#behlül

[nisasc]

sakin ol behlül 🐤

[thevampiricnihal]

Heathcliff 🤝 Petyr Baelish 🤝 Firdevs 🤝 Rüstem & Fatma Sultan

Manipulating younger people’s love lives

Heathcliff:

***

Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish:

Firdevs:

“I think men should marry chiefly so they do not live like you. Finally, a clock chimes in a man’s life that reminds them that it’s time they stop chasing fleeting romances and seek earthly happiness in the hand of a young girl.’

‘A poetic sentiment! Do you know? Sentences like that have a strange power over me. There is a second verse in your sentence: young girl!.. Young girls are, to my mind, creatures unknown, in need of being experienced. But I will leave this poem to be experienced after I have tired of the others.’

Firdevs Hanım seemed bent on not giving in. ‘Yes, but young girls can only be experienced once, and the desires that are to be left in their pure breasts should not be too rotten, too depleted.’

Behlül replied with a smile. ‘If you continue with these sentences, I will have to admit defeat. But who is this young girl who you find worthy of the happiness of owning me?’

As Behlül posed this question, the glass door of the hall had been opened, and Beşir had entered; he was probably going to say something to Firdevs Hanım. They continued talking, without paying him any heed.

‘Don’t you understand? Do you still not understand?’ Firdevs Hanım was saying. ‘But Nihal, only Nihal!.. I formed this notion when I came here and found her so utterly altered, so grown up in the last three months.’

Behlül had stood up with a long, ‘ooooh!’ He laughed as he asked, ‘when did you begin to hatch such wonders?.. Nihal… But you must seek a teacher for her, not a husband. Besides, look, now I think of it, it’s impossible to be Nihal’s husband. There is a great obstacle: I am in Nihal’s debt. See, now you do not understand. I have calculated that I am four lira and several kuruş in debt to her, and if you take interest into account…’

Firdevs Hanım was offended. ‘But you’re always jesting. Will you leave Nihal, that jewel, to someone else?’

Behlül looked at Beşir as he replied. ‘But you’re wrong. Nihal isn’t a jewel, she’s a flame. There isn’t a day we don’t quarrel… Isn’t that so, Beşir?’

Beşir was standing there motionless with unseeing eyes, not breathing. He did not seem to have heard Behlül address him.

Then Firdevs Hanım asked, ‘what do you want, Beşir?’

Beşir woke from his abstraction, and after a brief hesitation to recall what he had to say, replied, ‘beyefendi is asking, with your permission, if they can put a little table here, so you can eat together this evening…’

Firdevs Hanım agreed instantly, and after Beşir had descended, she turned to Behlül, who was still smiling at her. ‘Laugh all you will,’ she said, ‘you will take Nihal, since I have decided it will be so…’”

(Chapter 17)

“After leaving Behlül’s room, Nihal had gone upstairs, and found her father sitting with Firdevs Hanım. Firdevs Hanım, beckoning her, had said, ‘Nihal! Look what your father is saying!’ Nihal, curious, had drawn closer. Then Adnan Bey, laughing as if from the effects of a joke, had said that since Nihal was now to become a bride, there was now no excuse not to buy her that set of emeralds that had so taken her fancy.

Firdevs Hanım lost no opportunity of accustoming Adnan Bey, a little more every day, to the idea of this marriage. Today, it seemed as if something else had been decided between them. Before Nihal could reply, he said:

‘Nihal! We decided something else. We’re sending you to the island in a few days, to your aunt. To begin with, a change of air is necessary to your health, and then it seems your aunt has been complaining of being neglected…’”

(Chapter 18)

Rüstem:

Fatma Sultan:

@julyzaa @schrodingerdickstatussnape @minetteskvareninova @rhaelynn @mc-critical @tell-them-the-north-remembers @struttingstreets @la-pheacienne @ohhmichelettoohh

[muregunes]

Last Call for İstanbul - Serin&Mehmet

[noovva]

Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ | New 💥

[literatureismyentirepersonality]

Aşk-ı Memnu: Attempting a Pre-lapsarian Reading

@faintingheroine I’m so so glad that you introduced me to this book, and a lot of this analysis will be heavily influenced by you and your thoughts. We discussed pre-lapsarian readings quite a lot, but I wanted to see if I could give it a proper treatment. The translation I’m using can be found here.

The main concept of the argument hinges on the names of Adnan Bey and Firdevs Hanım: Adnan’s name meaning ‘the one who achieves immortality in heaven/Eden’ and Firdevs’ name meaning ‘Heaven’/’Paradise’.

Aşk-ı Memnu means ‘Forbidden Love’, and it’s possible to view love itself as the forbidden fruit of this Fall, or rather, collection of Falls. In Adam and Eve’s original tale, Adam’s love for Eve is sometimes viewed as the cause of his Fall, and he is blamed for being seduced, transferring agency to him rather than Eve.

To take the story first from Bihter’s perspective, Adnan is her Eden. She cannot create herself as an entire woman until she has escaped from her mother, but once she is in Eden, she is dissatisfied; ‘she want[s] such a love that it would leave an intoxicating faintness in her soul’. She feels the knowledge of love calling to her and Falls first not to Behlül (the one who laughs, but also not dissimilar in sound to Belial, another name for Satan— I cannot discover whether this tracks into Islam and the Turkish language, so I may be wrong to suggest this one), but to herself, when she makes that discovery of what love is:

Suddenly, in this semi-dark room, amid the slumbering silence of this house, as the tinted glass of the lamp above her head rained colourful shadows and seemed to enliven the furniture around her with an unfelt breeze, she shivered to find herself so naked, and feared the loneliness. No, this was such an emotion that it was closer to shame than to fear. She was ashamed, as if she had done a great wrong, ashamed that she had sinned unthinkingly against her virtue. She had fallen into the arms of an unknown lover who entered the privacy of her chamber secretly, and her first sin of passion had been committed in an irresistible nervous trembling. (Chapter 8)

Note how the room is ‘semi’ dark, how Bihter has been standing in the window, occupying liminal spaces that could represent her in-between state, the precipice of the Fall.

Bihter’s second Fall is more traditional. Behlül becomes a tempter, as he has tried and failed with Peyker, but unlike Satan, he lacks magnitude. He is opportunistic, casual. His Falls are more like flights of fancy and his temptations are boyish, almost innocent. They are in the room that serves as an entryway to his bedroom, neither completely sequestered in his private quarters, nor in the general space of the house and much of the action between them takes place in this in-between space. ‘[T]he red eyes of the stove were lowering their eyelashes’; ‘white snowflakes were falling’ (emphasis mine); Bihter is Falling.

The second Fallen figure I would like to consider is Behlül himself. Behlül is not someone who Falls once or twice, but someone who seems doomed to Fall over and over again. He seems to Fall for almost every woman he meets, but his two particular Falls are for Bihter and Nihal.

In a second Behlül had gone so far that it was now no longer possible to turn back (Chapter 10)

At last, the little love stories of his life had been closed, now a long love story, with all its passions, desires, fevers, happinesses, had begun. He was finding all the old memories petty, lowly. They had become like rough drafts that had been scribbled over as a child, which one, embarrassed, wanted to tear out and throw away, to burn to ashes.  Now he was going to write a perfect chapter of his love life, and after this chapter, he could end his love story. (Chapter 11)

He is insistent on the uniqueness of this, the irreversible romance of each Falling, yet his feelings for Nihal are almost identical:

Before this tableau of the old dream, he was thinking of his own life, of the life whose final page would perhaps be closed tonight, with one word from Nihal, of the life that would resemble just this view, turned into an abandoned ruin with its faded lines, its washed-out planes. Already that life seemed to have grown distant through an interval of long years; all those faces, even Bihter, all those memories belonging to yesterday, had been buried in the ruins of that old dream, far away, beyond such a wide sea. Now beside him, a fresh flower of hope was promising him the horizon of a new life with its shy glances. (Chapter 19)

He does not learn; after the close of the novel, it seems he may well have disappeared from Adnan Bey’s Eden to Fall again. He is a man; he may do so.

Last of the main three, but certainly not least, Nihal’s Fall is more complex and more gradual, less borne of single instants than Bihter and Behlül’s. The entire narrative encompasses her Fall, a Fall of a thousand moments. If Adnan Bey is Eden, then so too is Nihal’s childhood and his fatherly state. The more Nihal learns of love— at the wedding (noticeably we follow Nihal and the bride in that strange part of the day where the wedding has begun but the marriage has not, that precipice of Fall), by observing Bihter, by wearing sheets, by releasing Bülent, whose removal from the room is an acknowledgement of their adult genders— the more she edges towards her Fall. Even when she consents to marry Behlül, the Fall is not complete. It is not complete until she literally falls down those liminal stairs and lands at the bottom with Behlül and Bihter, the Fallen. She knows what love is; she knows what love can do. Adnan Bey carries her back upstairs, reclaims her for Eden, but this cannot last. The novel closes uneasily, ‘ a fear [...] passing through her mind’ as Nihal knows that Adnan Bey cannot live forever and she must one day leave Eden. She seems almost to resolve on death to escape passage into the next stage of life; a key parallel to Bihter.

I turn now to Firdevs. Is she not the epitome of the Fallen Woman? She Fell before the tale began, she seems determined to keep Falling until it kills her. Yet she is Paradise. What Paradise can this woman represent?

If my understanding is correct, Halit Ziya was familiar with Western traditions; likely familiar with Felix Culpa or the happy mistake. This is a view which suggests that the Fall is not actually a bad thing, but rather the only way humans could truly understand good and evil in the way God does and fulfil their destinies. 

Firdevs has lived with her mistakes and she suffers for them, a kind of purgatory or barzakh. Perhaps she will attain Paradise because she is willing to live with herself in a way that Bihter and Nihal are not. It’s interesting that Behlül is the one most willing to sympathise with Firdevs; he is the one who leaves Eden and lives, the one who seems most likely to follow her path in life.

Bihter and Nihal will not wait for the Paradise of Heaven; they will not wait to become Firdevs. The Fall is too much for them and the loss of Eden too terrifying.

Beşir’s position in this reading is particularly interesting. He is the one who brings revelation, ‘the one who brings good news’. Ostensibly, the news is hardly good, but it is truth. He becomes almost a stand in for the God of Adnan Bey’s Eden. He even potentially redeems Nihal from her Fall, a Christ figure, sacrificed for the sins of the others.

Ultimately, it is not simply love that is forbidden, but knowledge of what it is to love. Nihal struggles against this knowledge and in the tragic conclusion, finally Falls. She can pretend to be firmly in Eden at the close of the novel but her knowledge is inescapable. She forbids herself from romantic love, tries to evade it, but the Fall must happen, and she cannot stall it forever.

[coalaspy]

[tantasila]

Seni çok özledim ama ben öldüm

[semaamagokyuzuolmayan]

Korkakların ismi dün Behlül'dü, bugün Ali Cabbar. Yarın da sen olursun merak etme

😘💅

[bahtisikikpiyadesblog]

[ziyyangil]

Keşke💔

[nisasc]

canım Behlül🥹

büyümüş ama hala üstümde duruyor peşime takılıyor

[thevampiricnihal]

Bihter and Behlül

Pros: They are both in their twenties, they are presumably sexually compatible, they are attracted to each other. They at least believe that they love each other for a time. They are not too discordant in their personalities and values in daily life, they got along fine before the affair. The sex was presumably good.

Cons: Behlül doesn’t value Bihter as a person and comes to be disgusted with her for her earnestness and “easiness”, they fight during the affair, there is a general lack of genuine love, he just abandons her to her fate at the end and makes only her deal with the consequences of their affair, she kills herself partially because of him.

Nihal and Behlül

Pros: There is an actual basis of friendship and affection and witty banter. They understand each other the best out of the “pairings” in the poll. And they are attracted to each other.

Cons: She is 15 and he is 23, they are cousins and they grew up together - it is quite creepy, though it was accepted in the historical context. He is rather pushy towards her for her to accept his proposal, and she only accepts it to not be alone. He is not so much in love with her as much as with her “innocence” and her giving him a chance at “spiritual redemption” after his affair with Bihter. He runs away while she is having a health crisis.

Bihter and Adnan

Pros: They are adults who are not biologically related to each other. Bihter can wield influence over Adnan. Adnan is rather passionately infatuated with Bihter. They get along with each other fine in daily life.

Cons: There is a 28 year age gap between them. Adnan essentially “bought” her with his money. Bihter is supremely unattracted to her husband, she sees him more as a father figure. The marriage causes Adnan to neglect his emotionally vulnerable and sickly daughter, and his infatuation with Bihter causes him to essentially ignore the goings-on around him. While there is no outright implication of violent sexual assault, the descriptions of their sex life have an air of “dubious consent” to them - he deep down knows that she is not actually into it.

Nihal and Beşir

Pros: He is only two years older than her - they are both teenagers. She is the only one in the household who cares about him on some level. His love for her is the most selfless, genuine and passionate in the whole book - there is an element of “courtly love” to it. There is no element of sexual exploitation anywhere in their relationship unlike with the other three pairings on the poll. He essentially brings about her happy ending.

Cons: He is her family’s slave. She cares about him more as a pet than as a human person, and he never takes the first place in her thoughts. Their relationship has an emotionally exploitative element: She enjoys him crying over her own woes. His love for him is probably at least partially a coping mechanism he developed to survive enslavement (and this is not necessarily me reading too much into an old book, Halit Ziya cared about the subject of slavery and how it effects people, and I think this “coping mechanism” interpretation fits in with the text).

@julyzaa @winged-cries @struttingstreets @pileofsith @artemideaddams

[muregunes]

Beren Saat & Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ | Last Call of İstanbul

[amoor-proibido]

[literatureismyentirepersonality]

I once asked this to @ariel-seagull-wings too but I will ask it to you too. What would be the favorite Shakespeare plays of Aşk-ı Memnu characters?

Nihal: I'm going to be a cop out and say Hamlet. She would probably self-identify with Ophelia or Desdemona type characters, but secretly feel connected to Hamlet himself in my head (I am probably repeating what @ariel-seagull-wings already said but I have purposely not read that post)

Bihter: I'm feeling Othello or maybe Macbeth? Bihter would definitely feel for Desdemona, but in my head she'd also identify with the way both she, Emilia and Lady Macbeth take their own happiness seriously. There's more assertive women in the comedies, but I'm not certain how Bihter would like those. She has her own melancholy to her, distinct from Nihal's.

Mlle de Courton: Much Ado About Nothing. A nice sweet rom-com with less scandal than usual, but still a fair amount.

Behlül: Depending on his mood, Anthony and Cleopatra (he thinks he's outgrown Romeo and Juliet) or A Midsummer Night's Dream for something more comical and sweet.

The only other person I can see having a strong association with Shakespeare is Adnan Bey and King Lear. I don't necessarily believe he'd enjoy the play, merely that he'd be affected by it. Now I am thinking that perhaps Nihal would enjoy this play, and see herself as a Cordelia figure.

[ozgur-ce]

Gerçek hayatta ve filmlerde çok göremesekte #Mutluson olsaydı da ölmeden önce bi görseydik dediğimiz film ve dizilerin bazılarına yapay zeka ile mutlu son oluşturmuşlar 😅♥️

Sizde hangisini daha çok sevdiğinizi yoruma yazın bakalım muhabbet olsun 😊🎵🎶

Benim ki yorumda 😉👇