Constructed Selves: Autobiography, Women, Republic (Kurgulanmis Benlikler: Otobiyografi, Kadin, Cumhuriyet) (review)

Autobiographies are important sources of information, especially for historians and social science researchers. Different than fictional narrative forms, autobiographies claim to have reported "what really happened" in the past, since they are based on the testimonies of historical characters. These narratives might potentially provide us with alternative interpretations of past events, and the intersection of the historical subject—constructed through meaning-making processes—with the meaning-generating narrating subject and claims of reality might make these narratives more interesting for curious readers. In her book, Constructed Selves, Nazan Aksoy first questions the representative capacity of the narrating subject as an historical one in this respect, and from the very beginning she puts forth that the self is already constructed through historical narration—an approach that makes any text's reference to historical truths or something genuine highly disputable. As we already know, memory inevitably selects some of the elements for montage while filtering others out; Aksoy claims that this genre, at least in its fictional dimension, deserves to be the subject matter of literary studies as well.

In Constructed Selves, Aksoy provides an insightful analysis of autobiographies—together with a few biographical interviews—of fourteen pioneering women of the early Turkish republic. Almost all of these women have become prominent public faces in their professional lives and embodied new identities from the very beginning of the republican period. Basing her arguments on the interpretations of their autobiographies, Aksoy asserts that, different than their engagement in feminist politics in Europe, autobiographies of women in Turkey have inevitably been deeply engaged with Turkish modernization and the republican project (10). In fact, this is also true for Turkish intellectual life in general: A rather vast amount of literature both in literary studies and social sciences has also been shaped around the same issue—the modernization of Turkey.

When the author delves deeper into her analysis, the focus on the republican project becomes even more manifest. The modernization ideal of the Turkish republic emerges as the central theme around the life stories of these pioneering women intellectuals of the period. There appears to be an inevitable organic link between the life stories and the dominant history of the period. Indebted to Kemal Atatürk—the founder of Turkish republic—and his project, almost all of these women seem to have internalized as their own the ideals of the republic to such an extent that it seems difficult to demarcate the boundaries between the ideals of the new regime and those of the women. As a part of the republican project, some of these women were expected to express the views of republican men in international arenas and not those of women. As Aksoy explains, any references to privacy in the texts of these autobiographies are absent; having pioneering roles in a male world with its new sexual politics, these women abstained from giving reference to or providing any glimpses into their private affairs, loves, marriages, and children (90).

On the one hand, the autobiographies analyzed in Constructed Selves reflect a wide spectrum in terms of their authors' divergent professional careers and political allegiances, yet on the other, they all reflect the experiences of women within the upper segments of society. During recent decades, women from lower social positions and less-valued (or -visible) occupations have also started writing autobiographies of their experiences. In the near future, this new trend might contribute a better conceptualization and assessment of society and everyday relations in Turkey. However, almost all the autobiographies in Constructed Selves, as pioneering texts, illustrate only the upper-middle-class experiences of women. Atatürk's adopted daughters Sabiha Gokcen and Afet Inan, well-known Turkish novelist Halide Edip Adivar, socialist writer and critic of the oppressive republican regime Sabiha Sertel, right-wing proponents Samiha Ayverdi and Halide Nusret Zorlutuna, and pioneering academicians Mubeccel Kiray, Turkan Saylan, Mina Urgan, and Nermin Abadan-Unat are some of the prominent women...