The de(con)struction of the man-made language and ideology through female sexuality and textuality in the novels of Virginia Woolf and Erendiz atasü

Language, which is simply defined as the system of words or signs shared by a group of people to communicate and express thoughts, has always played an active and dominant role in creating a subjugated and subservient life for women. In this limited life, civilization is patriarchal, history is HIStory, literature is phallocentric and language is man-made. In order to break the chain of vicious circle, forcing them being the inferior 'others' of men, women seek the ways of de(con)structing all the fixed and the hierarchical structures of male discourse and its man-made language. Among those women are Virginia Woolf and Erendiz Atasü, who assert that women can transcend all patriarchal boundaries between body/mind, female/male and self/other through the 'all-encompassing female language', which enables a non-phallocentric 'feminine writing' practice. Depending on the similar concerns of women/women writers about the man-made language that constructs the rigid patriarchal norms, this study, first, puts forward how phallocentric ideology both affects women and how it is challenged by women's writing. Then, basing its argument on the theories of post-structuralist feminism, it analyzes the feminine texts written by Woolf and Atasü, who live in quite different periods and societies that have various philosophic, religious and cultural practices, in order to find out if the 'female language' shares common features despite all these boundaries. The comparative analysis of the two writers reveals that the female language challenges the speech governed by the phallus and brings down phallocentric discourse by writing the pleasures of female body, which are fluid, multiple, diverse and nonhierarchical. Thus, by liberating female body and experiences from the control and authority of the man-made language and ideologies, this new poetic language de(con)structs the distance between 'body and mind' and achieves 'wholeness' by moving beyond the fixed confines of sexual differences. With this all-encompassing unity, Virginia Woolf and Erendiz Atasü validate the possibility of creating a new world built on a true diversity and culture, where all sexes and genders will be equal. As a result, 'the female language' is proved to be offering an egalitarian basis for all humans, not just for women, by de(con)structing the patriarchally constructed gender roles.