AGORAFOBİ: “KOZALAR”

This article aims to analyse the play “Cocoons (Kozalar)”by Adalet Ağaoğlu from the point of the feminist critical approach to reveal how the socio-political discourse determines the life-styles of housewives in the private sphere, creating a pseudo reality under the circumstances of capitalist-patriarchal system. The play includes the abstracting features of absurd theatre and its symbolism, both structurally and thematically. What is in question in the play is the isolated lives of middle-class housewives who are stuck in the private sphere and who are limited in the frame of traditional roles as wives, as mothers. Their short-sighted, single-minded manners towards the facts of their conditions and the politics of their country are mocked. In the play, the housewives do not have identities because their minds are conditioned by the official discourse and patriarchy. The title of the play, “Cocoons” is a metaphor of their existence and isolated life style. The play is based on the patriarchal discourse in its own dialogues to reveal how women are conditioned by the images of the language, how it is internalized by women. The discourse in question and the paranoia it creates are the main obstacles in front of the women preventing them from being individuals. This article criticises the exaggerated generalization of the middle-class housewives in the play, which is ignoring the differences among women, but instead abstracting them in the sameness of a fictional “housewife” notion. As the play tries to show the ridicule of the middleclass values through “housewife” figure, it discusses more about the typicality and “caricaturization” of the figures as the puppets and parrots of capitalist-patriarchal discourse.Although the play includes themes such as hierarchy in the positions of housewives in terms of middle-class values, motherhood or the rivalry between women as enemies in its dialogues, these themes are not detailed or, in other words, are shadowed and limited by the marxist way of seeing the social facts.