Fashioning masculinity at the brink of collapse: Male bodies and dress in Kiralık Konak (The Rented Mansion) and Sözde Kızlar (The So-Called Girls)

This article examines how European models of modernization adopted in Istanbul during the late Ottoman period are represented and critically interrogated through regimes of male corporeality and visuality. Focusing comparatively on Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s Kiralık Konak and Peyami Safa’s Sözde Kızlar , the study argues that dress, body and gesture function in both novels not merely as aesthetic elements but as narrative instruments through which the moral, national and ideological value of masculinity is measured. The article contends that the new urban life shaped in Istanbul produces masculine types that are indifferent to wartime conditions, detached from collective responsibility and oriented towards pleasure, thereby rendering visible a crisis of modernization marked by the erosion of militarist discipline, public responsibility and national belonging. The eroticization of the male body, the transformation of dress into a sign that conceals moral inauthenticity and the redefinition of masculinity through sexual domination emerge as the principal narrative symptoms of this crisis. Within this framework, the article rethinks Karaosmanoğlu’s and Safa’s critiques of modernization not as extensions of traditional discourses centred on female morality, but as ideological interventions that foreground the bodily representation of masculinity. It further demonstrates that both authors construct Istanbul as the primary site of this dissolution, while imagining Anatolia as a space of moral and national reconstruction.