The New Turkish Woman and Her Discontents: The Contradictory Depictions of the (A)sexual Zeyno in Halide Edib Adıvar's Kalp Ağrısı (Heartache 1924)

The figure of the "New Turkish Woman" that appeared in the public life and literature of early twentieth-century Turkey was generally characterized as being "modern" but "modest": although her education and public visibility as part of the modernizing and republican projects of the era appeared to set her apart as a distinctly modern figure, she was also generally understood along more "traditional" lines as a figure that should avoid any possibility of arousing, explicitly or implicitly, sexual excitement; indeed, she was often characterized as being devoid of any sexuality at all. This article seeks to problematize such accounts of the New Turkish Woman's "(a)sexuality" through a Bakhtinian reading of the novel Kalp Ağrısı (Heartache, 1924), written by Halide Edib Adıvar (1884-1964), who is often regarded as one of the chief promoters of this figure of the "(a)sexual" New Turkish Woman. In contrast to existing critical accounts of this novel, which have tended to view the heroine (Zeyno) of Kalp Ağrısı as the prototype of (a)sexual New Turkish Womanhood, this article offers an alternative reading that examines how the depiction of its heroine disrupts received notions of New Womanhood in Turkey and, in particular, invites a deconstruction and rethinking of the place of female desire in the figure of the New Turkish Woman.