ianyan magazine
March 24 2012
The View from Zabel Yesayan’s The Gardens of Silihdar, Part II
Features – By Jennifer Manoukian
Yesayan was drawn to the freedom that France represented. By living in
Paris, she could escape many of the social conventions that she had
resisted, especially the restrictions placed on women in the larger
social context. According to Anne Paolucci in her afterword to Zabel
Assadour’s play `The Bride,’ the lives of many Armenian women in the
late Ottoman Empire could be summarized in this way:
In Anatolia and Constantinople, as in other parts of the world at that
time, women were expected to live within a rigorously limited
environment; a house- and family-oriented structure where marriage and
children were the only respectable and desirable ends. Women were
expected to be modest, retiring, subdued in dress, speech and manners
generally. Their voice carried no authority; their accomplishments
were the efficient handling of servants, embroidery, sewing and
carefully restricted public appearances in which they were expected to
follow certain rules of social behavior.
Although in her autobiography Yesayan comments on her father’s
open-mindedness and encouragement of her literary aspirations, in her
daily interactions she was nevertheless confronted with the prejudices
of the larger community to which she belonged, but in which she felt
intellectually stifled:
`Never did women, girls or even children allow themselves to act
spontaneously. Everything was formal and well measured; there was what
was done and there was what wasn’t done.’
Intently determined to lead her life differently, Yesayan was prepared
to defend herself against any and all social restrictions that she
encountered:
…I was used to struggling against every obstacle as soon as it
presented itself, but the liberalism of my father was not enough to
divert my path from all the barriers that the backward-minded
bourgeoisie imposed. Life taught me that I have to put up a fierce and
perpetual fight.
In the excerpt above, she represents her community as an adversary
with whom she would always be in conflict. With this outlook, leaving
for France allowed Yesayan to avoid a struggle by settling in a
country with a long tradition of women writers to hone her craft.
The conditions for women writers in France at the time of Yesayan’s
arrival were certainly an improvement over those in the Ottoman
Empire. In France, there had been many well-respected women writers
throughout the nineteenth century, which made women’s participation in
literary life much less of a rarity than in Constantinople.
According to the 1901 French census, 36.5 percent of French women
lived an `active’ life – in other words, they played a role in the
public sphere. Women writers composed a large portion of this
percentage since, women began to publish their works in larger
numbers. In 1894, writer Octave Uzanne estimated that there were
approximately 2,133 women actively writing and publishing in Paris. In
1907, the number of women writers increased to over 5,000 – their work
representing 20 percent of the total literary production in Paris.
This fertile period for women writers in France suited Yesayan’s
ambitions remarkably well, especially coming from a place where the
number of published women writers could be counted on two hands.
Although there were certainly restrictions placed on women in
France – for example, there was a law that forbade women from publishing
their work without written consent from their husbands – the crucial
difference between the two groups was that French women published
despite these restrictions, whereas the majority of Armenian women did
not.
There are many socio-cultural reasons for the scarcity of writing by
Armenian women, including the absence of widely accessible schools
outside urban centers and the sheer novelty of the modern literary
tradition; but Yesayan, armed with an education that rivaled many of
her male counterparts, was ideally situated to reverse this trend
among Armenian women.
Being far from Constantinople in her late adolescence also allowed
Yesayan to escape the social convention that would have most directly
prevented her from leading the independent life of a writer that she
had envisioned: marriage. For young Armenian women, marriage was the
path their lives were naturally expected to take. Since Armenian
society did not actively encourage women’s participation in the public
sphere, marriage was a way for families to ensure that their daughters
would be supported financially.
In her autobiography, Yesayan presents her readers with portraits of
various women emotionally devastated by miserable marriages. With a
grandmother who `constantly pregnant, cursed her husband and her fate’
and an aunt who `patiently endured the drunkenness and disdainful
tyranny of her husband,’ the young writer bore witness early in her
life to the plight of these women and began to view the institution of
marriage with a critical eye.
In Armenian villages, girls were normally married between the ages of
14 and 18 and boys between 16 and 21; oral histories tell us that the
average marriage age for Armenians in urban areas like Constantinople
was higher. Among Turks living in the Ottoman capital at the end of
the nineteenth century, the average marriage age was relatively high:
20 years old for women and 30 years old for men. More research is
needed to determine if this trend also characterizes marriage customs
for Armenians in Constantinople.
Despite implicit critiques, Yesayan does not categorically reject
marriage, but implies that women should not willingly accept a
convention that validates abuse and teaches them to quietly accept
mistreatment, if they find themselves in this situation.
In the series of unhappy marriages that she sees as a child, female
servility in the face of male disregard is a quality that particularly
disturbs her. Spending time with a friend of the family, Yesayan sadly
notes the way in which the wife devotes all of her time and energy to
please her indifferent husband: `When he was ready to leave, his wife
scurried behind him and, with her husband’s umbrella in hand, waited
for him to take off his slippers and put on his shoes.’
This denigrating daily ritual symbolizes the voluntary oppression that
women of her social milieu unnecessarily endured.
However, a similar fate awaited French women during the same period;
as in the Ottoman Empire, marriage in France was understood as a
financial arrangement between two families. Love between spouses – an
idea that Yesayan defended – was rare in both societies. Yet it is
important to note that the average marriage age for French women was
much higher than for Armenian women: according to the 1881 census, 60
percent of women were unmarried at the age of 25. The French society
that welcomed Yesayan was not free of its own problems regarding
marriage, but her years in Paris and her status as a foreigner enabled
her to focus exclusively on her studies and on her writing without
being bombarded by social pressures.
Throughout her autobiography, it is clear that Yesayan did not hold
most women in very high regard, describing them, almost universally,
with an extraordinarily scornful tone. She creates an explicit
dichotomy between men and women, showing men as noble and enlightened
and women as simple-minded and frivolous.
In general, men were liberal minded and loyal to the ideas of the
French Revolution. These ideas formed the basis of their moral
principles. Women, on the other hand, were conservative and
traditional, loyal to aggressive virtues that succeeded, as my father
said, in tormenting not only other people but themselves too.
In a curious, but not entirely surprising way, she reveals in this
passage that she does not readily identify with her gender, distancing
herself from other women and dismissing them as uninformed and
benighted. Her description illustrates that she considers herself an
exception to the norm – viewing other women critically and
condescendingly for incarnating, rather than defying, the very
stereotypes used to justify their inferiority. Even as a young girl,
Yesayan mocked the concerns of these women, considered them mindless
and inconsequential:
For these people, Parisian fashion dominated and they closely
followed – or at least they thought they did – the rules that they learned
from the special fashion magazines. And once the conversation moved to
this topic, all the women, especially the very young girls, spoke
about it with passion
During Yesayan’s childhood, the Ottoman Empire and, by extension, the
Armenian community were experiencing dramatic social, political and
cultural change; yet, despite these transformations, she notes that
the women around her were uninterested and unaware. The fact that the
women that she knew had no desire to educate themselves on these
issues further alienated the burgeoning young writer from women in her
own community.
For her, these women were not functioning in reality. Perhaps this
artificial reality was deliberately constructed to repress the despair
in their marriages or the thought of their thwarted ambitions, but,
from a very young age, Yesayan vowed to live in a world that was not
always pleasant or painless, but which was, first and foremost, real.
Yesayan developed this consciousness due in part to a jarring
experience in her childhood. As a child, she spent time with a family
friend named Santoukht. Once day, Santoukht took Yesayan to a room
where she kept her dolls: dolls that she treated like real
children – speaking to them, scolding them, tending to them. This
imaginary world inhabited by this woman profoundly disturbed the young
writer and produced an immediate understanding of the consequences of
living in an artificially constructed world.
This world was quite possibly the result of intellectual inactivity
and social marginalization – a room of her own in a society where women
were expected to sacrifice everything for their families to the point
of losing their own identities. In her article on `The Gardens of
Silihdar,’ Seta Kapoïan describes Santoukht’s room as a false escape
because while she resists reality, she is still dependent on the
environment around her, particularly on her indifferent husband, and
therefore must always be conscious of what exists outside it.
The relegation of women to the private sphere where their aspirations
was not respected or cultivated undoubtedly contributed to this
situation, but Yesayan, who had a chance at an education and had
encouragement within her family to pursue her ambitions, recognized
the danger of losing herself in the imaginary and was determined not
to ensnare herself in this world.
This essay is part of a series written in honor of International
Women’s Day and Month. Part I can be found here.
Jennifer Manoukian is a recent graduate of Rutgers University where
she received her B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and French. Her
interests lie in Western Armenian literature and issues of identity
and cultural production in the Armenian diaspora. She also enjoys
translating and has had her translations of writer Zabel Yesayan
featured in Ararat Magazine. She can be reached at
[email protected]
http://www.ianyanmag.com/2012/03/24/the-view-from-zabel-yesayan%E2%80%99s-the-gardens-of-silihdar-part-ii/