Dilek Direnç, Ege University, Turkey
"We think back through our mothers if we are women," said Virginia Woolf in 1929, addressing an audience of women. [1] She was pointing to the lack of a women's tradition in literature specifically; however, she also meant that women's intellectual or spiritual search into the past for connections and understanding could be made only through their female ancestors. In a recent interview, contemporary Turkish writer Ayla Kutlu expresses a similar view when she comments that "Women's lives and experiences have been confined to the home, their proper sphere, for a very long time. When a woman is finally liberated from this narrow sphere, she looks back and in order to understand where she stands and who she can be, she starts searching into the lives of the women who came before her." [2] Kutlu also explains that "if she is a writing woman, she then proceeds to write their lives using the memories passed on to her across generations." [3] Nan Bauer Maglin voices a very similar observation. "Women are now consciously exploring the previously unconscious bonds that have tied them to both their real as well as historical mothers and grandmothers," [4] she writes. "In relation to this there is a growing body of literature of matrilineage; women are writing about their female heritage and their female future." [5]
The female characters contemporary women writers create in their works share the same attitude of "thinking back through [their] mothers" and the same "backward glance" to probe into the past. As Sandra Gubar and Susan Gilbert explain, "where the traditional male hero makes his 'night sea journey' to the center of the earth, the bottom of the mere, the belly of the whale, to slay or be slain by the dragons of darkness, the female artist makes her journey into what Adrienne Rich has called 'the cratered night of female memory' to revitalize the darkness, to retrieve what has been lost, to regenerate, reconceive, and give birth." [6] This journey through time into personal, historical, and literary matrilineage is an empowering and inspiring process of discovery for women writers and the female characters they portray in their works. As Maglin writes, "looking backwards daughters do uncover their mothers' and grandmothers' strengths," [7] for in female memory women's wisdom, knowledge, and strength are preserved and can be transmitted. As a matter of fact, much women's writing--not necessarily feminist-in the twentieth century has explored female memory, and many women writers have written out of their female experience. There have been interesting affinities of theme, meaning, and structure between women writers of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds as they retrieve female memory and translate its meaning.
Ayla Kutlu is among the women writers in recent Turkish fiction who have focused their attention on female characters, and the worlds she creates centers on women of different ages, of diverse social, cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. In her works Kutlu makes use of the oral traditions of women and draws on women's stories transmitted across generations orally. She thus draws attention to the women's "unseen, unheard, unknown" lives, [8] revealing the depth and diversity beneath them while distilling the knowledge and wisdom those lives provide. Not only as a writer does Kutlu concentrate on women's stories, but in her novels as well it is her female characters who excavate women's pasts and explore female memory, becoming the chroniclers of women's lives and experiences. In her recent novels Bir Göçmen Kustu O (Like a Migrant Bird, 1985) and Emir Bey'in Kizlari (Emir Bey's Daughters, 1998), in which she searches into the history of a family over a period of one hundred years, Kutlu focuses on the relationship between the past and the present in terms of the intergenerational transmission of experience and memory. Revealingly, it is Leyla, the archeologist-historian daughter of the family in Emir Bey'in Kizlari, who attempts to discover her family history by first excavating layers of memory and then recording the stories they contain and transmit.
As a young student, Leyla is told by her history teacher that she should consider herself familiar with history only if she learns whatever is excluded from the history books. "Think[ing] back through [her] mothers," Leyla discovers the past through female memory; this is history not included in books or recorded in official documents. In Adrienne Rich's words, these stories of women are "records usually not considered / of sufficient value to be / officially preserved," [9] and they reach Leyla through memory.
Mothered by two women, Leyla thrives on their love and care. She grows up witnessing their lives and embraces the stories they transmit to her. She also gets to know the network of female friendship, through which aging, worn-out women, left alone in the world without a home or any means of supporting themselves, survive in a world of female solidarity. Visiting old friends, they offer their work and their stories at every home in which they stay. When they leave, their stories remain behind to resonate in the memory of the younger women. Other than those stories, "There's no trace of their lives. That they loved. That they made love.... No record of them exits." [10]
"What does it mean to look into the past?" asks Leyla. "To transform history to memory?" [11] Looking into the past and exploring the memory, Leyla comes to see how different and how impressive in their own ways her two mothers had been. Her adoptive mother had grown up in an oppressive, patriarchal society, in which even women were ranked according to their blood ties to the male master, and in which they were totally silenced. Yet, this did not prevent her from having moments of silent self-assertion and fighting courageously the battles she knew she was destined to lose. Her birth mother-a source of vitality and a model of self-reliance-came from a more privileged background, but her life did not lack struggle either. Realizing that these women provided her with the wisdom and confidence to become the person she is, Leyla values female memory as a source of strength and vitality and decides to preserve it by writing her mothers' stories.
Erendiz Atasü, another contemporary Turkish woman writer, attempts to reconstruct the lives of the previous generations of women in her works to discover the threads that connect their lives and experiences to those of the younger generations and to uncover what wisdom and knowledge those women can offer them. In her long story "Arda Kalan" [12] ("What Is Left Behind"), a professional visit to her father's hometown turns out to be a journey into the past for the protagonist, where she encounters the memory of her much-loved but little-known grandmother, now long dead, and learns from it.
Almost thirty years old, unmarried, educated and with a career, Selma is searching for the meaning of her life and that of being a woman in a changed and changing world. Since, as a result of the rapid social and historical changes experienced in the twentieth century, the women live in a world that is radically different from that of their grandmothers and lead very different lives, the question they are asking now is what aspect of their female existence and experience the grandmothers can possibly transmit to them. Selma's grandmother is long gone; in the place of her house, in which she had lived almost her entire life and to which she had been intensely attached, now stands an ugly apartment building. The title of the story is the question Selma carries in her mind on this journey: "What Is Left Behind." The story records the process of her reaching the answer. What is left behind is the memory, which, in her case, proves to be redeeming. Around the apartment building the flowers her grandmother planted ages ago are still blooming. The geraniums have endured and survived. The message is encoded in them for Selma to interpret.
A fortunate encounter with a woman her own age, who had been nurtured and also supported financially by her grandmother in her efforts to go to school, gives Selma the chance to learn more about her grandmother. What she had been told by her father before his death and what she learns through this woman give her a more complete picture of her grandmother's life. Although lived within the boundaries of conventional womanhood, her grandmother had been an extraordinary woman of strength and endurance. She once made a courageous escape with her family from an approaching enemy army in a small boat, rowing for days in the dangerous waters of the Black Sea, thereby saving her family. She weathered the loss of her husband and five sons-three of them were young men when they died; she suffered the cruelty and inhumanity of war; even when she was left as the lone survivor of her entire family, while her only granddaughter was in a distant city, she was still on the side of life and working for it, directing her love and care to the young people around her. She never gave up her house or her garden and valued both as her own livable space. The life story of Selma's grandmother, coming to her through her own and others' memories, reveals a life in which there were suffering and hardships, but also no lack of struggle and determination. The woman who comes back to life in the memory is a fighter.
As a woman who believed in herself, who had a fighting spirit, who was open to love, the grandmother shows Selma that self-determination, strength, and love do exist. After all, if her grandmother had achieved this much in her lifetime in a strictly patriarchal society and through such difficult times, Selma, the granddaughter, with all the privileges she now has, can do better. Thus, Selma's search for understanding and connection leads to a spiritual reunion with her grandmother, whose presence Selma can still feel in her flower garden, where her geraniums become a metaphor for the continuity of life through memory. The grandmother Selma retrieves through memory teaches, challenges, and nourishes her and thus prepares her for a season of blooming like her enduring geraniums. Selma gains the awareness that her roots give her the nourishment to live out her existence in her own time.
In American women's fiction, Eudora Welty is one of the writers who create affirmative visions of women's intergenerational transmission of values, wisdom, and knowledge through memory. Welty has often pointed out that the love of storytelling in the South encourages the transmission of memories across generations. Women's stories have a central place in Welty's fiction and she makes use of personal as well as generational and historical memory. Talking about her Pulitzer-winning novel The Optimist's Daughter, [13] she once said that "[she] did draw on some of the childhood and early married experience of [her] own mother." [14] In this novel, the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, gains wisdom and strength to go on with her life only after she connects with her mother and grandmother through remembering while excavating layers of female memory.
The protagonist, Laurel McKelva, who has been working in Chicago for long years, returns home to Mississippi after her father's death, but this time to leave it permanently to his father's young widow. The last night Laurel spends in her old home becomes a night of remembrance and discovery for her. Running away from a bird, which flew into the house on the stormy night, she is finally trapped in her long-dead mother's sewing room, which now hosts her mother's exiled belongings, including her letters, pictures, notebooks, and even recipes. Going through them, memory transcends time and space, and she glimpses her mother's life "as if it were freed of that clock time which spaces us so inhibitingly, divides young and old, keeps our living through the same experiences at separate distances." [15] The memories that return to Laurel in her mother's sewing room teach her that perfection in life is an illusion. She also learns that love cannot be perfect unless it is sealed away and frozen in its moment of perfection. Instructed through memory by the wisdom of both her mother and grandmother, Laurel gives up her protected and idealized memories, which were frozen in a dream of perfection. In return she is liberated from the hold the past and death have over her and is now able see a new future.
Laurel's long night of remembering is a journey into the past. But it is also a journey to the underworld, for the past becomes a place of the dead where she meets her mother both as a young girl and as a dying woman, and her old and lonely grandmother as she is thinking and writing of her granddaughter. Facing the past and the dead, Laurel then arises with a new strength and maturity, ready to live her life in her own time. A female place, called by Carol S. Manning "the womb of the house," [16] her mother's sewing room thus becomes a place of transformation for Laurel, for the processes of recovering and reworking memory and of translating its meaning start there. When Laurel leaves her mother's room the following morning, she is a much wiser and stronger woman than she had ever been. At the end of her long night of entrapment in her mother's room, in a gesture symbolic of her own liberation, Laurel frees the bird from its own entrapment in the house. In the end, she is herself freed from her entrapment in the past and is ready to move into the future.
In a similar way, Katherine Anne Porter, also a Southern writer, looks back into the past, exploring women's lives through memory. Studying Porter's fiction, Jane De Mouy observes that the writer "had a fierce curiosity about who she was and what her feminine identity meant." [17] "Her fiction," De Mouy writes, "chronicles what she discovered in various times and places, particularly how women were affected psychologically by attitudes in their society and by the other women they encountered." [18] "The Old Order" stories, which form a story-cycle unified by a single narrator, are reflections in a rearview mirror for Porter's primary character Miranda. In these stories, Miranda reconstructs the lives of the women in her family, while focusing her "backward glance" on her grandmother and the women of her generation, including the freed slave and lifelong companion Nannie and Great-Aunt Eliza, her grandmother's sister. Paralleling the daily artistic activity of her grandmother and Nannie, who make memory quilts using "scraps of the family finery, hoarded for fifty years," [19] Miranda's attempt is to create intelligible patterns fitting together scraps of the family memory, so that she can translate their meaning for her own use.
The similarities in the lives of the black slave and the white mistress underline the inescapable servitude of women born into the tradition of Southern Victorian society. However, although always within the limits of conventional womanhood, the grandmother demonstrates enormous strength, determination, independence, and self-sufficiency while she raises eleven children single-handedly after her husband's death. Nannie, on the other hand, survives the grandmother, and in her last years, she decides to live on her own. Shedding off all the familial ties and social roles (like the tree frogs in the fig trees that shed their skins in the story "The Fig Tree"), she declares her independence and becomes "an aged Bantu woman of independent means," not "the faithful old servant" of the family. [20] She thus prepares Miranda for her own decision to belong only to herself. Great-Aunt Eliza's primary gift to Miranda is an awareness that "her grandmother's is not the only world of values and that the different world of Aunt Eliza can exist separately from it and on equal terms." [21] This impressive woman, who demonstrates "an almost sacred interest in science," [22] kindles intellectual curiosity in Miranda and thus leads her from ignorance to knowledge and to expanding her world. The grown-up Miranda in the story "Old Mortality" rejects conventional womanhood as it is defined and lived out in her culture; however, the strength for this act of self-assertion comes to her through her identification with these inspiring women. The women of her grandmother's generation provide Miranda with different versions of the strong, independent, and self-sufficient woman. If Miranda can go on to become the New Woman, it is only after she internalizes the lessons taught her through the memory of these strong women.
Interestingly, both the optimist in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter and Emir Bey in Kutlu's Emir Bey's Daughters are defined as men with daughters. Yet, in both texts, the daughters identify with their mothers. They come to realize that while their fathers seemed to be all-powerful, the wise, strong, and enduring ones were their mothers. In a way, the grown-up daughters discover their fathers' humanity and vulnerability at the same time that they discover their mothers' strength and vitality through memory. In Atasü's "What Is Left Behind" and Porter's "The Old Order," the protagonists turn to their paternal grandmothers to receive the strength they need to create and pursue their private visions. In all of these texts, the basic orientation is toward the maternal; the male characters are peripheral, whereas female characters occupy the center stage by becoming the shaping influences in the lives of the younger women. The daughters find a source of strength, vitality, expansiveness, and freedom in the power and struggles of their mothers. Their common experience, the journey to the past, is a journey from ignorance to knowledge, one that brings about a positive transformation. In women's fiction, the acts of excavating women's history and retrieving female memory lead to an expansion of the self as a result of the wisdom and strength gained through memory.
Notes
[1] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, (1929; New York: Harvest, 1992) 72.
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[2] Ayla Kutlu, Nov. 1999, personal interview.
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[3] Kutlu, personal interview.
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[4] Nan Bauer Maglin, "'Don't never forget the bridge that you crossed over on': The Literature of Matrilineage," The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980) 257.
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[5] Maglin 257.
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[6] Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale, 1979) 99.
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[7] Maglin 262.
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[8] Ayla Kutlu, Bir Göçmen Kustu O, (1985; Ankara: Bilgi Yayinevi, 1996) 56. All translations are my own.
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[9] Qtd. in Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993) 83.
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[10] Kutlu, Emir Bey'in Kizlari (Ankara: Bilgi Yayinevi, 1998) 215.
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[11] Kutlu, Bir Göçmen Kustu O 217.
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[12] Erendiz Atasü, Lanetliler (Istanbul: AFA Yayincilik, 1985).
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[13] Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter, (1972; New York: Vintage, 1990)
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[14] Peggy W. Prenshaw, ed., Conversations with Eudora Welty (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979) 116.
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[15] Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) 102.
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[16] Carol S. Manning, With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985) 182.
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[17] Jane Krause De Mouy, Katherine Anne Porter's Women: The Eye of Her Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) 5.
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[18] De Mouy 5.
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[19] Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York & London: Harvest, 1979) 326.
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[20] Porter 349.
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[21] William L. Nance, Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964) 108.
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[22] Darlene Harbour Unrue, Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985) 46.
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