THE SERPENT’S FANGS EMBEDDED IN THE HEEL: THE DIALOGIZATION OF AUTHORITY IN NAMIK KEMAL’S INTIBAH

Abstract

The Turkish novelist Namık Kemal’s Intibah indicates how a character struggles against misrepresentation. In the novel, Ali Bey, a 22-year old educated boy, meets a very beautiful woman, whose name is Mehpeykey, as he walks in Çamlıca, and he falls in love with her. The narrator says that Mehpeyker does not have a virtuous background and he does his utmost to make the addressee hate her and believe that she is not a suitable partner for Ali Bey. However, the reader interestingly sympathizes with her throughout the novel because with her speech and actions Mehpeyker represents herself differently from what the narrator says about her. The present article studies the relationship and struggle between the narrator’s and Mehpeyker’s discourses based on the theory of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Since in Intibah the narrator’s discourse appears as patriarchal discourse and another’s word as femininity which struggles against misrepresentation by patriarchy, a feminist reading of Bakhtin is also employed in the analysis of the novel. In Intibah Mehpeyker represents the voice of the other that disseminates the male authority of the narrator.