Peride Celal'ın romanlarında kadın kimlikleri

Abstract

Peride Celâl (b. 1915) was first acknowledged as a writer when short stories and novels were used to be serialized in newspapers and thus increased the circulation of newspapers. Peride Celâl has written numerous short stories and novels since 1936, the year her first novel was serialized. The author’s works, which primarily focus on female identities, are classified by most critics into two main groups. According to that classification, the novels, which were published between 1938-1949 and are known as “romances”, represent her first period, and those published between 1954-1990 represent the second one. Dar Yol (The Narrow Road) (1949) is accepted as the final novel of the author’s first period and Üç Kadının Romanı (Three Women’s Novel) (1954) is considered to be the groundwork for the second period. These two novels are hence, believed to be outstanding milestones in Peride Celâl’s literary career. The aim of this study is to depict the continuity rather than the so-called disunity among Peride Celâl’s novels, especially when one focuses on female identities. Such themes as “love and interpersonal relations”, “motherly love”, “perception of the body”, and “solipsism”, through which Peride Celâl’s female characters are replicated, are among the topics covered in this study, as well as narcissistic character traits that can be inferred through psychoanalytic interpretation of those themes. Besides the works of Sigmund Freud, Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, which mainly focus on the issue of narcissism, the works of D. W. Winnicot, an important psychoanalyst of the British school of object relations, which are on mother-child relations, will be the main sources in the theoretical part of the thesis. For this study, three novels, each of which represents a different period in Peride Celâl’s career as a novelist, are selected as the main texts to be analyzed. These novels are Dar Yol (The Narrow Road) (1949), Üç Kadının Romanı (Three Women’s Novel) (1954), and Kurtlar (Wolves) (1990).