Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 3 – SOME TOPOI IN THE KURTULUŞ EDEBİYATI 
94 
(significantly a woman in 
Çalıkuşu
and 
Vurun Kahpeye
) and the traditional society 
of his or her own country. The choice of a teacher’s role in all three and of a heroine 
as opposed to a hero as the central figure in two of the novels serves to make the 
contrasts in that interaction sharper. In all three novels the reader’s sympathy is 
clearly meant to be with the teacher-hero. That said, the novels are quite different. 
Vurun Kahpeye
is written as a didactic work which projects by reference to the 
national struggle an obvious sense of right and wrong in the light of which the 
characters are fairly crudely portrayed. By contrast 
Çalıkuşu
has no overt 
didacticism, despite being nearly contemporaneous with 
Vurun Kahpeye
, only 
incidental reference to a war and by using the conceit of a first person narration, a 
much more nuanced literary form. 
Yeşil Gece
is didactic in a way that 
Çalıkuşu
is not 
but takes, as its own hero decides at the end, the middle way. The war comes and the 
hero is deported to a Greek island; but after his return he sees that the agents of 
reaction whom he knew before the war have only changed their external appearance 
and he is forced into a retreat. At the end of the novel the middle way is the one he 
literally and metaphorically resolves to follow. 
Against this background it seems unnecessary to over-analyse Reşat Nuri’s choice of 
a female protagonist for 
Çalıkuşu
and posit with Stephan Guth
18
that Feride is a 
representation of the author himself. Guth is however right to point out that it is not 
enough to read the novel as a contribution to the debate on female emancipation, 
drawing attention to a number of initiatives which had started before the First World 
War. To these we can add a much older reference to Ahmet Mithat Efendi who as 
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Guth, 205 

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