Acting the Nation

Acting the Nation Women on the Stage and in the Audience of Theatre in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic Cora Skylstad TYR 4590 – Master’s thesis in Turkish Studies Area Studies of Asia, the Middle East and Africa Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages UNIVERSITY OF OSLO October 2010 ii iii Abstract In the first decades of the 20th century, the public position of actresses underwent a radical transformation in Turkey. While the acting profession had long been commonly regarded as unsuitable for Muslim women and had been monopolized by women belonging to the non- Muslim minorities, in the 1920s the Muslim actress was not only legitimized but in fact embraced by the state as a model for Turkish women. In the works of Turkish and Ottoman theatre history, the emergence of Muslim actresses has been given some attention, but it has not been studied from a critical perspective inspired by theoretical questions. Moreover, the process of legitimization of Muslim women as theatre audience, which took place prior to the legitimization of the actresses, has been ignored. The present thesis seeks to develop a better understanding of these developments by approaching them as part of social and political history, while drawing inspiration from an interdisciplinary field of scholarship on gender and theatre. The time period studied begins with the late era of the Ottoman Empire and ends with the early years of the Turkish Republic, covering a time span of more than fifty years. In order to capture the complexities of the subject, a wide array of written sources, including memoirs, interviews, theatre reviews, books and a theatre play, are included in the analysis. This thesis challenges historical narratives approaching Turkey’s transition from Empire to Republic as one of total rupture, and instead emphasizes continuities and the complexity of factors influencing the position of actresses in Turkey. Although rapid changes did take place in the first years of the Republic, the legitimization of Muslim Turkish actresses relied on transformations of both national identity and norms of feminine behaviour, and none of these were realized overnight. An analysis of original debates suggests that the legitimization of Muslim actresses also entailed a process of Othering of non-Muslim actresses, and that the Muslim actresses were summoned to the stage not primarily to represent femininity but to properly represent Turkishness. By showing how theatre has been perceived as simultaneously a reflection of and producer of modernity, this thesis highlights the role of theatre in Turkish nation building. iv v Acknowledgements First of all, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Bernt Brendemoen. With abundant knowledge and continuous encouragement he has guided me through the never-ending maze of the Turkish language and into the increasingly confusing corridors of Ottoman Turkish, while always maintaining a sense of humour that has made the journey very enjoyable. This thesis would never have come into being in its present form without the inspiration I enjoyed as an exchange student at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. I am particularly grateful to my professors Duygu Köksal, Ahmet Kuyyaş and Berna Yazıcı for constantly presenting me with intellectual challenges, and to my fellow students for our endless and enlightening discussions. My research is the result of academic wanderlust and has profited from material found on three continents in various departments. I am very grateful to the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul for awarding me a one-month research scholarship for the spring of 2010 which allowed me to access dearly needed material while living right off Istanbul’s old theatre district. During my research stay in Istanbul I profited from the help of the staff at Kadın Eserleri Kütüphanesi (Women’s Library), Yapıkredi Sermet Çifter Kütüphanesi (Yapıkredi Research Library) and the Near East department of the Boğaziçi University Library. I would also like to thank the librarians at the Boston Public Library and the Outreach Centre at Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts for helping me fill in blanks in my bibliography. As I believe that ideas are often better developed through exchange of thoughts than in absolute solitude, I am also grateful to a number of colleagues and friends, whose feedback and opinions I appreciate dearly. You are too many to mention. I thank Barış for being my first Turkish teacher and for all of his support. And lastly, I thank my parents for letting me grow up surrounded by books, and for encouraging me to be ever more curious and critical. vi A few Remarks on Turkish Pronunciation and Transliteration The orthography of modern Turkish is very phonemic compared to that of most languages. Turkish vowels are mostly short; in older language extended length or stress is sometimes marked through a circumflex for the letters â, î and û. Here is an outline of the standard pronunciation of the most significant letters: a as in bath c as in June ç as in change e as in Mecca g as in gap ğ is called ‘soft g’ (‘yumuşak ge’) and is normally silent. Its main function is lengthening the preceding vowel as in the word bağ, but it also appears as a voiced postvelar fricative. h as in hat i as in infant ı is an unrounded high back vowel which does not have an equivalent in English but is somewhat similar to the vowel sound in plus j as in French Jean o as in horse ö as the first vowel sound in murder, like the German ö r is mostly close to the fricative r in Norwegian or Italian but softer u as in move ü has no complete equivalent in English but is similar to German ü or the French u in tuer In this thesis I cite all Turkish words, including terms borrowed from Persian and Arabic, as they are spelled in Turkish. The only exception is ‘Istanbul’, which I spell as in English, omitting the dot over the initial ‘i’. I have also chosen to follow the Turkish way of spelling Armenian names, since this is how these names appear in my sources. In my study I make use of primary sources written before the Turkish language reform of 1928, when the Ottoman script was abandoned and a modified Latin script was introduced. However, I have not transliterated this material myself but rely on the transliterations from Ottoman Turkish into vii Latin script found in my sources. I quote these transliterations as I have found them, and have thus not made use of diacritics in this thesis. In Turkey, only a few people used surnames prior to the surname reform in 1934, which obliged all Turkish citizens to adopt a surname. In most Ottoman sources people appear only with their personal name(s) followed by a title such as ‘Bey’ (Mister) or ‘Hanım’ (Miss or Mrs).1 Women were often identified by their father’s name until they took their husband’s name upon marrying. In older sources the order of personal name and surname is sometimes inverted, i.e. Muhsin Ertuğrul is in Ottoman sources often referred to as Ertuğrul Muhsin. These facts all add up to a very confusing situation where Halide Hanım, Halide Edip (father’s name), Halide Salih (first husband’s name) and Halide Edip Adıvar (second husband’s name) are all the same person, as is Mustafa Kemal, Mustafa Kemal Paşa and Atatürk (name given by the Turkish Grand Assembly in 1934). In order to make this thesis as reader friendly as possible, and to minimize confusion and anachronisms, I have chosen to cite names consistently throughout the thesis with surnames adopted at a later time in square brackets, i.e. Halide Edip [Adıvar] and Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk]. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Turkish are my own. The original Turkish quotes are given in footnotes. 1 Other common titles include ‘Efendi’ (Sir), ‘Ağa’ (Lord, commonly used for landowners) and ‘Paşa’ (Pasha, also used for generals and admirals). viii Contents ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................................................................III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..................................................................................................................................V A FEW REMARKS ON TURKISH PRONUNCIATION AND TRANSLITERATION ............................. VI CONTENTS...................................................................................................................................................... VIII 1. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................. 1 1.1. RESEARCH QUESTIONS................................................................................................................................. 2 1.2. SITUATING THIS THESIS WITHIN THE WIDER LITERATURE ........................................................................... 4 1.3. METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS.......................................................................................................... 5 1.4. STRUCTURE OF THESIS ................................................................................................................................. 7 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1. THEATRE, POLITICS, AND NATIONALISM...................................................................................................... 8 2.1.1. Theatre at the Intersection of the Literary and Political Public Spheres ...........................................

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