The Tragedy of “Spinsterhood”: An Analysis of a Story by Tarık Buğra

Abstract

Various human aspects of the lives of ordinary people are witnessed in Tarık Buğra’s (1918-1994) stories, which consist of scenes from daily life. One of his stories is “Var Olmak Veya Olmamak” (1953), addressing a life story shaped by the loss of meaning and purpose in human existence. This story tells the tragedy of a 34-year old, “ugly and spinster teacher”, a witness of Turkish modernization and early republic years, who commits suicide. This teacher's nephew as a storyteller focuses on the last moments of her on a ship and on the breaking points in her past. Throughout the story, the reader understands that the loneliness of the teacher triggers feelings of ugliness in her, and the resultant feelings of inferiority complex drastically damage her joy of life and adaptive capabilities. This study aims to examine the conflict underlying this tragedy with a focus on her last moments and the meaning of spinsterhood in early Republican Turkey (1923-1950). Singleness, ugliness, and death coexist in this story and, the psycho-social context surrounding the suicide of the teacher who lost her power of being oneself is analyzed here. Relatedly, it is inferred that the overlapping norms of both traditional lifestyle and Turkish modernization lead to heavy public expectations and traumatic effects on the woman teacher. Patriarchal oppression of the teacher as a strong female character in the public sphere might be related to society’s unfamiliarity with the independent woman figures. Internalization of societal prejudice as a member of the collective subjectivity might result in feelings of incompleteness in an unmarried woman. The internal withering of the daughters of the Turkish Republic while they partook in the constitution of a new public sphere implies the difficulty in transforming and struggling against established social perceptions.