Moll Flanders Romanında Anaerkil Alanlar ve Moll'un Kimlik Kazanımında Etkileri

On sekizinci yüzyıl İngiltere’sindeki kadınların inkar edilemez dezavantajlarına rağmen, Daniel Defoe’nun Moll Flanders romanındaki Moll karakteri, roman boyunca kendilerine yer edinmiş olan kadınlar sayesinde kimlik oluşumunu tamamlar. Geleneksel olmayan evlerde yaşamını sürdüren Moll, maceraları süresince karşılaştığı kadın karakterlerin sahip olduğu ve hüküm sürdüğü evlerde bulunur. Bunların bazıları; çocukken ona bakan ve eğiten Hemşire karakteri, evinde çalıştığı soylu hanımefendi, Bath’daki ev sahibesi, hırsızlık döneminde ona yol gösteren ‘Geceyarısı Annesi’ karakteri, ve hatta Amerika’daki kendi annesidir. Romandaki bu güçlü kadın karakterler, Gillian Rose’un Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge kitabında tartıştığı “erkeklerin hegemonik söylemleriyle sorunlu bir ilişkiyi dile getirmek için düşünülmüş bir alan” (159) olan paradoksal alanlara sahiptirler. Bu dönemdeki kadınların yadsınamayacak ölçüde ne evin içinde ne de evin dışında herhangi bir toplumsal güce sahip olmamalarına rağmen Moll Flanders’ın karşılaştığı bu kadınlar, kendi güçlü alanlarını yaratmışlardır. Bu yazının amacı, Moll Flanders romanındaki kadınların sahip oldukları umumi ve özel alanların Moll karakterinin kimlik arayışındaki olumlu etkilerini tartışmaktır.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Daniel Defoe, On sekizinci yüzyıl romanı, Alan çalışmaları, Kadın alanı, Kadın kimliği

Matriarchal Space and Formation of Identity in Moll Flanders

Despite the apparent disadvantages of women in the eighteenth century, Moll in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders encounters and learns from many women who have established a place for themselves. Although she never legitimately owns a home of her own until the end of the novel, Moll’s adventures feature her movement from establishment to establishment where a matriarch governs—“Nurse,” who schools her as a child, the gentlewoman she works for, her landlady in Bath, “Mother Midnight” throughout her years of thievery, and indeed her own mother in America. Each of these arguably strong women inhabits what Gillian Rose in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge has termed a paradoxical space, “a space imagined in order to articulate a troubled relation to the hegemonic discourses of masculinism” (159). Despite the indisputable dominancy of men in both the external and internal sphere at this time, the women in this text seem to enjoy spaces in which they can establish their own authority, although these may not be as easily identifiable as the well-established patriarchal norms. This paper aims to discuss the public and private spaces governed by women in Moll Flanders and to analyse how this use of space and place contributes to Moll’s formation of identity as a strong and liberated woman.

Keywords:

Daniel Defoe, Eighteenth-century novel, Space, Women’s space, Women’s identity,

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