The representation of sexual violence in Halide Edib Adıvar's novels

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the representation of sexual violence and its textual and political implications in Halide Edib Adıvar’s novels. By analyzing the narrative construction of sexual violence in Adıvar’s novels written from 1909 to 1923 through a feminist narratological approach, it discusses the relation between the form and the content and seeks answers to how and why sexual violence is represented, and who narrates it. Halide Edib’s early novels -namely Heyula (1909), Seviye Talip (1910), and Handan (1912)- represent sexual violence through ambiguities, silences, and gaps in the texts narrated exclusively by first-person male narrators whose discourses are challenged by the narratives of other characters. This narrative strategy allows Halide Edib to embed the unnarratable sexual violence in the novels and to distance herself as the author from the narrators of the texts. However, her two nationalist novels -Ateşten Gömlek (1922) and Vurun Kahpeye (1923)- written during the Independence War, mark a change in her choice of narrators from first-person male to third-person omniscient whose gender is unmarked. This change also reflects a switch in her style for representing sexual violence. Her narratives of harassment, sexual assault, or rape which were unnarratable in her first novels become narratable in a nationalist context and after the existence of an omniscient narrator, the ambiguities and silences no longer exist to signify sexual violence.