Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Literature, August 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis studies three novels of the Turkish writer Halide Edib (1884-1964) written between 1908 and 1912, and examines this historical period and her life during it. The thesis deals with the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, the '31 March Incident' and the Turkist movement, as reflected in her novels, as well as independently through secondary sources. The examination of Raik'in Annesi (1980) reveals Edib's ideas on 'ideal womanhood,' morality and divorce. Seviyye Talib (1990) includes her views on the Constitutional Revolution, women's modernisation and the '31 March Incident.' The study of Yeni Turan (1912) reveals much about Turkism, or Turanism, and its political opponent in the novel, Ottomanism. From these novels Edib's main ideas are brought out and examined. Among the recurrent themes analysed are her strong admiration for the Angle-Saxon culture, her understanding of Westernisation, her approach to Islam, and her views on women and family.

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Halide Edib positioned herself as a main agent and figure of the Turkish nationalist movement, as both visionary and defender of her nation. Contributing to the evolving discourse on what it meant to be Turkish; Edib placed the family at the center of the state and identified women as state-builders. Through her interpretation of Turkish nationalism, I argue that Edib obscured the division between the public and private realm and classified women as agents in the creation of the Republic. I further contend that by doing this she contributed to the legitimization of Turkey on an international scale. This thesis focuses on the speeches Halide Edib delivered at the university Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi in 1935. These particular speeches are significant because they work towards a legitimization of Turkey, still in its infancy, as a nation, by addressing the "woman question." Halide Edib's view of a "new nation" and a "new woman" articulated in these speeches challenged contemporary views on women in a society at a political and cultural crossroads, overwhelmingly dominated by men.The power dynamics within the family and society at large are nuanced by Halide Edib's understanding of Turkish women's part in the national process during the formative years of the Turkish Republic. She depicted women as agents of nationalism and creators of the state. In doing this, she challenged both the ideological and applied position of women in the private realm, through her own discursive understanding of nationalism. Edib's definition of nationalism included the tenets of gender relations, family, and Islam and described each as a necessary component of a successful state.

This thesis examines the depiction of female characters as New Women in a comparative analysis of the fiction of two authors from fin-de-siècle United States of America and late Ottoman/early Republican Turkey: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), and Halide Edib Adıvar’s Raik’in Annesi (Raik’s Mother, 1909), Handan (Handan, 1912) and Kalp Ağrısı (Heartache, 1924). It argues that these novels can be read as examples of New Woman fiction, with their challenge to conventional fictional treatments of womanhood and their depiction of complex female heroines struggling against restrictive social roles, conventions and moral codes. Examining these texts together opens up a hitherto unexplored area of comparison into how the construct of New Womanhood was perceived and dealt with differently (and similarly) in the American and Turkish societies of the era. The thesis brings a new approach to the analysis of the novels under question not only by reading Wharton’s and Adıvar’s fiction in a comparative perspective but also by approaching New Woman fiction by means of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism, complemented by the work of feminist critics such as Dale M. Bauer, Gail Cunningham, Luce Irigaray and Lyn Pykett. A feminist dialogic approach informs my reading of the novels as texts that present a pluralistic exchange between multiple discourses and that resist a singular interpretation - instead offering multiple “readings”, with a surface narrative and counter narrative: whilst the surface narrative appears as authoritative and seeks to maintain the status quo (through voices that attempt to stabilise the New Woman and assert the authority of conventions and moral codes), this is disrupted and destabilised by the subversive marginal voices of the counter narrative. By attending in this way to the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of conflicting voices on the New Woman question in the texts - particularly as these are expressed in the heroines’ inner dilemmas and conflicts and around the issues of marriage, divorce and sexuality - I attempt to go beyond a reading of the texts as reflections of the biography of the authors or their views regarding a certain model of female identity, instead emphasising the problematisation and unfixing of identity in the novels and their depiction of New Women that are complex, fragmented and contradictory. Furthermore, influenced by the ideas of feminist thinkers such as Judi M. Roller and Elizabeth Bronfen, I propose that the unhappy endings of Wharton’s and Adıvar’s novels can be read as critiques of the oppressive effects of hegemonic discourses about women and a recognition of female agency and struggle. By examining these aspects of the novels, this comparative thesis aims to contribute to feminist studies focused upon the “woman question” and to the growing body of scholarly work on the New Woman.