Ömer Seyfettin’s Eleğimsağma (The Rainbow): A Little Girl with a Male Writer by Her Side

This paper explores Ömer Seyfettin’s 1917 short story Eleğimsağma (The Rainbow) through the lens

of gender roles in the context of gender studies, analysing how a male author critiques the oppressive

social constructs imposed upon women in Ottoman society. Focusing on the story’s ten-year-old

protagonist, Ayşe, the paper examines how femininity is not a biological destiny but a culturally

enforced identity. Ayşe’s desperate desire to become a man, symbolized by her attempt to pass under

a magical rainbow, is portrayed as a means of escaping societal constraints and gaining the agency,

freedom, and power reserved for men. Through powerful imagery and symbolic elements such as the

veil (çar) and the rainbow, Seyfettin critiques patriarchal structures and gender norms that confine

women to passive, domestic roles. The figure of Kurt Hodja, the village imam, emerges as a symbol

of institutionalized patriarchy and religious oppression, further reinforcing Ayşe’s internalized

inferiority. Although Ayşe momentarily transcends her gendered reality in a dream, her awakening

reaffirms the unyielding nature of these roles, culminating in a profound sense of disillusionment

and resignation. By highlighting a young girl’s gendered awakening within a deeply patriarchal

system, this paper discusses how Seyfettin’s Eleğimsağma constitutes a bold, proto-feminist critique

of traditional gender ideology in Ottoman culture, uncommonly by the pen of a man, and challenges

the gendered expectations that continue to shape identities today.

Keywords: Ömer Seyfettin, gender roles, gender discrimination, patriarchy, masculinity-femininity