Traditional Morality and the View of Female Virginity

Traditional morality and female chastity form a social code in the novel, not merely a private belief about sex before marriage. In 1970s Istanbul, the expectation that a young woman preserve her virginity until marriage collides with Westernization, urban life, and changing courtship. The resulting double standard shapes who can claim to be modern, who risks a damaged reputation, and how love is imagined in private and in popular culture.

Historical and Social Framework

The narrator situates the norm in 1975, describing it as part of a wider regional tradition while emphasizing that its practical force varied within Istanbul. As young people delayed marriage amid urbanization and Westernizing aspirations, chastity could appear less valuable to some affluent circles. Yet even educated, Westernized families had not simply left the code behind. Couples whose commitment was publicly recognized through engagement could receive a degree of tolerance, but women were still expected to describe premarital intimacy as evidence of modern independence rather than trust in a future husband.

Where a relationship lacked that social recognition, the consequences fell more heavily on the woman. The customary remedy might be marriage, while a family could seek legal intervention if a young woman under eighteen was involved and the man refused to marry her. Newspapers’ treatment of women whose sexuality had become a public matter further exposes the connection between reputation and visibility: photographs obscured their eyes, making concealment part of the public record. The narrator’s account thus distinguishes a changing urban culture from an unchanged guarantee of personal freedom. Modern appearance and language did not remove the sanctions attached to women’s choices.

Reputation, Marriage, and Unequal Risk

The dinner-party discussion about Mehmet and Nurcihan makes the code visible in everyday matchmaking. Nurcihan had lived with several partners while studying in Paris, but had kept those relationships from her wealthy parents in Istanbul; the experiences had left her sad and drained. Sibel hoped to introduce her to Mehmet, whose family had money, and the narrator describes the match as a possible route back to Istanbul and to a partner who would not condemn her past.

Berrin doubts the match because she reads Mehmet through his family background and social type. She argues that a woman may be treated with disrespect years after marriage for having allowed intimacy before it, and that a man’s attitudes are shaped by the world he comes from. Her distinction is not simply between permissive and conservative individuals: a woman must assess the likely judgment of the family and community around a suitor. The narrator partly agrees, observing that women who fear being judged may keep their distance from Mehmet even when he appears serious, while acting more freely around men whose intentions are less certain.

The discussion also refuses to equate love with sexual access. Berrin invokes Leyla and Mecnun as an image of love that does not depend on sex. Sibel, meanwhile, worries that if a woman trusts a man and he does not marry her, she may be left to bear the consequences alone. She says women often struggle to decide whether a man is trustworthy, or yield to desire while being too afraid to enjoy it. In her view, imported stories about European sexual freedom have encouraged Mehmet to treat premarital sex as proof of modernity, even though that expectation may obstruct the happy marriage he wants. The uncertainty itself is part of the code’s power: it makes a woman responsible for forecasting a man’s future behavior under conditions she cannot control.

Modernity and Private Contradiction

The narrator’s own engagement makes the tension personal. Sibel challenges his appeal to modern European values: if virginity is irrelevant because the couple is modern, then it cannot serve as a special obligation that excuses his conduct toward another woman; if tradition still matters, its demands should apply consistently. Her argument exposes how the language of modernity can be used selectively, rather than abolishing the unequal standard.

At another gathering, Sibel tries to help Nurcihan and Mehmet move toward marriage, while also resisting the prospect that Zaim might exploit Nurcihan’s situation. She says that in France men do not look down on a woman simply because she has had a premarital relationship, but that even a little freedom in Turkey can bring a reputation. Her wish to protect Nurcihan and Mehmet’s feelings therefore operates within the same social limits she recognizes. The novel presents matchmaking not as a neutral custom but as an attempt to arrange intimacy so that it can survive family judgment and public scrutiny.

The family’s response to Füsun shows a related concern about reputation. After she has appeared in a beauty contest, Osman says the family should show that it takes an interest in her and that she can depend on them. He worries that her beauty and revealing dress might lead to a reputation and then to misery, and recommends Kenan as a suitable husband. His concern mixes care with an assumption that a woman’s appearance and public visibility can expose her to social danger. The episode places Füsun’s prospects within a family’s protective, but also restrictive, reading of respectability.

Popular Stories and the Code’s Persistence

Cinema gives the chastity code a melodramatic form. The narrator recalls films in which an apparently respectable young woman is deceived at a dance and subsequently loses her honor; the familiar plots divide women into innocent victims who die and those condemned as immoral. Such stories turn social judgment into a dramatic moral scheme, presenting a woman’s fate as the consequence of sexual vulnerability rather than examining the conditions that make her vulnerable.

At an open-air cinema, the film starring Orhan Gencebay makes that scheme especially stark. Its heroine is forced into marriage after being harmed, but the marriage does not relieve her suffering; she attempts suicide, and her husband saves her. When she asks whether he is ashamed of her, the narrator recognizes his own buried shame. The audience’s silence registers the stigma attached to marrying a woman whose chastity has been violated. A second film shifts the emphasis from shame to the pain of love, linking the private conflict to a wider emotional condition rather than resolving it through moral judgment.

The same conventions recur in Broken Lives, the film Feridun makes with support from the narrator. Its heroine loses her virginity to a rich man, then becomes a singer and plots revenge; her misery arises because she cannot marry. Although critics dismiss the film, audiences respond intensely, especially to the heroine’s eventual revenge. The story’s popularity and its familiar melodramatic structure show how persistently chastity, injury to reputation, and marriage organize popular narratives. Across social conversation, family advice, and cinema, the code appears both as a rule imposed on women and as a language through which people explain love, fear, and social belonging.