ASİYE ATAERKİDEN KURTULUR MU? YA DA KURTULUŞA TUTSAK KALMAK

This article aims at analysing the play “Asiye Nasıl Kurtulur?” by Vasıf Öngören from the feminist critical viewpoint.The play tries to disclose how the upper-middle class in power maintains its socio-economic power and privileged position, and what discourse it has to make last the exploitation of the poor or the lower class and keeps the control of reproduction of the system based on capital. Marxist viewpoint of the struggle of social classes is given through the theme: “how to save the lower-class women from being pushed into prostitution” by using Brechtian epic theatre techniques. The play supports the idea that the unjust socio-economic system of capitalism must be changed for the sake of a better world and that in a capitalist system, the only way to be free from poverty or being oppressed is to exploit the other has-beens to make more capital. It may be claimed that the message of the play has another dimension to discuss the gender problem or patriarchal-capitalism, as for the main characters are women of upper and lower social classes and prostitution is in question. However, when it is approached the analysis of the play from feminist critical viewpoint, it is seen that the play focuses on class discrimination in a capitalist system rather than patriarchy- capitalism relationship or sex-class system of patriarchy, in its plot and discourse. Women are second class of all social classes in the play and the patriarchal way of thinking is consolidated and normalized, without being realized. And alienation effects of the play are too formalist and weak to discuss the subject in deep structure and Brechtian critical way. In this article, these problematics of the play are tried to be proved by explanations and quotations from the text. In this way, it may be claimed that the play uses all the clichés in its themeprostitution and women- just as a mean for the benefit of its own discussion to criticise capitalist norms and to support Marxist viewpoint, not to discuss gender at the same time. Patriarchal ideology is continued in the play in a natural way, most probably not on purpose, as it is internalized even by the playwright himself. When the play is deconstructed, the way of thinking of the playwright underlying the structure shows that patriarchy, patriarchal capitalism or sex-class system is not the main question of the theme, because it gives such idea as if the main source of gender was the capitalist system and in a socialist system the oppression of the women would be prevented, naturally, as class discrimination and mechanism of capital would be disposed of. However, world history has showed that changes in regimes have not made a fundamental change in the patriarchal way of thinking. If, in a new dramaturgy, the weak points of the play like alienation effects and gender problem are deconstructed without a worry to focus on only the Marxist political message, the theme may be enriched for new interpretations of the play.