Abstract
This paper investigates the intricate connections between sexuality, desire and clothing in Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil's turn-of-the-century novel Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love, serialized in 1900), which is perceived to be one of the founding blocks of prose fiction in Turkish. More specifically, the paper focuses on the role of clothes and the shopping for clothes in shaping the relationships between the two female protagonists, with the help of the theoretical framework provided by René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Through a reconsideration of the major dynamics of plot and character development, enabled by a new type of relationality between clothes and their wearers or commodities and their users, the paper seeks to position the century-old novel within its historically specific cultural and economic context, and hence responds to existent criticism that tends to see it as divorced from the social reality of its time.
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