The New Woman Identity in Halide Edib’s Novel Handan

Halide Edib Adıvar’s novel Handan (1912) was written in a period of the dissolution of nearly six-hundred-year-old Ottoman empire and in the eve of the World War I. Handan whose attitude towards men is unladylike and is considered as a nontraditional woman in Ottoman society. She talks about philosophy, sociology and even politics. As a nationalist, Adıvar gives the example from “purely Turkish” tribes or the ‘Yuruks’ while asserting that the position of women in ‘Yuruks’ women is better than Ottoman women. While Adıvar praises the “purely Turkish” tribes such as “Yuruks”, she advocates a society where equality between men and women is maintained. Similar to Adıvar, Handan has a thirst for knowledge and the belief in equality. As a self-assertive, intelligent woman, Handan behaves like the early Ottoman or ‘Yuruk’ girls that discussed about public issues with men, rode horses with them and dares to travel on her own. To sum up, with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement in the book The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1973: 301), unfortunately Handan dies without reaching her desire to become the woman who is independent and self-assured due to traditional values in the late Ottoman period.