Social Customs Governing Married Women’s Interactions and Gendered Gazes

The novel’s account of social customs governing married women’s interactions and gendered gazes shows how rules about honor, respectability, and contact between the sexes organize both public behavior and private life. In Kemal’s recollection, the possibility of being watched can constrain a woman’s movement and expression; within the Keskin household, those same restrictions help make an otherwise impermissible attachment possible in the form of repeated visits, exchanged looks, and performed indifference.

Honor, Respectability, and Social Judgment

The customs belong to a particular historical setting, not to a timeless or uniform code. The narrator situates his account in 1975 Istanbul, where virginity could still be treated as a young woman’s premarital responsibility even as urbanization and Westernization altered expectations about when people married. In affluent Westernized circles, a couple’s formal engagement or other public sign of serious intent could make premarital intimacy more socially tolerable. Yet women were still expected to describe their choices in terms of modern freedom rather than trust in a prospective husband, revealing how an old standard could persist beneath a newer vocabulary.

The burden of that standard fell unevenly. In the narrator’s description, a young woman whose sexual respectability was questioned could become the focus of family intervention, public gossip, or legal action, while the man’s conduct was not subjected to the same scrutiny. He recalls newspapers obscuring women’s eyes in photographs of people cast as sexually dishonored, a visual convention that made public exposure and concealment coexist: the woman was displayed as an object of judgment while her identity was partially hidden. This wider honor system supplies the social background for the novel’s more intimate scenes, though the narrator’s retrospective account is not a claim that every family or class followed one identical rule.

His story of Belkıs offers a more personal example of those pressures. Belkıs, from a poor family, fell in love as a lycée student with Faris, the wealthy youngest son of the Kaptanoğlu family. Their relationship lasted for years, but Faris’s family opposed the match, suspecting that Belkıs’s surrender of her virtue was a means of securing marriage. The family sent the young couple to Paris to live out of sight; after Faris died there three years later, Belkıs returned to Istanbul and entered relationships with other wealthy men. Society men gave her the nickname the Consoling Angel, while married women who had lived within far narrower expectations envied her public pursuit of eligible bachelors. The episode shows honor operating not simply as a private belief but as a social judgment shaped by class, family power, and women’s unequal room to act.

The Gendered Gaze in Public

The narrator describes women’s restricted eye contact as one ordinary expression of the wider separation between the sexes. In his account of earlier Istanbul, a woman walking through streets, shops, or markets was expected not only to avoid a man’s direct gaze but to avoid appearing to look in his direction at all. The norm applied whether or not a woman covered her head. For a woman, being seen looking could itself carry meaning; for a man, looking did not expose him to an equivalent risk of public interpretation.

That restraint did not make the gaze meaningless. The narrator recalls couples who said that they had first communicated through their eyes before becoming acquainted and marrying. His mother likewise maintained that she and Kemal’s father had first noticed one another at a ball attended by Atatürk, before their marriage was arranged. The narrator notes that his father did not contradict her account, though he privately said he did not remember the young woman at the ball. The anecdote preserves a tension central to the custom: looking could be remembered as the beginning of mutual attachment, but the same act was tightly constrained when it occurred between a woman and a man outside the recognized boundaries of family and marriage.

Male expectations also distorted the meaning of women’s appearance. The narrator describes a widespread belief that women who wore miniskirts, did not cover their heads, and lived in affluent neighborhoods were freely available for sex. Men who believed this could cruise Istanbul in search of the imagined women, treating dress and location as evidence of desire. Yet his account of Hilmi the Bastard complicates that behavior: despite participating in this masculine pursuit, Hilmi would sometimes defend a woman being followed merely for bleaching her hair or wearing makeup. The contradiction exposes a culture in which women’s appearance invited speculation even as some men recognized that such scrutiny could become harassment.

A Married Household and the Performance of Indifference

The customs acquire a particular narrative force after Füsun is married to Feridun and Kemal begins visiting the Keskin household repeatedly. Feridun’s absence unsettles Kemal because it leaves him wondering whether the marriage might be happy; at the same time, Feridun’s presence makes Kemal acutely conscious of his own attachment. The household’s ordinary rituals, including sitting together at the dinner table and watching television, provide a socially acceptable frame for visits whose private emotional purpose cannot be openly acknowledged.

Kemal explains that the surrounding taboos helped make his frequent presence possible. In a society where showing interest in a married woman in front of her parents was regarded as unthinkable, and where even a sidelong glance could carry grave consequences in some settings, Feridun could interpret Kemal’s visits as innocent. Kemal therefore had to behave as though his love for Füsun could not exist. He argues that greater candor between men and women in a more socially open setting would eventually have made the reason for his visits obvious: Feridun would have become jealous and stopped them. The prohibition does not simply block the relationship; in the narrator’s analysis, it helps determine its unusual shape and duration.

The same pressure governs Kemal’s decisions about when to leave. He sometimes tries to time his departure around Feridun’s return, but leaving immediately could signal dislike or disclose that he had come for Füsun. Staying, however, intensifies his shame and discomfort. His solution is to remain after Feridun arrives, accepting the private strain in order to preserve an outward appearance of normal sociability. The scene makes social restraint legible as a sequence of small choices, each calibrated against what a husband, a family, or neighborhood observers might infer.

Glances as Communication and Concealment

Füsun’s looks become the most concentrated form of communication within that constrained domestic space. At first, when her eyes meet Kemal’s during family meals, she looks away quickly. He initially reads the gesture as the reserve expected of a Turkish girl encountering a man outside her family circle. Later he interprets her avoidance as deliberate, perhaps intended to provoke or punish him; the account does not settle her motive beyond Kemal’s shifting interpretation. What changes is his attention: once dismissive of such exchanges, he becomes absorbed in trying to read what her looks might convey about him, her life, and her feelings.

That practice contrasts with the couple’s remembered intimacy. Kemal resents what he sees as Füsun’s performance of shyness, because their earlier relationship makes her apparent reserve seem to deny their shared past. Yet he also recognizes that the household’s customs leave little room for direct acknowledgment. When television draws the family into a shared emotional response, a chance meeting of their eyes can give him intense happiness, while Füsun appears not to recognize it. The glance is at once a contact between two people and an act that must remain deniable to everyone around them.

The novel thus treats gendered looking not as a decorative motif but as a social practice shaped by honor, marital boundaries, class, and surveillance. A woman’s gaze can be read as evidence against her, while a man’s gaze can remain comparatively unmarked; within the Keskin home, however, brief eye contact allows a private relationship to persist without being spoken aloud. Kemal’s interpretation of these looks remains subjective, and the gap between Füsun’s gestures and his explanations preserves the limits of what he can know. The customs give their silences meaning, but they do not make that meaning certain.