Jean Rhys’in Karanlıkta Yolculuk ve Günaydın, Gece Yarısı Romanlarında Benliği Biçimlendirmek

Year 2024, Volume: 18 Issue: 1, 66 - 77, 30.06.2024

Nesrin Koç

https://doi.org/10.47777/cankujhss.1431613

Abstract

Jean Rhys modaya ve modaya uygun giysilere tutkuyla bağlıydı. Rhys’in modayı “ikinci bir tene” bürünmenin aracı olarak görmesi, eserlerinde yinelenen bir motif olan benliği biçimlendirme kaygısında karşılığını bulur. Rhys’in kendi hayatından otobiyografik izler taşıyan kadın karakterlerinin modaya uygun kıyafetler edinmekte yaşadıkları fiziksel zorluklar, 1900’lerin başında Paris ve Londra gibi kentsel mekânların fiziksel ve metaforik karanlığındaki yolculuklarında ataerkil ve sömürgeci bakışın nesneleri olarak yaşadıkları daha geniş çaplı mücadeleleri temsil etmektedir. Bu çalışma, ötekileştirildikleri toplumda varlıklarını sürdürebilmelerinin yegâne yolunun modaya uygun giysiler olduğunu düşünen kadın karakterlerden ikisi olan Karanlıkta Yolculuk’un Anna’sına ve Günaydın, Gece Yarısı’nın Sasha’sına odaklanarak, bu romanlarda Rhys’in modayı çok yönlü ele alışını karakterlerin iç ve dış benliklerini biçimlendirmekte yaşadıkları güçlüklerin bir yansıması olmaları bakımından, bütüncül bir benlik duygusuna ulaşmanın neredeyse imkânsızlığının bir ifadesi olarak incelemektedir.

Keywords

moda, benlik, Jean Rhys, giyim, kimlik

Fashioning the Self in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight

Abstract

Jean Rhys held a deep passion for fashion and stylish attire. Her perspective on fashion, as an instrument of adopting “a second skin” finds expression in her focus on fashioning the self, a recurring motif in Rhys’s oeuvre. The physical difficulty Rhys’s female characters, whose lives bear strong similarities to her own, have in obtaining fashionable clothes represents the broader struggles they go through as the objects of the patriarchal and colonial gaze, in their voyages through the physical and metaphorical darkness of urban spaces like Paris and London in the early 1900s. Focusing on two of these women, Anna of Voyage in the Dark and Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight, for whom fashionable clothing appears to be the only way of navigating the modern society which marginalizes them, this study explores Rhys’s multi-layered portrayal of fashion as a reflection of the near impossibility of attaining a cohesive sense of self, mirroring the characters’ struggles in fashioning their inner and outer selves.

Keywords

fashion, self, Jean Rhys, clothing, identity

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