A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON KATE CHOPIN’S “A RESPECTABLE WOMAN” AND SEVGI SOYSAL’S “TANTE ROSA AFOROZ EDILIYOR”

Abstract

Feminist literary criticism focuses on what women are doing in a fictional work, how they interact with men, what the moral and social codes for women are, and what the women’s role in society is. Feminist criticism provides new evaluations and historical, social, and interdisciplinary points of view to every text. It is also thought that women writers look at the world differently and create their works within a predominantly female sensibility. This study presents a comparative analysis of the themes and heroines in the short stories “A Respectable Woman”, by Kate Chopin, and “Tante Rosa Aforoz Ediliyor”, by Sevgi Soysal. Sevgi Soysal and Kate Chopin not only describe the individual feelings of women but also criticize the patriarchal structure of society in their works. By doing a feminist reading, it will be tried to understand the aims of Chopin and Soysal while describing and demolishing the cult of ideal womanhood in their writings. In this article, the woman image will be problematized in the light of feminist literary criticism, and it is examined how this image is shaped in these short stories. It is aimed to show that although the authors and short stories’ protagonists are from different eras, societies, and cultures, the reflections of politics, controlled by patriarchy, have similar characteristics.