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about their weaknesses and fears, so they are strong characters. But they are not portrayed as ideal
figures, they are very human and real. In this context, representations of women in these three plays
by Erenus present an alternative approach against general, common representations of women in
drama in Turkey.
In these biographical plays, playwright questions about what real facts are and also researches the
actual reality of the women whose lives are her subject matter. Because there is a discrepancy
between what is recorded in history and the life experience of the women in plays. Women take
place in history either with the definition of masculine ideology or they are invisible. These plays
make these women both apparent and prevent them from being forgotten; but most important of
all, the plays question how these women are recorded in history which is written by men. The reality
changed when these women wrote about their own life stories. It can be said that the significance of
Halide Edip, Virginia Woolf and Lillian Hellman as individuals and subjects, as women who directed
the changes in society with their actions, writings, words, and standings, is downgraded by the
masculine history. Even the facts are distorted against these intellectual women in the field of
literature and history. Bilgesu Erenus is paying attention and emphasizing this fundamental issue
while dramatizing these women’s autobiographies. We previously have mentioned that the identities
of the women whose stories are being told are inevitably reconstructed, however the fictious part is
not totally distracted from the autobiography and totally made up of free imagination.
When we look at the formalistic features of plays, we do not see a linear flow or a realistic
approach. Bilgesu Erenus, while dramatizing women’s autobiographies uses, in all three plays,
symbolic expressions, a fantastical construction and stream of consciousness as writing techniques.
In each play, besides the main role, there is an additional figure that helps to proceed the plot. This
figure sometimes takes the place of some persons of the past, becomes a spokesman for them,
sometimes has the function of an observer with a critical view while the past is being lived, and
sometimes speaks as the inner voice of the main character or personality. Chain of action is carried
to a timeless space where the past, now and the future are lived at the same time or all times are
lived at once. This space is so that it is a moment of being at the same moment which hangs between
conscious and subconscious, between what is above time, and between times and outside time; it is
as if a tide, a waving in the mind, as if a spring of thought but in relation with reality, like a point of
view which can evaluate the reality from a distance. In short ordinary time perception is demolished.
In these biographical plays, Erenus, also tries to criticize historically the politics and socio‐political
structures of both the countries and the world of the eras that these three women lived in. In
addition she also shows the contradictions of social values and patriarchal relations. In these plays,
she discusses and questions the standard, common ways of perception and thinking determined by
political and social discourses, which also form the attitudes, relations and emotional reactions of
people and change values in society. She also criticizes the writing itself and all written materials by
starting from written history. In the plays, it is as if everything takes place in the cosmos of literature
or written works of all kinds.
That is why not only discussed are the writings of these women but also everything that has been
written about them in all times. Thus these women become observers, timeless readers, who have
the knowledge of everything what has been written about them. The playwright wants to empower
the critical point of view of the play by using the technique of “play within a play” or by forming a
meta‐fiction. The characters have the awareness of being written. This awareness of the characters
prevents empathy of the reader/spectator and creates a kind of alienation effect in order to tend the
reader to criticize and question the history. In these plays there is also a composition that changes
the time perception of the reader/spectator. Thus, reader/spectator’s emotional attraction towards
the life story told in the play is prevented. The reader/spectator is requested to be included in an
activity of thinking or it is aimed that the reader/spectator would become an outside eye. In