Sanem Altı is a PhD candidate at University of Leicester, researching contemporary Turkish women’s writing through the motif of the hymen (1923-2023). She is currently looking at the works of Elif Shafak, examining the role her novels have in readers’ understanding of Turkish womanhood.
'The Hymen in the Novels of Elif Shafak'
The hymen is not significant biologically, ‘nothing more or less than a functionless leftover’ (Blank, 2007: 33). It is, however, socially significant whereby it directly and indirectly ties a woman’s worth to her purity. Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British author whose novels include the focus on womanhood in Turkey. Shafak does not limit the role of the hymen to virginity. She also reveals how shame and guilt are ingrained into women from a young age. Additionally, Shafak explores the different representations of women in Turkey, and critiques the representation of the ‘ideal’ Turkish woman. Turkish is one of the languages into which Shafak’s novels have been translated. However, the translations differ from the English original. Arzu Akbatur analyses how national identity in The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) changes according to the Turkish translation and English original. However, Akbatur does not explore national identity through the lens of women. National identity is gendered, and Shafak emphasises this. My presentation will compare Honour (2013), and its Turkish translation, Iskender. This comparative analysis seeks to determine the representation of national identity when deconstructed through language. By comparing these two novels, I conclude that the translation plays a key role in the readers’ comprehension of Turkish womanhood.
Keywords: language, womanhood, Turkey, national identity, gender.
Gaia Fay Lambert is a part-time PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. She specialises in experimental fiction, blending poetry, prose and drama in her work. Her masters project, a poem-play entitled ‘The Blue House’ debuted last summer in an Off-West End production which received 3 Offies nominations. Her current work is an experimental historical novel examining the legacy of female tragedy in popular culture, tracing the journey of Ophelia and the women who portray her. Outside of her PhD, she works in educational events management and outreach.
'Reflections in the Water: Exploring the Legacy of Tragedy in the Recontextualised Tragic Heroine'
This paper examines the ways historiographic metafiction can reflect on cultural legacy and the phenomenon of an extratextual tragic heroine. My Creative Writing PhD project follows the threads of female tragedy over time and its impact on English culture: Ophelia’s death escapes the bounds of Shakespeare’s play, and her name becomes synonymous with that of the tragic heroine. In writing my novel, I have had to grapple with the way public perceptions of history become legend, how female tragedy is represented and how women’s legacies become inextricably linked. Since Lizzie Siddal’s early death in 1862, her former role as the model for Millais’s Ophelia painting in 1852 has been interpreted as foreshadowing of her own tragic fate. I will discuss how my writing process engages with this phenomenon by using a 21st century protagonist to reflect on Ophelia, Siddal and their cultural afterlives.
Keywords: tragedy, history, women, metafiction, creative writing.
Andrea Lambert is a part-time postgraduate student at Anglia Ruskin University. Her first degree is in Politics and Modern History from the University of Manchester. She gained her Masters in English from the Open University, where her dissertation was on the works of John Keats, exploring his preoccupation with time. She is currently in the fourth year of her PhD, and her thesis explores the agency of Lord Byron’s heroines in his poetry and dramas. Examining the works in their literary, political and historical context, the thesis will add new insight to Byron’s depictions of women.
‘Byron’s Haidée as Tirso’s Tisbea: The Re-presentation of Woman as Victim in the Reimagined World of Don Juan’.
Writing in self-imposed exile in Italy between 1818 and 1823, Lord Byron used his mock epic, Don Juan, to express his contempt for the hypocrisy of English society, as well as his anger and frustration about various political and historical events happening in Britain and across Europe. The hero-villain of the Don Juan legend is typically presented throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries in the dramas of Tirso de Molina, Moliere, Shadwell, and Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, as a cynical, unashamedly evil serial seducer of susceptible women. Byron subverts the legend, instead portraying Don Juan as the innocent prey of resolute, sometimes powerful women who have agency to determine the course of the narrative. As part of my wider research into Byron’s female characters in his poetry and dramas, this paper will focus on one heroine, Haidée, examining her in comparison with her counterpart Tisbea from Tirso’s text. I will explore the way Byron uses Haidée as a parallel to the Greek people and a means of expressing his Philhellenist views. This will demonstrate Byron’s presentation of a woman with the agency to rule her own island yet ultimately ending as a victim of patriarchy.
Keywords: subversion of patriarchal type, boundary-crossing, agency for women.