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Configuration of Transient Shelters As Alternative Spaces Through Nomadic Acts in Doris Lessing'S
(Cyprus International University, 2019) Güvenç, Ö. Ü.
Doris Lessing's short story "An Old Woman and Her Cat" from her collection, The Temptation of Jack Orkney, revolves around the nomadic experiences of an old and homeless woman in various places and her survival under poor living circumstances with her cat. The places occupied by the old woman in this story such as the Council flats, the room in the slum and the ruined flat in a wealthy neighbourhood cannot be considered as proper homes where people have a sense of belonging; rather, they are just material places she tries to appropriate as shelters temporarily on the way without a feeling of warmth and attachment to them. Focusing on the woman and the cat's relationship with their surrounding provides a discussion on space and nomadism within the framework of Henri Lefebvre's spatial tripartite - the perceived, the conceived and the lived - which is related to Rosi Braidotti's theory on nomadism. It also reveals the social norms and values, which disregard an old woman and her cat's struggle for life in a metropolis. Therefore, this article aims to discuss not only the material qualities of transient places in London and their conceived perspective which segregates the poor and the homeless from the wealthy but also the old woman's configuration of alternative spaces for herself out of the ruins without a sense of home.
Vampire versus the empire: Bram Stoker's reproach of fin-de-siecle Britain in dracula
(Cambridge Univ. Press., 2018) Koç, Ertuğrul; Demir, Yağmur
Much has been said about Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking [the] taboos, [and in need of being] read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The text has also been seen as “reinforc[ing] readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternative Weltanschauung in place of the decaying Victorian ethos. True, Dracula is a fin-de-siècle novel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as the doppelgängers of the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. But, it is also true that by juxtaposing the “abnormal” against the “normal” he targets the utilitarian bourgeois ethics of the empire: aware of the Victorian pragmatism on which the concept of the “normal” has been erected, he, with an “abnormal” historical figure (Vlad Drăculea of the House of Drăculești, 1431–76) who appears as Count Dracula in the work, attacks the ethical superstructure of Britain which has already imposed on the Victorians the “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 356). Hence, Stoker's choice of title character, the sadistic Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the closing years of the Middle Ages, and his anachronistic rendering of Dracula as a Gothic invader of the Early Middle Ages are not coincidental (Figure 8). In the world of the novel, this embodiment of the early and late paradigms is the antagonistic power arrayed against the supposedly stable, but in reality fluctuating, fin-de-siècle ethos. However, by turning this personification of the “evil” past into a sexual enigma for the band of men who are trying to preserve the Victorian patriarchal hegemony, Stoker suggests that if Victorian sterile faith in the “normal” is defeated through a historically extrinsic (in fact, currently intrinsic) anomaly, a more comprehensive social and ethical epoch that has made peace with the past can be started.

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