The portrayal of the “New Woman” in Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold and Halide Edip Adıvar’s Handan

There are striking resemblances regarding the role of women and the constitution of the female subject in European and late Ottoman societies at the turn of the century as represented in Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold and Halide Edip Adıvar’s Handan. Both Handan and Rita struggle to establish themselves as independent subjects in societies where they are basically perceived and treated as objects. Seeking to assert their individual identities as “New Women”, Rita and Handan stray from the well-trodden path and openly challenge patriarchal structures that marginalise women. Yet, they are also torn by inner turmoil that results from the conflict between traditional female roles their society expects them to play and their desire for an authentic, fluid identity. Whereas Rita is able to exercise relatively more agency and ends up following her own path in the end of the novel, Handan can only find release in death. Thus, Handan fails to make the vital transformational shift from seeing herself as the helpless victim and as not good enough to deeply honoring and respecting herself as a whole. In what follows, I comparatively examine Rita and Handan as discursive constructions of the New Woman in fiction and examine ways in which the New Woman protagonists in these novels internalise or challenge dominant gender norms and discourses of their milieu.