Medeni ya da müslüman :popüler aşk romanlarında Feyza olmak

Abstract

Popular romance narratives are usually neglected and regarded as a part of “low literature” in the literary discussions of Republican period. This study claims that these novels, in fact, provide significant data in the context of the construction of both Kemalist / civilized and muslim women’s identities in different periods and under dissimilar conditions. In the light of this assumption, this study aims at exploring the textual image of woman in the novels of Kerime Nadir (1917-1984) and Şûle Yüksel Şenler, entitled respectively Gelinlik Kız (1943), Saadet Tacı (1966), and Huzur Sokağı (1971). To this end, I adopted a comparative method on the base of gender relations in the novels and searched for an answer to the question of how status of woman in these relations was defined and / or determined by female authors. At this juncture, feminist readings of popular romance and thought provoking comments of the feminist literary critiques on women writers provided me with an instrumental perspective for the analysis of the novels. In this study, it is concluded that these two women writers, Kerime Nadir and Şûle Yüksel Şenler, producing novels in two different historical periods and seemed to be the agent of different ideologies with quite different narrative messages are promoting a common image of woman stemming from the similar narrative structure as well as parallel narrative codes. In addition to paying a special attention for determining the methods exploited by Nadir and Şenler for transmitting their ideological messages to readers, it is also revealed that the ideological preference of the author in question has a formative effect on the novels’ structure.