Carnivalesque Reading of Halide Edib Adivar’s The Clown and His Daughter

Abstract

Halide Edib Adıvar (1884–1964), prominent and revolutionary Turkish writer, wrote her novel The Clown and His Daughter in 1935 in English. With a colourful story of Rabia’s psychological, social, and physical development, Adıvar undertakes a meticulous re-examination of the social categories of her native land during an empire’s rapid moving into a state of a republic. This study will claim that Adıvar’s novel The Clown and His Daughter is a purely carnivalesque piece of work if analysed in terms of Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival. Mikhail Bakhtin rests the importance of the carnival sense of the world upon the transcending of every possible barrier between all living creatures in the universe. The theory of the carnival is infused with the atmosphere of freedom, excessiveness, challenge, rebirth, and bodily priorities. In a carnivalistic world, where a king can become a slave, an old woman can die while giving birth to a baby, or a man can unite with the whole world while consuming food. Bakhtin discusses such images under the term of the grotesque — an image of the bodies that constantly change from one form into another. Adıvar’s novel, in the same vein, focuses on the underlying unity between genders, communities, religions, races and human beings and animals. The setting and the characters in Adıvar’s novel can be recognised as carnivalistic because of their eccentricity, tendency to subvert social norms, and the urge to be able to feel the unity with the whole world. This study will conclude that Adıvar’s aim in writing this novel was to reveal the fundamental principle of a Turkish society — its social wealth that is indelibly marked by its endless varieties, differences, and fluctuating reality.