WOMEN’S CHANGING IDENTITY IN AYLA KUTLU’S NOVEL ENTITLED EMİR BEY’İN KIZLARI (DAUGHTERS OF MR. EMIR)

Abstract

Ayla Kutlu ranks top among authors in the Turkish literature who have focused on the question ofwoman and used woman’s point of view in the most effective way. Kutlu’s originality lies in herplacing the women in the context there she belongs rather than separating them from thesociety where they live and the historical periodIn this way, she saves women from getting lostamong abstract discourses and reflects the process of social changes, to which she attaches veryimportance, in a clearer mirror. The purpose of my study is to reveal the women’s changingidentity and to analyze the reflections of the modernization in the Turkish literature within theframework of fictional reality which Ayla Kutlu created without ignoring the historical perspectiveand probe the social equivalent of the intellectual woman identity by acting from this novel. Atthe center of the novel is Eyyübe Cevahir Yeşil, who is referred to Leyla for short. Ayla Kutlurenders visible the changing identity of the woman in the Turkish society through Leyla. Leyla isthe last member of a large family who has epitomized the breakdown of whole lifespan of thatfamily in her person, and a synthesis of two mothers. Nevnihal and Gülhayat’s shortcomings insociety have been completed in the person of Leyla. Her elder sister Hüsra, on the other hand, isa character who has been disillusioned in the course of her life, which she had begun without aguide. Emir Bey’s elder daughter Hüsra is an “Assyrian beauty of two thousand years ago” withher limited point of view, her weakness, frigidity and lack of willpower; she belongs to ancienttimes. His younger daughter Leyla, on the other hand, has won the battle she has fought againstlife, though at a heavy price, with her culture, idealism, her fondness for uniqueness, her strongpersonality and willpower, and with her identity gained by these qualities, she is woman of newages. The function of Emir Bey in the novel is to serve as an axis where the lives of these fourwomen converge.