The portrayal of the “New Woman” in Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold and Halide Edip Adıvar’s Handan

Abstract

There are striking resemblances regarding the
 role of women and the constitution of the female subject in European and late
 Ottoman societies at the turn of the century as represented in Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold and Halide Edip Adıvar’s
 Handan. Both Handan and Rita struggle
 to establish themselves as independent subjects in societies where they are
 basically perceived and treated as objects. Seeking to assert their individual
 identities as “New Women”, Rita and Handan stray from the well-trodden path and
 openly challenge patriarchal structures that marginalise women. Yet, they are
 also torn by inner turmoil that results from the conflict between traditional
 female roles their society expects them to play and their desire for an
 authentic, fluid identity. Whereas Rita is able to exercise relatively more
 agency and ends up following her own path in the end of the novel, Handan can
 only find release in death. Thus, Handan fails to make the vital
 transformational shift from seeing herself as the helpless victim and as not
 good enough to deeply honoring and respecting herself as a whole. In what
 follows, I comparatively examine Rita and Handan as discursive constructions of
 the New Woman in fiction and examine ways in which the New Woman protagonists
 in these novels internalise or challenge dominant gender norms and discourses
 of their milieu.