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WOMEN’S BIOGRAPHIES IN PLAYS
Fakiye ÖZSOYSAL *
In this study, three plays, namely Halide, Kırmızı Karaaağç‐Red Elm‐ and Güneyli Bayan‐Southern
Lady‐, written by Bilgesu Erenus, a women playwright of Turkey, with feminist critical approach from
the memoirs and autobiographies of Halide Edip Adıvar, Virginia Woolf and Lillian Hellman (Halide
Edip Adıvar’s Mor Salkımlı Ev‐House With Wisteria, Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary and her novels,
Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time) will be evaluated in the context of how women biographies are
handled in these plays. What these biographies are speaking to our day and how a
feminist playwright who originates from these lives compose her plays, the dimension of the
relation she establishes with these biographies and what she reflects in the plays will be discussed.
sing the autobiographies as subject matters for plays means that the autobiographic personality
that is handled, is inevitably composed and interpreted in variable ways, again and again; first by the
playwright in the text, then by the director and players on stage. Hence, in biographical plays, the
frames of reality and fiction are inside one another and are vague.
Subject matters of three plays by Bilgesu Erenus, the autobiographies of three intellectual
women, Halide Edip Adıvar, Virginia Woolf and Lillian Hellman, as presented in plays, include a
confrontation and a reconsidering their pasts. We also see how they establish their existence in
writing. We witness them questioning the political and social ideologies of their era. We see their
personalities that present their standing point as intellectuals; but they don’t hide their weaknesses
and fears, either. In the lives of these women of literature, there exists a different problematic and a
struggle since they are women. In addition to this, the isolation and the solitude that they are
sentenced as intellectual women in society, the contradiction between the reality and the way that
they are recorded in history are their common features of their life stories.
Bilgesu Erenus, in these three biographical plays that she composed with a feminist critical
approach, aims to make apparent not only the intellectual identities of these women of literature but
also their identities as women. She gives special importance to portraying the weak and strong
features of their personalities interwoven, thus she does not create idealized figures
and personalities in the plays. These plays are written with the critical viewpoint of the
experience of being women. They are composed so that while presenting cross sections from the
lives of these women, it is aimed that the reader/spectator would approach the social and political
ideologies from a critical angle and would question the social status of women. These plays are
questioning the internalized social and political ideologies and thus are diversifying and widening the
point of view of the reader/spectator. Another common feature of these plays is that while
talking about and reconsidering what happened in the past, they also shed light on today.
Thus they are ever meaningful.
These women characters that Bilgesu Erenus has chosen from history and presented us are the
representations of women as individuals and subjects, who were influential in the field of literature
and politics, who were able to interfere with the society and who have influenced the society with
their ideas and attitudes. These intellectual women’s efforts to keep on to exist in a world that they
were forced to solitude, their efforts not to give up their standing points and their struggle to carry
on their criticism against patriarchy and the political structures of their era are emphasized in these
plays. Women in these plays make their own decisions, they live according to their own free will,
they lead their lives according to their own choices and preferences and they are not afraid of
bearing the consequences of their decisions; they are smart and they also have the courage to talk
*
İstanbul University - İstanbul, Turkey