The construction of the self in Nigâr Hanım’s diaries:|Writing the female subject in the late Ottoman period

Abstract

Nigâr binti Osman (1862-1918) is one of the most important women writers who contributed to the social and cultural change in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century with her works and intellectual personality. Nigâr Hanım is a writer who cares about the issue of “writing herself” since her first works. One of the most important proofs of this is her diaries that are constantly cited in the sources but are not transliterated to the Latin alphabet. Her diaries, which she kept between 1887 and 1918, convey a period in which the Ottoman Empire underwent a rapid change in the political and social levels at first hand. Thus, in these texts, the information about Nigâr Hanım's life can be discussed in the context of “memory”, “experience” and “testimony”. In addition, these diaries offer the opportunity to follow the daily life, emotions, literary preferences, writing adventure, quest and position of an Ottoman upper class woman according to the changing political and social conditions at the same time. In this study, Nigâr Hanım's diaries will be examined in detail in the context of “the construction of the self”, “the writing of the female subject” and the “inclusion in literature public”, based on the data presented to the self-construction of the daily genre.