The Novel & the Censors: A Woman's Proper Role?

image: Hagia Sophia, 2006

We have talked in class in some detail about Shafak's charges under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. We have not, however, talked about how Auntie Zeliha might have inflamed Muslim rage nor how this fictional character has a family of literary ancestors in America.

If her out-of-wedlock daughter and her defiance of Islamic propriety do not shock us, consider how they might stun a very different audience, including many who only know of the book by hearsay.

That is an old sentiment in the United States, but it existed strongly here at the time of Susanna Rowson's novel Charlotte Temple, its first American edition published in 1794. It was also the young nation's first best seller. The protagonist Charlotte becomes pregnant at the hands of a man who deserts her. By the moral conventions of the day, such a fallen woman must not succeed in a work of fiction. Rowson has her die in the course of the book. In fact, in this melodramatic tale, she expires in a chapter entitled "Ch. XXXIII: Which People Void of Feeling Need Not Read."

We laugh now, but in Rowson's time, novel-reading was considered morally suspect; her tale of sin and punishment perhaps placated critics who thought that novels promoted "suicide, adultery, prostitution, and the indulgence of every propensity for which a corrupt heart can plead an inclination" (qtd. in Cowell 14).

That revulsion at the popularity of the novel continued, but novelists gradually overcame the moral strictures of their day. Hawthorne could not allow Hester to live, but in 1900 Theodore Dreiser could allow Carrie to live and, indeed, thrive in Sister Carrie. Edith Wharton, on the other hand, did not permit Lily Bart to escape her actions alive.

Dreiser's publisher would later face obscenity charges over his 1915 novel, The Genius, and as a result withdraw it from publication (and copies were pulled from bookshop shelves). But Dreiser had a tough enough time getting his first novel into print. Harper and Brothers' letter to the author, rejecting it for publication, noted ""the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels" (qtd. in West). Reading Sister Carrie is still unsettling, when one thinks of the year in which it appears. Unlike Wharton's Lily, who falls from favor in rich society, Carrie is the small-town girl who has affairs and rises in the world of the theater (not a morally respectable profession). Amid the glittering parties and wealth of Gilded Age Chicago and New York, a new century began and with it, new desires by writers to test the old moral absolutes. The legend I've heard--one not supported in my research--is that Dreiser's novel first came out in a plain brown wrapper!

I think we have a context for Shafak's novel. If Turkey remains a secular republic, critics may come to regard The Bastard of Istanbul as Turkey's Sister Carrie. If you have an interest in what Dreiser pulled off in getting his novel published, I'd recommend this site at UPenn's library.

Works Cited:

Cowell, Pattie. Preface. Charlotte Temple. By Susanna Rowson. Boston: Bedford St. Martin's, 2011.

West, James L.W. III. "The Composition and Publication of Sister Carrie." Dreiser Web Source. http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/dreiser/scpubhist.html