Halide Edip Adivar’s First Novel Attempt: Çingene Kızı
İmren Gece ÖzbeyÇingene Kızı was the first novel written by Halide Edip Adıvar and was published in 1899 in the Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete under the name of “Halide”’ while she was still a high school student. Determining the various aspects of the novel and that it in fact was composed by Halide Edip play an important role in the process of completing the author’s biography. In fact, the novel provides important clues about Halide Edip Adıvar’s entry into the literary world, her initial influences, and character building in her later novels. This article aims to determine the position of Çingene Kızı in Halide Edip’s biography. It also examines, the relationship between Çingene Kızı and Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s novel, Çingene, which had a significant impact on Halide Edip’s novel. Further, the process and purpose of writing Çingene Kızı is discussed.
Halide Edip Adıvar’ın İlk Roman Teşebbüsü: Çingene Kızı
İmren Gece ÖzbeyÇingene Kızı, Halide Edip Adıvar’ın henüz 1899’da henüz lise öğrencisiyken “Halide” imzasıyla Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete’de tefrika olarak kaleme aldığı fakat yarım bıraktığı ilk telif eseridir. Bu eserin tüm yönleriyle ortaya konması ve Halide Edip’e aidiyetinin kesinleştirilmesi Halide Edip’in biyografisinin tamamlanması sürecinde önemli bir yere sahiptir. Nitekim söz konusu roman denemesi Halide Edip Adıvar’ın edebiyat dünyasına girişi, ilk etkilenmeleri ve daha sonra yazacağı romanlardaki karakter yaratımları ile ilgili önemli ipuçları vermektedir. Bu çalışmada öncelikle Çingene Kızı’nın Halide Edip’in biyografisinde nerede durduğu belirlenmeye ve ortaya konmaya çalışılacaktır. Bununla birlikte Halide Edip’in romanı kaleme alırken önemli ölçüde etkilenme yaşadığı Ahmet Mithat Efendi’nin Çingene romanı ile Çingene Kızı arasındaki münasebetler belirlenerek romanın yazılış süreci ve amacı irdelenecektir.
Halide Edip Adıvar is one of the most prolific writers in our literary history. She entered the literary world at a young age, thanks to the good education she received at home from private instructors during her childhood. Her first effort was a translation of John Abbot’s book The Mother in the Home for which she was awarded a medal by Sultan Abdülhamit. Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Mahmut Esad, two great writers of the period, lauded her in their articles. In 1899, around 2 years after the translation was published, she published an unfinished novel titled Çingene Kızı in the Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete. Çingene Kızı was Halide Edip Adıvar’s first novel under the name “Halide,” written while she was still a high school student. To the best of our knowledge, this novel has not been mentioned in literary histories and in the various Halide Edip Adıvar biographies written to date. Only two articles refer to Çingene Kızı: one is Fethi Erden’s article about the lesser known facts unknown sides and memoirs of Halide Edip Adıvar (1964). In this article, Erden says that he asked Adıvar about her first novel and she answered it to be Çingene Kız, but Erden’s knowledge of the novel is incomplete and incoherent. The other article about the novel is Serdar Soydan’s essay titled “Is the Çingene Kızı the Unknown First Work of Halide Edip Adıvar?” published in Notos. Soydan wrote that this novel, which he noticed while looking through the newspapers, may have been written by Halide Edip. The novel consists of five chapters: Little Gypsy, Request, Success, Rıfkı’s Offer, and New Chamber of Gypsy. It describes a wealthy young girl named Güzide buying a gypsy child from her mendicant mother and taking the child to the house where Güzide lives with her aunt and cousin. Güzide wants to discover whether she can educate the gypsy child; everyone in the house finds the girl strange, but nobody can oppose Güzide’s wishes. Güzide asks her cousin Rıfkı to help persuade her aunt to keep the child, and Rıfkı convinces his mother, thinking that they will have fun. The gypsy child is allowed to live in the house, but the novel ends before the child’s education begins. Before Çingene Kızı, there were two novels written about gypsies in our literature, one of which is translated and the other is copyrighted. The first novel is the 15th part of Letaif-i Rivayat, published in 1886, and titled Çingene. The second work is a two-volume translation of Çingene Kızı in 1889 by Xavier De Montepin, the most-translated author of the 19th century. After this novel by Halide Edip, although some authors, especially Ahmet Rasim, wrote various texts about gypsies, we could not find a literary work that featured gypsies as main characters until Çingeneler by Selahattin Enis (1924). Furthermore, we could not determine the effect of Montepin’s novel on Edip’s work. However, Ahmet Mithat’s novel, Çingene, is noteworthy as it contains the main idea for her novel. This study examines the relationship between these two novels and discusses the writer’s process of writing the novel and leaving it unfinished.
