Peride Celal’s Theater World Themed Novel: “Rüyalar Evi” / Peride Celal’in Tiyatro Dünyasını Konu Alan Romanı: “Rüyalar Evi”

Between the years of 1935, from when she published her first story, and 2002, when she published her last novel Deli Aşk, Peride Celal (Yönsel) was known as a unique writer with both the subjects she covered and her researcher identity in the art of novel writing. Peride Celal’s writing career can be divided into two periods. During the first fifteen years of her writing career (1935-1950), she wrote popular works focusing on love and adventure in the category of romance, and with her novel Üç Kadının Romanı (1954), she entered her period of mastery, where her novel technique gained importance and she wrote more realistic and qualified works based on observation. Celal’s early novels, which were serialized in periodicals before being published in book form, were effective in increasing the circulation of the daily newspapers in which they were published and helped in making the ‘novel’ genre more appealing to the readers they reached. Peride Celal’s success in narration with her clean and fluent Turkish, which is the most prominent feature of her novels, has been observed since her first novels. Nevertheless, Peride Celal did not adopt her first period novels, wrote with the concern of making a living and did not allow her works to be published in book form. The novel Rüyalar Evi (1951), which remains in the blind spot between the author’s first and second period novels, is one of the works that the author does not want to remember. This novel, which has remained in the newspaper pages since the day it was published in the newspaper titled Cumhuriyet, has not been included in any academic studies on Peride Celal until today. In this novel, Peride Celal summarizes the developmental stages of Turkish Theater between the years of 1900 and1950 by examining the actors, directors and works, and by mentioning many classical, contemporary, and local and foreign plays along with stage artists. The two main characters of the work, Nemide Gencay and Ahmed Cem, are reminiscent of Neyyire Neyyir and Muhsin Ertuğrul. The aim of this study is to determine the place of Rüyalar Evi among Peride Celal’s novels in terms of its subject matter and mounting, and to ensure that the novel takes its rightful place in Turkish literature alongside novels that deal directly with the art of theater.