both Woolf and Edip-Adıvar transferred these negative
feelings and experiences caused by the patriarchy into their first novels.
 103

It is a known fact that Woolf was not as lucky as her brothers in terms of
getting higher education, as a result of which she was not able to obtain the visibility
and the proper place throughout the society that she desired. Certainly, here, the role of
Sir Leslie Stephen – Woolf’s authoritarian father – cannot be denied. Yet, the most
painful thing that affected her whole life was the molestation of her step brother. She
always bore the traces of this shameful event in the rest of her life. As a consequence, in
our opinion, Virginia Woolf sought the salvation in writing to be able to get rid of all
these wormwoods. While reading Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, one can easily
grasp the reflection of the writer’s fears, lack of confidence, inexperience and distrust
towards the male sex in Rachel, the young protagonist, which are all caused by the
paternal authority and the fleshy desires of the masculine power. The repressed
femininity of Virginia Woolf is reflected in Rachel’s continual dream in which she sees
herself buried alive with the hunched figure in the tunnel:

She dreamt that she was walking down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow by
degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on either side. At length, the tunnel
opened and became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her
wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor
gibbering, with long nails (The Voyage Out, p. 44).

Indeed, this dream symbolizes the permanent passivity and the lifelong
imprisonment of not only Rachel but also the creator; that is Virginia Woolf. It is clear
that the lust of patriarchy represented by the grotesque man with sharp claws will
forever hold them as prisoners.

Like Virginia Woolf, Halide Edip-Adıvar faced the stark reality of the
repressiveness of the masculine power and the gender roles of Ottoman society since
her early childhood. Though Halide Edip’s father, Edip Bey, was less restrictive in
general in comparison with Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and provided her
daughter with lots of educational opportunities, he was still a traditional Ottoman man
and never hesitated a moment to remarry again when his wife, the beloved mother of
 104

Halide Edip, died. Without a shadow of doubt, this unpleasant event that she
encountered when she was a little girl had a profound effect on Halide Edip and this
effect was deepened with her husband’s, Salih Zeki, getting married with another
woman during their arriage. Stuck between the womanly pride and the patriarchal
dictates imposed on the married women in Ottoman society, Halide Edip got sick of
nervous depression. During this time of hysteria, she started to write her famous novel,
Handan, whose protagonist had significant touches with Halide Edip herself. Thus, with
her recent grief, Halide Edip transferred her personal feelings and pains into the female
character of the novel, Handan, who also suffered from her husband’s betrayals and
insults. However, unlike to the real life story of Halide Edip, Handan did not get
divorced from her husband and meanwhile, she fell in love with her cousin’s husband,
Refik Cemal. It is thought that Halide Edip, most probably, gave voice to her repressed
emotions and desires through Handan and her fatal love. Nonetheless, in a traditional
Ottoman society, the rules of which had been strictly determined by the patriarchal
dictates, it was impossible even to think about such a thing. Stranded with the individual
desires and the moral norms of her society, Handan gradually broke off her connection
with the real life and began to live in the realm of fiction, because this rejection was the
only possible way for her to realize her private needs. Yet, Handan felt the pricks of
conscience very soon since the rules of being feminine and the moral norms of the
society were so strongly and deeply indoctrinated to her. Like the protagonist of The
Voyage Out, Rachel, Handan also began to suffer from seeing the same nightmare in
which she identified herself with Judas betraying the Jesus:

Ben artık zelil ve sefil bir günahkar oldum. Ben artık tarihin en mel’un çehresi
Yehuda’ya nazire oldum […]Ben o kadar kokmuş, o kadar çürümüş bir leke, bir et
parçasıyım, başka bir şey değil. Değil cennet hatta cehennem, cehennemin en yakıcı,
en işkence eden derinlikleri bile beni kusup atmalı. Ben ebediyen hiçbir yerde
kendime yer bulamamalıyım. Hava, deniz ve esir beni reddetmeli, vücudumu tabiatın
hiçbir unsuru kabul etmemeli […]kirli yüzümü, günahkâr ruhumu örtmek, saklamak
için bucak bucak gitmeli, sürünmeli, kahrolmalıyım! Çekil Handan, senden
iğreniyorum (I am a low, miserable sinner now. I am like Judas, who is the most
accursed man in the history […] I am such a rotten and putrid blemish, a piece of
meat but nothing else. Not the paradise but even the hell, the most mordant and
torturing depth of it, must throw me up. I must not find any place for myself forever.
The air, sea and land must reject me, none of the elements of the nature must accept
my body […] I must escape to hide my dirty and sinful soul, lead a miserable existence
 105

and be damned! […] Go away Handan, I am disgusting with you) (Handan, p.215–
216–217).

As clearly seen, due to the behavirol codes and sexual taboos that have been
taught to her since her early childhood, Handan regards herself as a sinful, vile and
inferior creature though her love towards Refik Cemal stays in the spiritual level and
nothing physically happens between them except kissing.

It is a well-known fact that the other side of personality – the negative or

inferior side – can be reflected in dreams, and this is termed as ‘the shadow’ in the
psychoanalytic thought of Jung. According to him, the shadow is the part of the
personality and it develops in the individual’s mind. Yet, as Jacobi stated in his book
(1973), one naturally starts to repress some parts of his nature as he grows and gets in
touch with the outer world. The reason of this repression is the fact that these parts are
not acceptable to parents or society and considered frightening or shameful. Thus, the
person has no way but to force them to stay in the unconscious level. However, if one
wants to improve further towards self-actualization and individuation, he must firstly
face and then integrate with what he has repressed. Meeting the shadow and unfolding
the possibilities held unexpressed is quite important, because without it one may never
become the mature and separate person. Jung claims that interaction with the shadow –
whether through visions in various forms or dreams – may shed light on one’s state of
mind. He also explains this fact in his ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Conscious’:

…. shadow appears either in projection on suitable persons, or personified as such in

dreams. The shadow coincides with the personal unconscious…. the shadow
personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is
thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly….To become conscious of it involves
recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is essential
condition for any kind of self knowledge and it therefore, as a rule, meets with
considerable resistance (Jung, 1964 qtd. in Özen, 2002, p. 52-54).
 106

As stated in Jung, the protagonists – Rachel and Handan - also showed

resistance to their shadows that appeared in their dreams. They got frightened of what
they had seen and tried to deny it as their ‘personas’, the masks they present to the
outside world, was contrasting with their ‘shadows’. More interestingly and
importantly, these masks that Rachel and Handan wore had not been determined by
themselves in accordance with their private and feminine needs but by the patriarchy
and its masculine desires. Thus, they felt the forceful negative influence of their shadow
much more strongly deeply, which was throwing them into frustration and alienation
day by day. Whereas, if Rachel and Handan had taken the initial step to coincide with
their shadows – which is referred as the ‘the first act of courage’ by Jung – they would
have solved their conflicts and reached the state of self-realization as follows:

This widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal

wishes, fears, hopes and ambitions which has always to be compensated or corrected
by unconscious counter-tendencies; instead, it is a .... relationship to the world of
objects, bringing the individual into absolute, binding and indissoluble communion
with the world at large (Jung, 1966, p. 178).

Indeed, finding this sort of a transformation to a state beyond guilt is the

task of the creators of these protagonists; that is Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-
Adıvar. Unfortunately, Woolf and Edip-Adıvar neither had the strength to descend into
the underworld and fight with dark creatures – shadows – of their own nor had the
courage to resist the patriarchal dictates that had been imposed. They both did not let
their private needs and feminine desires come into the surface. Thus, death has to be the
fate of their first female characters, Rachel and Handan.

To sum up, Rachel and Handan are not, unfortunately, powerful enough to
attain their self-esteem and realize their individuation because of the fact that neither the
writers nor the society is ready yet to handle and face with such extraordinary female
characters. As explained before, Woolf and Edip-Adıvar have not been able to get rid of
the negative effects of their personal burdens and experiences, and transferred all of
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these negative feelings to their first female characters in the novels. Moreover, these
protagonists, Rachel and Handan, are not the acceptable female identities yet for the
society, the rules of which have been previously determined by the masculine power in
accordance with the masculine desires even though there have been lots of social and
cultural innovations throughout the Victorian and Ottoman societies. The places and
roles of women in the society are not well-determined, and they do not have an active
identity in public though they take the advantages of being a member of the upper-class.
Besides these facts, the outstanding women like Rachel and Handan always create
uncomfortable feelings in males with their marvellous mental capacities and
contradictory behaviours to the socially-constructed femininity; hence, they are wiped
out at the end lest Rachel and Handan should undercut the masculine power and serve
as a model for the other passivized women.

Yet, these precedent novels of Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-Adıvar with
the first examples of the extraordinary and self-conscious female characters, Rachel and
Handan, are very important due to their emphasising the era, in which the new identities
are being shaped. As Juliet Mitchell states in her book (1974), The Voyage Out and
Handan can be read and interpreted as the history of being a female and a male; that is
the process of acquiring an identity.

Consequently, the female characters and their struggles for a separate

identity despite the patriarchal societies in these novels – though Virginia Woolf and
Halide Edip- Adıvar has to kill their protagonists - are very important to understand the
changing expectations regarding the women in the societies experiencing the transition
periods.
CONCLUSION
 109

By the 19th century, the status of women, like other issues of social concern,
had reached a further level of improvement with the contributions of social, economic
and political transformations. Changing social institutions and cultural values initiated a
period of awakening among women both in West and Middle-East. Each culture,
western and eastern, was experiencing chain of changes: families were changing,
customs were changing, modes of behaviour were changing, and the traditional notions
of femininity and masculinity were changing. Women were more aware of the double
standard and inequality, resisting doing all the domestic works which imprisoned them
in the house. The passive view of femininity was gradually diminishing and women
were increasingly joining the labour force and taking part in public life by demanding
equal rights and treatments. Briefly, ‘women’ was one of the important issues of
discourse in the nineteenth century. Thus, in this thesis, it has been focused on the
female explorations with the changing role concepts from traditional to modernity and
the evaluation of the emerging ‘new women identity’ in the patriarchal Victorian
England – as representative of the West – and Ottoman Empire – as representative of
the Middle-East – during the late nineteenth and early twentieth.

Our belief is that the mental history, dealing with the changing notion of
thought of the societies, and the literature cannot be seen as separable entities. Literary
works have always been used in history writing as primary sources as they give access
to and provide the means of recovering the culture that it mirrors. Therefore, this has
been also the study of the mental attitudes of writers on the women issues. Because it is
natural that women writers can understand the situations of their fellows as the bearer of
women traditions, it has been focused on the precedent novels of the two distinguishing
women writers in this thesis: The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf and Handan by Halide
Edip-Adıvar.

Personally experiencing the difficulties of being women and writers in

patriarchal societies, Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip take active parts in the debates of
their periods on the constructions of femininity with their forerunner personalities.
 110

Furthermore, with their novels, they try to emphasize the process of becoming women
in their patriarchal societies by offering issues concerning the feminist visions and
female identities of those times:

They wrote novels to describe that process – novels which said: ‘Here we are: women.
What are our lives to be about? Who are we? Domesticity, personal relations, personal
intimacies, stories…’ The novel is that creation by the woman of the woman or by the
subject who is in the process of becoming woman (Mitchell, 1974, p.100)

Thus, The Voyage Out and Handan shed valuable lights to the changing
concepts of the women identity in Victorian and Ottoman societies during their
transition periods from traditional into modernity, and enable the reader to evaluate the
relation between the individuals and the society. Through the personifications of the
female protagonists in their novels, Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip transfer their
women perceptions about the ‘new women identity’ emerged in their societies. In both
novels, the protagonists, Rachel and Handan, struggle hard to get rid of the social
conventions and the strict traditional rules of their male-dominated societies. To be able
to conclude that these female characters, and certainly the writer themselves, have
achieved their dreams about establishing the strong and independent female identities,
the women perceptions of Woolf and Edip-Adıvar has been taken into consideration in
the second chapter of this thesis.

Though it is not possible to say that their women perceptions overlap with
each other completely, it has been agreed that there are still some common points
between Woolf and Edip-Adıvar. They both became the voice of the Victorian and
Ottoman women, an advocate for women’s rights and pioneer in creating awareness of
these issues. Knowing the fact that it was the masculine values that prevail in both life
and literature, Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip marched in favour of women’s suffrage
and liberation claimed their right of education devotedly. What was essential for them
was the women’s being able to obtain the chance of getting education –as every man did
 111

easily- and standing on their own legs by having a strong and stable social place with
their independent female identities throughout the patriarchal societies. Through their
writings, Woolf and Edip both attempted to escape the influence of patriarchal
domination and to create woman characters that were confident and had the capacity to
cope life with their own.

By relying on these demands, Virginia Woolf tried to kill the ‘angel’ in the
house, who never had an idea or dream of her own, and encouraged women to survive
the lives formed within the framework of their own decisions and freewill rather than
live the predetermined ones. For her, the individuality and personal desires were of
great importance, so Woolf totally ignored the needs of the male-dominated Victorian
society. In other words, she opposed to becoming someone’s angel in the house, which
means that Woolf both wanted to be free of masculine authority and to use sexually
liberated language in literary works, the topics of which had traditionally been the
province of the male authors. In a way, Virginia Woolf succeeded this in her first novel,
The Voyage Out. She resisted to the traditional closure of the novel in which the heroine
falls in love with and marries the hero, and challenged both the province of the male
authors and the patriarchy with its established genres that killed the female creativity
and individuation. Nevertheless, she could not portray her female protagonist in The
Voyage Out as marginal and independent in her quests as those in her later novels, and
had to kill Rachel at the end of the novel, because Woolf personally was not able to
remove the influences of the cultural entrapment and conformities of her society.

In the analysis of the novels in the third chapter, it has been mentioned
about the comments of some of the critics, who have interpreted Rachel’s death as an
indication of resisting to patriarchal system. Yet, in our opinion, death is not a relief and
salvation from the dictates of the patriarchy but an abandonment from her hopes to
realize the separate-self and submission to the desires of the male-dominated society.
Furthermore, the indifference and ignorance that was shown by the others upon the
news of Rachel’s death clearly proved this fact. Her existence was irrecoverably lost
 112

under the influence of the masculine power. Rachel was not able to survive long enough
to complete her voyage into the independent womanhood as Woolf personally was not
powerful and brave enough to resist. Fortunately, Virginia Woolf did not give up
struggling against the patriarchal dictates and completed her aim of creating a self-
confident and independent female character in her magnificent novel, To the
Lighthouse. That is, Woolf finished her journey into writing that started with The
Voyage Out by achieving what she aimed: “The Voyage Out To The
Lighthouse”(Batchelor, 2000, p.19).

Nevertheless, unlike Virginia Woolf, Halide Edip-Adıvar was not able to

unbind herself completely from the conventions of the patriarchal Ottoman society since
she knew very well that the females who had been brought up within the sphere of the
Ottoman-Islamic traditions and norms were regarded as the symbols of underdeveloped
civilization by the Westernizers. On the other hand, for the Pan-Islamists, the modern
Occidentalist women were ‘femme fatal’ who were deprived of cultural and religious
values. Thus, Halide Edip tried to establish an ‘alternative women identity’ that
conciliated the conflicting ideas of the two sides: ‘women who were both modernized
and faithful to their values in conform to the settled moral and religious norms of the
public’. That is, getting stuck between tradition and modernity, Orient and Occident,
Halide Edip had to display a half modernist and a half-conservative manner.

With the influence of the Western education that she had, Halide Edip
appreciated the developments taking place in the modern world and argued that the
Ottoman society had to improve itself in order to reach the level modern societies. To
realize this aim, the only way was to increase the facilities for education. Like Woolf,
Halide Edip also defended the necessity of education for women. Yet, here also, the
underlying fact behind this demand was different. Virginia Woolf highlighted the
importance of education for women to realize their private needs and desires. On the
contrary, for Halide Edip, the question of establishing sophisticated women was directly
bound up with the bringing up intellectual future generations. That is, by creating
 113

intellectual wives and better mothers, she aimed enabling the Ottoman Empire to move
on the way to modernization without touching the traditional roles and moral values of
her society.

Indeed, as also seen in the personification of her female protagonist who

was stranded between the moral values of her society and herself, the concepts of
morality and religion were very influential on Halide Edip and her women perception.
Indeed, under these strong religious beliefs both of herself and the society, she had to
kill her protagonist, Handan, who was out of her time with her extraordinary
qualifications that did not conform to the socially-constructed femininity of the
Ottomans. While depicting Handan as a self-confident and strong woman at the
beginning of the novel, Halide Edip, then, had to kill her protagonist at the end of the
novel by depreciating Handan into a sinful, vile and inferior creature since she fell in
love with her cousin’s husband and betrayed her husband, having left her to live with
his mistress.

Indeed, to take such a brave step in her novel like this; that is, to dare to
write about a married woman’s falling in love and desiring to live with another man in a
society, where the principles of morality are so strict and harsh, is beyond the scope of
Halide Edip’s period. More importantly, it can be interpreted as a direct resistance to the
patriarchy. However, no sooner, Halide Edip had to finish her novel with the death of
her protagonist not only because of the harsh criticisms coming from the Ottoman
society but also because of her deep religious and moral norms having penetrated to her
since her early childhood. Thus, though trying, Halide Edip had to surrender herself to
the hands of the phallocentric representation of women and let her first female
protagonist, who was proceeding on the way of being the representative of the ‘new
women identity’ that came out of during the social transformations in Ottoman Empire,
became the subjects of the destinations that had been chosen for her. Handan was
punished as she deserved and died by being stigmatized as ‘femme fatal’.
 114

In the following stages of her career, unlike Virginia Woolf, who succeeded
in constructing the individual and self-conscious women that she longed for in their
novels, Halide Edip-Adıvar entered a new way with the emergence of the Independent
War, in which the idea of nationalism elevated women’s roles as mothers and wives. In
accordance with these roles, new images – self-sacrificing, desexualized and patriotic
women struggling for the salvation of the nation – gained importance for Halide Edip.
Indeed, this was; that is, creating desexualized women characters, who would not
possess any danger for males and always be in accordance with the moral values and
traditional roles of their societies, a safer way for Halide Edip to be able to lessen the
religious patriarchal effects of her society.

While studying the women perceptions of the writers and analysing the
reflections of these perceptions into their precedent novels throughout the thesis, Halide
Edip’s concept of desexualizing has reminded us the idea of the androgynous mind of
Virginia Woolf at first. However, our belief is that these concepts of the two writers are
totally different from each other. For Woolf, androgyny is a combination or balance of
masculinity and femininity, and one is not superior to another. Nevertheless, Halide
Edip totally ignores the feminine features and reshapes the women identity according to
the needs of the male-dominated society since she cannot distinguish herself in any
traditional or public sense.

In fact, to wait for a complete consistence between Virginia Woolf and

Halide Edip-Adıvar concerned with the women perceptions and the ‘new women
identity’ that they have struggled to construct is a great fantasy. As it is known, the
female sphere is eclectic. As with ethnic and national identity, female identity is sought
in an ideal reconstruction of history and the projection of that reconstruction on to the
future. This is why the women perceptions of the writers are different, the reason of
which must be sought in the differences of mentality and of attitudes of these women
writers. Due to these different mental attitudes and the changing historical events of
their periods, the portrait of their ‘new women identity’ through the personification of
 115

the female protagonists in their novels are influenced by all of these changes. Yet, the
novels of Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-Adıvar serve as an analysis of the historical
development of women identity and literature as Elaine Showalter has stated (1988).
According to her, there are three important stages in women writing: first is the
imitation of the mainstream literary tradition; second is the protest against the standards
of this dominant tradition concerning social values and rights and the last one is the self
discovery which aims at a search for identity. These stages are identified as ‘feminine’,
covering the years between 1840 and 1889; ‘feminist’, the period between 1890 and
1920; and ‘females’, starting in 1920 and comes to the1960s.

Considering these points, it has been understood that Virginia Woolf and
Halide Edip-Adıvar were in the second period of women writing, in which they lashed
out against the patriarchal standards and values by demanding their rights and
sovereignty be recognized. Unfortunately, the character analysis of the female
protagonists and the criticisms of the The Voyaye Out and Handan have leaded us to the
point that to change the role expectations of the patriarchal societies and construct a new
and independent female identity in place of the traditional and obedient one by
challenging the long-established phallocentric rules is too hard, especially if the creators
of these novels were also grown up in these kind of male-dominated societies. Thus, it
has been concluded that neither Virginia Woolf nor Halide Edip-Adıvar managed to
break total loose from their restraining patriarchal societies in their first novels. Indeed,
it was a fantasy to wait for them to realize quick changes and great improvements in
female identities and roles, because there was a long-lasting traditional notion of
femininity among the male-dominated societies despite the social innovations and
transformations towards modernisty. As being women having brought up in such kind
of patriarchal Victorian and Ottoman societies, Virginia Woolf and Halide Edip-Adıvar
were not able to become free from the social, political and ethic influences of their eras,
which shape one’s subjective experience and freedom. Hence, they had to kill their
female protagonists, who were totally contrary to the concepts of the acceptable
femininity of the era, as Woolf and Edip-Adıvar were not powerful and fearless enough
to resist to the patriarchal dictates.
 116

In addition to all, it is our belief that the strongest evidence proving the
weakness of the writers against the patriarchy is the way of killing their first female
characters. They both chose the death from an illness for their protagonists rather than
let them commit suicide, because Woolf and Edip-Adıvar knew very well that there was
free-will in suicide. Moreover, they knew the fact that they would face with the
reactions of their societies -Victorian England and Ottoman Empire- who were not
ready yet to see such kinds of independent women models who were self-reliant and
conscious.

The overall conclusion that can be offered at the end of this study is that,
while reading these novels, one can easily see the effects of the patriarchal system and
dictates on female creativity. However, though Woolf and Edip failed in their first
novels in terms of independent female explorations, they both - at least - challenged the
expectations of patriarchy and the way in which they were represented in their Victorian
and Ottoman societies. It is an undeniable fact that these two forerunner writers have
become proper models for the coming female generations with their personal life
stories, women perceptions and precedent novels in which they enable the readers to
evaluate the influences of the modernization period of women in West and Middle-East.
For the rest, these narrations of Woolf and Edip-Adıvar are the clues of the
controversial issues within the framework of gender relations, which still maintain their
validity at present.
 117

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 125

INDEX

A N
acceptable .... 10, 20, 34, 83, 84, 86, 95, 105, 107, 115 new women identity 5, 6, 7, 10, 18, 26, 27, 29, 41, 74,
93, 109, 110, 113, 114
C
P
Chodorow ........................................16, 17, 97, 98, 99
passivized women....................................96, 102, 107
patriarchal society.... 8, 10, 19, 20, 22, 24, 51, 59, 73,
F 76, 83, 92, 94, 96, 101
female exploration ...............................................7, 73 patriarchal women ...........................................97, 101
female identity .. 10, 30, 36, 41, 44, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, patriarchy .... 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17, 18, 21, 23, 24, 28,
56, 70, 82, 92, 95, 96, 97, 101, 114, 115 41, 42, 43, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 73, 76, 87,
female self ...........................................................9, 14 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 111,
feminine.... 4, 6, 10, 15, 16, 17, 20, 42, 51, 57, 67, 69, 113, 116
70, 72, 73, 76, 84, 87, 91, 100, 104, 106, 114, 115 phallocentric ........................................2, 88, 113, 115
Feminism ..................................................29, 55, 120 private needs..... 10, 34, 36, 41, 57, 69, 72, 73, 79, 84,
101, 104, 106, 112
psychoanalysis .....................................................4, 97
İ public needs...............................................69, 87, 101
identity search..........................................................97
individuation 16, 17, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 111, 124 S
separation...................................15, 16, 17, 97, 98, 99
J socially-constructed femininity...9, 10, 21, 23, 25, 26,
Jung .......................................................105, 106, 119 28, 30, 75, 76, 84, 86, 88, 107, 113

L T
Lacan .........................................................97, 98, 120 traditional.... 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 21, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30,
43, 44, 52, 53, 54, 57, 60, 73, 74, 93, 94, 103, 109,
110, 111, 113, 114, 115
M transformation............................7, 21, 23, 24, 77, 106
transition........................ 10, 51, 60, 92, 102, 107, 110
masculine.... 4, 10, 16, 17, 39, 42, 65, 68, 80, 96, 100,
103, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112
mental history ....................................................6, 109 U
Modernity ........................................................18, 118
Mother-Daughter Relationship ................................94 Urgan .........................................34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41
motherless..................................................97, 99, 101