Civilized or muslim: Being Feyza in popular romances

Popular romance narratives are usually neglected and regarded as a part of?low literature? in the literary discussions of Republican period. This study claimsthat these novels, in fact, provide significant data in the context of the construction ofboth Kemalist / civilized and muslim women?s identities in different periods andunder dissimilar conditions. In the light of this assumption, this study aims atexploring the textual image of woman in the novels of Kerime Nadir (1917-1984)and ŞÃ»le Yüksel Şenler, entitled respectively Gelinlik Kız (1943), Saadet Tacı(1966), and Huzur Sokağı (1971). To this end, I adopted a comparative method onthe base of gender relations in the novels and searched for an answer to the questionof how status of woman in these relations was defined and / or determined by femaleauthors. At this juncture, feminist readings of popular romance and thoughtprovoking comments of the feminist literary critiques on women writers provided mewith an instrumental perspective for the analysis of the novels. In this study, it isconcluded that these two women writers, Kerime Nadir and ŞÃ»le Yüksel Şenler,producing novels in two different historical periods and seemed to be the agent ofdifferent ideologies with quite different narrative messages are promoting a commonimage of woman stemming from the similar narrative structure as well as parallelnarrative codes. In addition to paying a special attention for determining the methodsexploited by Nadir and Şenler for transmitting their ideological messages to readers,it is also revealed that the ideological preference of the author in question has aformative effect on the novels? structure.key words: Kerime Nadir, ŞÃ»le Yüksel Şenler, popular romance, feminist criticism,Kemalism, Islam.