Atkinson’ın Suç Romanlarında Jane Eyre’in Feminen Özne Arayışının Tekkerürü

Year 2023, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 58 - 70, 10.05.2023

Esra Melikoğlu

Abstract

Kate Atkinson ilk ve dördüncü suç romanı Case Histories (Suç Dosyaları) ve Started Early, Took My Dog’da (Köpeğimi Alıp Erkenden), feminizmin başarısızlığını gözden geçirmek için Charlotte Brontë’nin Jane Eyre’ini ve başka Kadın Gotik anlatılarını yeniden yazar. İkinci dalga feminizm, kadınlardan yarı yok edilmiş feminen özneyi bulmalarını ve kalıntılarından kendileri için özgür bir kimlik inşa etmelerini ister. Atkinson’ın ilk suç romanında amatör dedektif ve oyuncu Julia Land kaybolan kız kardeşini, dördüncü romanında da televizyon ekranında büründüğü adli tıp doktoru rolünde, bedenine eziyet edilerek öldürülmüş bir seks işçisinin kimliğini bulmak zorundadır. Ancak Julia, Jane Eyre gibi hem kaybolan bir kadını arar hem de kadının varlığını görünmez kılmaya çalışan ataerkiyle suç ortaklığı yapar. Bu makalede, Atkinson’ın çağdaş suç romanında kadın dedektifinin ve günümüz kadınlarının ‘gotik kadın kahramanın’ açmazını tekrar yaşadıklarına işaret ettiği savunulacaktır: Kendilerini romantik aşk mitine kaptırarak feminist misyonlarını unutup ataerkinin feminen özneyi yok etme suçuna ortak olurlar.

Keywords

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories, Started Early, Took My Dog, Jane Eyre, Feminen Özne

Reiteration of Jane Eyre's Search for the Feminine Subject in Atkinson's Crime Novels

Abstract

Kate Atkinson in her first and fourth crime novel, Case Histories and Started Early, Took My Dog, rewrites Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and other Female Gothic narratives to ponder feminism’s failure to ‘arrive.’ Second-wave feminism asks women to retrieve the half-obliterated feminine subject and construct from the fragments an emancipated identity for themselves. In Atkinson’s first crime novel, the amateur detective and actress Julia Land must retrieve a vanished sister and, in the fourth, in her onscreen role as a forensic pathologist the identity of a mutilated sex worker. Yet Julia repeats Jane Eyre’s simultaneous search for a lost woman and complicity with patriarchy’s occlusion of her. Atkinson, it will be argued, signals that the contemporary literary female investigator and ultimately today’s women relive the gothic heroine’s dilemma: Susceptible to the myth of romantic love, they abort their feminist mission and collude with patriarchy’s obliteration of the feminine subject.

Keywords

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories, Started Early, Took My DOg, Jane Eyre

References

• Armitt, Lucie. “Dark Departures: Contemporary Women’s Writing After the Gothic.” Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture, edited by Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 16–29.
• Atkinson, Kate. Case Histories. 2nd ed., Black Swan, 2015.
• ---. Started Early, Took My Dog. Black Swan, 2011.
• Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Penguin Books, 1994.
• Beebe, Ann. “The Companion.” Emily Dickinson: A Companion. McFarland, 2022, pp. 23–262.
• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 3rd ed., Penguin Classics, 1985.
• Dresner, Lisa M. The Female Investigator in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, McFarland, 2007.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, vol. 12, Hogarth, 1958, pp. 145–156.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979.
• Hanson, Clare. “Fiction: From Realism to Postmodernism and Beyond.” The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970 – Present, edited by Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker, vol. 10, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 23–35.
• Head, Beth. “A Normal Pathology? Patricia Cornwall’s Third-Person Novels.” The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film and Television, 1990–2010, edited by Malcah Effron, McFarland, 2011, pp. 36–48.
• Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Irigaray, Luce. “Women-Amongst-Themselves: Creating a Woman-to-Woman Sociality.” The Irigaray Reader: Luce Irigaray, edited by Margaret Whitford, 5th ed., Blackwell, 1995, pp. 190–197.
• Melikoğlu, Esra. “Culpable/Maternal Detectives: The Impossibility of a Caring Ecofeminist Community in Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog.” Crime Fiction Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2021, pp. 171–185. doi:10.3366/cfs.2021.0045.
• Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Columbia University Press, 2016.
• Munt, Sally R. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel, Routledge, 1994.
• Norquay, Glenda. “Genre Fiction.” The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Norquay, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 130–139.
• Parker, Emma. Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Reader’s Guide, Continuum, 2002.
• Reitz, Caroline. “Nancy Drew, Dragon Tattoo: Female Detective Fiction and the Ethics of Care.” Textus, vol. 27, no. 2, 2014, pp. 19–46. doi:10.7370/78276.
• Riley, Catherine, and Lynne Pearce. Feminism and Women’s Writing: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
• Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2008.
• Wallace, Diana, and Andrew Smith. “Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic.” The Female Gothic, New Directions, edited by Wallace and Smith, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 1–12.
• Wisker, Gina. Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.