TRANS Nr. 17: 3.3. - Pelin Güllübağ: The Question of Polygamy: Halide Edib’s Approach

Halide Edib Adıvar (1882-1964) is a distinguished woman writer and one of the most productive novelists of the late Ottoman and Republican Turkey. She is remembered in the world historiography as a ground-breaking activist of women’s rights and issues. Memoirs of Halide Edib is the first volume of her English-language autobiography that is published in 1926, during her self-imposed exile in London and Paris. Ernest Stuart Bates contends that her two volume autobiography not only represents the protagonist’s self history, but also stands as an epic completing and strengthening the authenticity of one another related with the issues of philanthropy, politics, home, passion, community, revolution and education.(1) In her Memoirs, Edib narrates her childhood experiences, married life, socio-political events and the World War I that echo in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious nature of the Empire and also in the diverse phases of Turkish nationalism(2). This paper aims to explore in what ways Edib’s approach to the polygamy custom has affected her writing and hence has resulted in prompt dispersion and maturation of the seeds of Turkish women’s freedom.

The first part of Memoirs is essential in the way the prevailing psychoanalytic language of the autobiographical discourse brings to light Edib’s experiences as a child that construct the fundamentals of her future spiritual identity alongside the cracks in her exceptional existence. In other words, “the self reveals itself in the notion of psyche that dynamically intersects the inner consciousness and the reality of the outer world”(3). She mostly depicts her early childhood as her days of gloom and despair, because the loss of her mother and the subsequent lack of care and affection caused the feelings of disappointment, fear and loneliness in her world, and as she grows older she tries to ease this pain and bring together the missing parts of her personality by identifying herself with some other individuals and society(4).

She was born in the abashed days of the long-established Islamic Empire on the verge of collapse, into a prosperous family of the Ottoman upper-class in Istanbul. For the most part she was raised by her conservative grandmother who was a member of the Mevlevi sufi order, which was widespread in the Turkish society and which referred to the mystical and nonconformist dimension of the Islamic religion, since her mother died when Halide was a young child(6). Edib was a writer who, from her childhood, closely witnessed the clash of the Ottoman-Turkish tradition, namely the Orient; she turned to the spiritual and to the Western culture, the Occidental, that she saw as dominated by materialistic existence. Therefore, Edib stands out from her contemporaries in her approach to the East-West conflict – she sees its resolution in a dialogue-based synthesis where the women’s question is found at the center (7). As Pelin Başçı puts it, Edib’s work, particularly her early period novellas that discuss some important gender-related subjects such as love, marriage, motherhood and divorce, reveals the Ottoman women’s struggle with unsatisfactory relations and the surrounding public restrictions. Edib’s work reveals the women’s quest for a distinctive kind of existence that brings up the equal partnership to men and the way how they contribute to socio-cultural transition, and the formation of an independent-minded woman image and hence a new family image(8).

Turning back to her family background in Memoirs, her grandmother’s house in the Muslim quarter of the city - which she calls the Wisteria-covered House and names after her Memoirs, 1963 - was traditionally decorated, mirroring the serene, reliable and powerful touch of the ideal Ottoman-Muslim cultural atmosphere and Sufi spirituality that prevail in all her works(9). Actually, this setting, where Halide is provided with the elementary principles and related values of Islam, which were adopted as the extension of cultural tradition and a stock of Turkish folklore, constitutes a miniature representation of the Ottoman Empire. It depicts the way in which the members of different races and ethnicities gather in harmony and are treated equally, and therefore become a part of the whole household showing mutual tolerance and respect to various individual and social interpretations of religion, culture and diversity(10).

Halide’s father Edib Bey, a man with a progressive outlook, settles in an Armenian and Greek neighborhood and serves as First Secretary of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s Purse. He belongs to the palace upper bureaucracy and as he appreciates the British principles and the system, he sends his daughter to a kindergarten which only Christians attended, and then to a famous missionary school in Istanbul, thus risking his entire career just to give his child a Westernized and modern education. As one of the first Muslim students of the American College, young Halide also received home tutorials from the most prominent Ottoman philosophers and mathematicians. These diverse levels of her background contribute to her development into a woman pulled between two poles. However, despite her intensive exposure and sympathy to Christianity and Western culture, she manages to remain composed, because her firm upbringing in the hands of her grandmother had no tolerance for imitation and the feeling of rootlessness(11).

The main issue which is discussed within the framework of the East and West conflict is the issue of harem and polygamy. The word harem refers to the section of the house banned to men who are not in close relations with a family. In nearly all families the wife of the eldest man and their daughters lived in the harem. In contrast to the common Western Orientalist prejudice (or fantasy), very few Ottoman harems housed more than one wife of one single man; only the rural population of religious background or the high ranking government officials practiced the custom of polygamy. Against the Western misinterpretation of the term harem and of the stereotypical Ottoman woman as obedient, ignorant, slothful, and unqualified, Edib writes to support the Turkish women’s battle for self-definition “…dispel the nasty atmosphere which a wrong meaning of that word cast over our lives. Tell (them) what our existence really is”(12).

Soon after the mother’s death, Edib Bey remarries and Halide begins to live her life moving between two houses. She develops a multicultural understanding in these formative years; she is able to witness two seemingly opposite views of humanity, society and their respective realities: East and West. At this particular moment in her life, she instigates a search for the ways to compare, criticize and reconcile the values and concepts concerning these cultures and the cosmologies with which they were identified. Young Halide’s life passes through a drastic change when her father decides to lead a polygamous life. Her father’s marriage to another wife, a family-dependent to whom Halide was deeply attached, and his attempt to unite all his family under one roof in a large establishment in Scutari, makes the things even worse. The blight of polygamy along with the painful period of family growth and miserable home conditions continued to cause affliction and difficulties to both wives and children: “On my childhood, polygamy and its results produced a very ugly and distressing impression. The constant tension in our home made every simple family ceremony seem like a physical pain, and the consciousness of it hardly left me” (13). According to Halide, the institution of polygamy not only connotes the act of betrayal, but also turns out to be an ongoing power struggle between the two women who are forced to share one husband legally; the first wife suffers more, yet, by instinct, both wives seek to gain supremacy through getting control of the household and making the decisions:

The grandmother’s house served as a shelter for the abandoned ladies. Confronting their agony and the humiliating position they had to bear, and finding herself at the center of the rivalries between the women and their relatives, Halide felt great distress and internalized a life-long loathe for polygamy. Since then, she bears in her soul the first seeds of her conscientious objection against repression and the urge to struggle and determine the necessary domestic policies and to make arrangements for social equality and the empowerment of women and the improvement of her socio-economic status as essential in the survival and maintenance of marriage, family, and the community. Henceforth, she wants to introduce a new image of dynamic and intellectual Eastern women in modern Turkey on the basis of her innovative understanding of Islamic verses and institutions from a liberal Islamic standpoint. (15)

Edib Bey’s obviously inconsiderate behavior and his decision to remarry was surprising; he was known as a critical rationalist, strongly dependent on the Western perspective, and he belonged to a progressive intellectual community that had no lenience for polygamous life style. However, he could not help practicing the early concessions which were offered to his gender by his social class and the patriarchal structure of Ottoman society that let him have the freedom to act upon his own wish, without getting others involved. For instance, when the Young Turk Revolution which brought about the second constitutional era and hence reforms in the administration of the Ottoman Empire took place in 1908, without any hesitation Edib Bey approved the society’s chaotic but thrilling transition and became a member of the revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), and supported its activities alongside her daughter. Therefore, it has been perplexing for Halide to accept the polygamous situation and the cracking fidelity that goes with it - as her father’s qualities do not allow such a confusion and personality defect. Edib Bey himself was not happy at all, as he was also disturbed by the whole situation:

After graduating from the American College in 1901, Halide married a famous mathematician and philosopher, Salih Zeki Bey, a friend of her father’s and the same age as her father, and started living in isolation and peace like a traditional Turkish lady. Every now and then, her married life was also interrupted by feelings of uneasiness and melancholy: “My life confined within the walls of my apartment…For the first few years I even ceased to see father’s old friends whom I had known as a child. I belonged to the new house and its master and gave the best I had to create a happy home and to help him in his great work”(17). When Salih Zeki decided to take a second wife after nine of years of their marriage, she immediately made her decision to divorce him and resisted the emotional adversity of this decision which was still considered socially radical. She felt that the curse of polygamy which she had suffered earlier in her life is casting a shadow on her own new home; this came as a shock to her sense of integrity(18). Edib wanted a divorce; however, at that time, as a woman, she had no legal rights. After a long and painful argument, her husband was persuaded to end their marriage. The custom of polygamy was again allowed after the Decree on Family Law in 1917, which introduces a monogamous family model, provided that the husband got consent from the first wife.(19) Edib as a renowned novelist who was mainly concerned with the women’s issues shows no rage at Salih Zeki presenting a noble front in an effort to rebuild her shattered life and in her narrative she portrays herself “as a wronged woman suffering for her principles”. Her notion of ideal marriage includes the modern Western-style nuclear family emptied of any excessive or immoral act. That is a Western model integrated into the present model for the Eastern family that reveals the hybrid structure of Turkish culture and its opposition to unrestricted implementation of concepts, values and models(20)

The genre of auto-biography serves as a lucrative source to trace the steps of modernization process as it discloses a person’s daily and life-long tensions and conflicts. Therefore, this paper has aimed to investigate the paradoxical concept of polygamy in the life of a revolutionary feminist, Halide Edib, who lived in specific realities of different homes. The paper has pointed out the way in which, both a public figure and a lady belonging to the elite and cosmopolitan circle of the Ottoman society, Halide Edib contributed to social transformation in terms of gender relations and women’s roles and hence to reconstructing the images of a new Turkish woman, an authentic blend of the East and West.

1 Quoted in Adak, Hülya. “An Epic For Peace” Memoirs of Halide Edib. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2005.p.v

2 Ibid p. xiii

3 Durakbaşa, Ayşe. Halide Edib: Türk Modernleşmesi ve Feminizm. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2000. p.179

4 Ibid p.176-177

5 Edib, Halide Adıvar. Memoirs of Halide Edib. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 1926.p.4-6

6 Durakbaşa, Ayşe. “Halide Edib Adıvar” Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19 th and 20 th Centuries, Francisca de Haan (ed.) Herndon: Central European University Press, 2006.p.120

7 Enginün, İnci. Halide Edib Adıvar’ın Eserlerinde Doğu ve Batı Meselesi. İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1978. p.461

8 Başçı, Pelin. “Love, Marriage and Motherhood: Changing Expectations of Women in Late Ottoman Istanbul” Turkish Studies. London: Routledge p.146-148

9 Enginün, İnci. Halide Edib Adıvar’ın Eserlerinde Doğu ve Batı Meselesi. İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1978. p.19

10 Enginün, İnci. Halide Edib Adıvar. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1989. p.1-4

11 Enginün, İnci. Halide Edib Adıvar’ın Eserlerinde Doğu ve Batı Meselesi. İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1978.p.27.

12 Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London: I.B.Tauris & Company, 2004.p.99

13 Edib, Halide Adıvar. Memoirs of Halide Edib. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 1926. p.145

14 Ibid p.142-143

15 Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London: I.B.Tauris & Company, 2004. p.38; Durakbaşa, Ayşe. “Halide Edib Adıvar” Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19 th and 20 th Centuries, Francisca de Haan (ed.) Herndon: Central European University Press, 2006.p.122

16 Edib, Halide Adıvar. Memoirs of Halide Edib. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 1926. p. 145-147

17 Ibid p.207

18 Durakbaşa, Ayşe. “Halide Edib Adıvar” Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19 th and 20 th Centuries, Francisca de Haan (ed.) Herndon: Central European University Press, 2006.p.121; Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London: I.B.Tauris & Company, 2004. p.38

19 Quoted in Adak, Hülya. “An Epic For Peace” Memoirs of Halide Edib. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2005.p.x

20 Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London: I.B.Tauris & Company, 2004.p.123; Başçı, Pelin. “Love, Marriage and Motherhood: Changing Expectations of Women in Late Ottoman Istanbul” Turkish Studies. London: Routledge. p.145

21 Edib, Halide Adıvar. Memoirs of Halide Edib. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 1926.p.307-310

3.3. Globalization, Transnational Literatures, and Cross-Cultural Understanding

	Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	März 2010

Sektion 3.3.	Globalization, Transnational Literatures, and Cross-Cultural Understanding Sektionsleiter \| Section Chair: Atilla Silkü (Ege University, Izmir, Turkey) Dokumentation \| Documentation \| Documentation