Gender roles and female-male relationships in Naki Tezel's "Turkish Tales" book

As a work of oral literature, a fairy tale is the first literary genre that we have already known, since our childhood. After making the impossible things possible in an ornamented fiction, fairy tales, which creates an opportunity for the narrator to express his/her feelings, dreams, and complaints in a figurative way, reflects the reality of human with imaginative elements. The action, which might be gifted or punished, forms the basic tenet of the conflict, and feelings bear the knowledge of social morals. Holding the social rules, and general acceptance is conveyed by characters. Fifty-four (54) tales in the book edited by Naki Tezel, namely "Turkish Tales" are analyzed throughout the study in the center of gender roles and male-female relations. General acceptances and expectations about gender roles in amazing fiction are determined and the formation process of identities is observed through the texts of the tales. The aim of the study is both to evaluate the findings of tales about gender in a sociological and psychological context and to reveal the effects of narration on the recreation of identities. In the very first part of the study, findings after literature review are presented and accomplished into a scientific background with a onceptional and theoretical frame. In the second part, the biography of Naki Tezel, the editor of tales underlying the sample group of the study, is presented. After the third part where the methodology of the research is explained, findings gathered together after analysis of tales are presented under the titles. In the last part, dispute, suggestions, and the conclusion part, data is compared to the previous studies, and the solutions are presented for the problems with expectations for the following studies. In this study, tales are analyzed in the light of gendered discourse and data shows that representation of male-female overlaps with the ones in the real life. Turkish society's patriarchal structure and the gender conception in this structure are almost the same as the gender conception in fairy tales.