Women as Boundary Markers between Islam and Secularism in Julia Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium (2004) and Elif Şafak's The Bastard of Istanbul (2006)

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Bulgarian-French writer Julia Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium (2004) and Turkish novelist Elif Şafak's The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) show how both secular and veiled women become the ground upon which Turkey and France build their national identities. In Murder , the two narrators—the French journalist, Stephanie Delacour, and the unnamed narrator—associate secularism with modernization and progress, and Islam with backwardness and gender inequality. A financially independent world traveler, Stephanie constructs her identity as a foil to the allegedly subservient headscarved Turkish women and fears that French women's freedom might be endangered by the arrival of Muslim immigrants. Her elevation of her Slavic mother Christine and the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena as secular and rational Western women stands for her dream of a French national identity without Islamic influences. Şafak's novel, on the other hand, portrays Turkish female identity not as singular but complex, as the two sisters—the headscarved Banu and Zeliha wearing a miniskirt—live under the same roof. Şafak also portrays Turkish women's ambivalent position as the markers of modernity and tradition as the matriarch Gülsüm Kazancı criticizes Banu for defying secularism and Zeliha for her seductive clothes. Whereas Kristeva's narrators set French national identity in opposition to Islam and Turkish women, Şafak's novel challenges the flattened conception of Turkish femininity by depicting the hybridity of women's dress codes and religious practices. Both novels portray how secular Turkish and French nationalisms are imagined vis-à-vis female roles.