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Article Excerpt
Ozet
Doris Lessing'in Altin Defter ve Peride Celal'in Uc Kadinin Romani'ninda Kadin ve Yazma Edimi
Hem kadin hem de yazar olma ikilemi, belirli bir yer ve zaman cercevesine konuldugunda ayri bir boyut kazanmaktadir. Bu calismanin ele aldigi iki romaninda karakterleri kadm yazarlar olmakla birlikte her ikisi 1950 ortalarinda yasamaktadirlar. Ancak, Doris Lessing'in The Golden Notebook (Altin Defter) romani Londra'da, Peride Celal'in Kadinin Romani ise Istanbul'da gectigi icin kadinlarin sosyal ve politik konumlari farkliliklar gostermektedir. Bu calismada romanlarin ana karakterleri olan Anna ve Fatma, hem yazar olarak hem de kadin olarak kendilerine nasil bir kimlik yarattiklari acisindan incelenirken, yasadiklari konumun bu kimlik arayisindaki etkisi uzerine durulacaktir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Dorris Lessing, Peride Celal, roman, kadin yazar karakterleri, Uc, Kadinin Romani, The Golden Notebook.
Abstract
Being a woman and a writer is a duality that gains particular interest when contextualised in a specific time and place. The novels that this paper aims to analyse both have female authors as their protagonists, and both Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Peride Celal' s Kadmm Romam (A Novel of Three Women) take place at around the same time--the mid-1950"s. However, while The Golden Notebook is set in London,Uc Kadinin Romani is set in Istanbul, thereby showing particular difference in the social and political structure. The principal concern of this paper is to offer an analysis of women writers of the times and to discuss their position in these two very different social atmospheres, as depicted in the novels in question. The two central characters in these novels, Anna and Fatma, will be compared and contrasted in terms of how they view their identity, womanhood, and how they are able to overcome this duality of identity.
Key Words: Dorris Lessing, Peride Celal, The Golden Notebook, Kadinin Romani, novel, women authors' characters.
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Despite the differences in their form and content, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Peride Celal's Kadinin Romani (A Novel of Three Women) share an integral concept--the problematisation of the role of women. Both novels concentrate on the position of women in their particular contexts, and offer an analysis of the women as writer in their respective times and places. Although their contexts differ (one is set in London, the other, in Istanbul), the novels are approximately close in their dates of publication; The Golden Notebook (1962, but takes place in 1957) and Uc Kadinin Romani (1954). This paper aims to analyze Anna and Fatma, the respective protagonists of the novels, in terms of how their femininity and artistic personality that is, being authors, are constructed. General issues regarding the woman question, marriage, and the relationships of these protagonists, particularly with that of their female friends, will also be analysed in order to emphasise the conflicts among the female characters in question.
Peride Celal has been criticised of writing 'popular' fiction at the time when novels published in Turkey were firstly serialised in newspapers and journals. These were called "tefrika romanlari" and were popular in the 1940s and 50s. Celal wrote, admittedly at great haste, to meet the deadlines set by these newspapers, and, in shod, she wrote for money. As she admits in an interview conducted by the author Selim lleri, "In the first years I wrote ordinary things, a little of what the newspapers wanted [...] I never looked back on them anyway" (1996, p.47). The negative criticism directed towards her was due to her 'simplistic' writing of popular love stories. Uc Kadinin Romani, published in 1954, signalled a slight change in her career, as author, toward a more socially oriented discourse in her fiction. It is, indeed, a love story, and, unlike most of Celal's work, has a happy ending. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern the female author finding a voice in the character of Fatma, who is also an author. The novel actually portrays a transitional phase of Turkish society from a traditional to a modern one, and especially dwells on the position of women in society in flux.
The problematisation of the female author, as Aytac; points out, is a post-modern concept because of its insistence of listening to the suppressed voice of the woman. Aytac states that Celal is perhaps the first female Turkish author who dwells on this problem: "For her to take up this widespread subject of post-modern literature makes her an initiator in some aspects. The questioning of the author--artist identity, how to write, what is the stance towards reality and the world, takes her to the detectable layers of metafiction" (1996, p. 122). Celal's use of metafiction in Uc Kadinin Romani is confined to the stories of Fatma, Belkis and Renan, three entirely different sisters in terms of character, but unified in the novel in terms of their experience of being women. The use of three perspectives, in the questioning of their main role, suggests a fragmental aspect of the novel, which places it into the layers of metafiction yet again.
While Uc Kadinin Romani can be said to be post-modern mainly in its content, Lessing's The Golden Notebook is post-modern in its form. Firstly, it is a multi-layered novel composed of four different notebooks that Anna writes in. Anna identifies these notebooks in terms of colour--the blue notebook is her diary, the yellow notebook is composed of her experimental creative writing, a red notebook for her experience in politics, and a black notebook, in which she dwells on her writing. These notebooks are in essence an extension of her fragmented personality and serve to make explicit the splits in Anna's character. Moreover, there are also the sections entitled Free Women in which a more objective, third person point of view is given to highlight the course of events. Thus, the novel has at least five levels to it, and as Greene also points out, "This situation of an Anna who writes a novel about an Anna, who gives up writing is a closed, self-cancelling circle: like...
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