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.