“Şadan’ın Gevezelikleri” in the Context of the Tension Between the West and the East as Gendered Spaces

Abstract

Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil’s Bir Şi‘r-i Hayal, a collection of sixteen stories originally published in 1914 and later reprinted in Latin letters in 1943. The first six stories of the collection, titled “Bir Şi‘r-i Hayal,” “Yolda Bir Çiçek,” “Bir Küçük Hatıra,” “Ormanda Seyran,” “Bir Seyahat Sahifesi,” and “Seyahat Defterinden,” are narrated from the point of view of the character Şadan, who returns from a trip to Europe, and are grouped under the main heading “Şadan’ın Gevezelikleri.” In these stories, Şadan tells the narrator, who visits him in his house in Erenköy, about his relationships with Western civilization and Western women. Şadan’s relationships with Western civilization and Western women reflect East-West and masculine-feminine tensions. In the stories, when the East and the West are sometimes coded as masculine and sometimes as feminine, the West is fluidly gendered by associating with nature or civilization according to Şadan’s changing position. This study argues that Şadan sometimes codes the West as masculine by associating it with civilization and sometimes as feminine by associating it with nature. This paper suggests that in his relationships with Western women, Şadan occasionally positions himself as an Eastern subject desiring to submit to the West, and other times he makes himself an object of desire, thus attempting to reestablish the lost masculinity of the East. The manifestations of the orientalist and occidentalist conceptions in the gendered East and West will also be examined.