Between Generations Across Cultures: Exploring Female Memory in Women's Fiction

We think back through our we are women, said Virginia Woolf in 1929, addressing an audience of women. (1) She was pointing to the lack of a women's tradition in literature specifically; however, she also meant that women's intellectual or spiritual search into the past for connections and understanding could be made only through their female ancestors. a recent interview, contemporary Turkish writer Ayla Kutlu expresses a similar view when she comments that Women's lives and experiences have been confined to the home, their proper sphere, for a very long time. When a woman is finally liberated from this narrow sphere, she looks back and in order to understand she stands and who she can be, she starts searching into the lives of the women who came before her. (2) Kutlu also explains that if she is a writing woman, she then proceeds to write their lives using the memories passed on to her across generations. (3) Nan Bauer Maglin voices a very similar observation. Women are now consciously exploring the previously unconscious bonds that have tied them to both their real as well as historical and grandmothers, (4) she writes. In relation to this there is a growing body of literature of matrilineage; women are writing about their female heritage and their female future. (5) The female characters contemporary women writers create in their works share the same attitude of thinking back through [their] mothers and the same backward glance to probe into the past. As Sandra Gubar and Susan Gilbert explain, where the traditional male hero makes his `night sea journey' to the center of the earth, the bottom of the mere, the belly of the whale, to slay or be slain by the dragons of darkness, the female artist makes her journey into what Adrienne Rich has called `the cratered night of female memory' to revitalize the darkness, to retrieve what has been lost, to regenerate, reconceive, and give birth. (6) This journey through time into personal, historical, and literary matrilineage is an empowering and inspiring process of discovery for women writers and the female characters they portray in their works. As Maglin writes, looking backwards daughters do uncover their mothers' and grandmothers' strengths, (7) for in female memory women's wisdom, knowledge, and strength are preserved and can be transmitted. As a matter of fact, much women's writing--not necessarily feminist--in the twentieth century has explored female memory, and many women writers have written out of their female experience. There have been interesting affinities of theme, meaning, and structure between women writers of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds as they retrieve female memory and translate its meaning. Ayla Kutlu is among the women writers in recent Turkish fiction who have focused their attention on female characters, and the worlds she creates centers on women of different ages, of diverse social, cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. her works Kutlu makes use of the oral traditions of women and draws on women's stories transmitted across generations orally. She thus draws attention to the women's unseen, unheard, unknown lives, (8) revealing the depth and diversity beneath them while distilling the knowledge and wisdom those lives provide. Not only as a writer does Kutlu concentrate on women's stories, but in her novels as well it is her female characters who excavate women's pasts and explore female memory, becoming the chroniclers of women's lives and experiences. her recent novels Bir Gocmen Kustu O (Like a Migrant Bird, 1985) and Emir Bey'in Kizlari (Emir Bey's Daughters, 1998), in which she searches into the history of a family over a period of one hundred years, Kutlu focuses on the relationship between the past and the present in terms of the intergenerational transmission of experience and memory. Revealingly, it is Leyla, the archeologist-historian daughter of the family in Emir Bey'in Kizlari, who attempts to discover her family history by first excavating layers of memory and then recording the stories they contain and transmit. …

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