Limits of Women’s Liberation in Fatma Aliye Hanim’s Ud？: Women Working 'Within The Moral Boundaries’ and ‘The Others’

Fatma Aliye Han？m (1862-1936) who is considered as the first woman novelist of Turkish literature wrote novels on the woman question on the basis of modernization movements in the Ottoman Empire. Her novels Muhadarat (1892), Refet (1898), Ud？ (1899), Levayih-i Hayat (1899), and Enin (1910) were published chronologically. It is seen that in the studies on Fatma Aliye Hanim researchers have interpreted author's novels in the context of women’s participation in social and business life, women’s education, marriage, polygamy, and divorce. The aim of this work is to argue basic concepts and ideas of the Ottoman women's movement, which is different from the identical movements in Western countries, through Fatma Aliye Han？m's novel Ud？ (The Lute Player). Identities and professions of the mother and the daughter as antiheroines, positioned at the opposite pole of the heroine Bedia, who made use of her own ability to play ut to become able to stand on her own legs after divorce, define the othered women of the era. In this study, it is emphasized that from Fatma Aliye Han？m’s point of view, Naome and Helula were non-Muslims and they had to be excluded because they played and danced in public shows. The female characters are examined through Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895-1975) dialectic of self and other, which argues that at the time of aesthetic activity the writer empathizes with the other, then returns to his original position and reflects each character’s inner conflicts objectively