Mommies, Grannies and Aunts at Home: Old Female Figures’ Relationship with Sacred in the Early Republican Era Turkish Novels

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between second and third generation female figures, who do not usually play dominant roles in the novels published between 1920 and 1950, and the relationship with the sacred sphere. This examination is carried out in the context of the secularization theses of “religious decline,” “differentiation,” and “privatization,” using selected examples from the novels. Accordingly, the positive or negative characteristics and levels of religiosity of the analyzed novel figures reflect the various contradictions and concerns of the implied authors against the modernization processes. One of the main arguments of this study is that secularization is a dominant trend in the novels examined, and that the sacred is not based on an authentic understanding of religion before secularization in any way. Another argument put forward in this study is that the attitudes of the implied authors towards the analyzed novel figures reveal not only an ideological approach, but also a genuine internal conflict. Thus, general information about the scope, method and aims of the study is given in the “Introduction,” and the representations of religiosity of old women in the novels of this period are analyzed based on the example of Mademoiselle Noraliya's Seat in the first section. In the second and third sections, the aim is to reach holistic results by dealing with these representations of religiosity with different dimensions. While analyzing the characters, a narratological approach is adopted and the distance and identification relations between the implied authors and the characters of the novels are taken into consideration.