a scale to evaluate a person’s reputation in a larger social context. It goes hand in hand with the sensations of guilt (in dignity cultures), shame (in honor cultures), and the experience of losing face (in face cultures).56 In honor cultures, this virtue is not only a sentiment internal to an individual inside or outside a group but also “external to him – a matter of his feelings, his behaviour, and the treatment that he receives” (Pitt-Rivers 503).
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A notion of honor that is closely associated with the “purity” of the female body can be considered an essential element of some, often non-Western value systems. Within them, “the greatest dishonour of a man derives from the impurity of his wife” (Pitt-Rivers 52). Not only in the respective home countries, but also abroad,57 the sources of female honor violation are manifold. These can be provoked by a girl’s or a woman’s lost virginity before marriage,58 her disrespect for existing dress codes, her immoral behavior in public like laughing out loud on the street or talking to a man outside her family, her committing adultery, her giving birth to an illegitimate child or only to girls, her infertility, as well as her being the victim of a rape.59 Both in the social imaginary of literary works and in a reality reflected by numerous studies, these seem to be the most frequent causes for a woman to lose her honor and, by doing so, to put her family’s reputation at stake. Even though the novels mentioning blasphemy, alcoholism, or homosexuality are rather rare, these can also be good enough reasons for a woman’s honor loss, followed by private or public punishment. In any of these cases, a woman’s violation of the existing honor codes triggers a more or less violent chain of male actions which need to be visible in public.60 In general, the source or cause of honor loss should not be conceptually separated from its effects. It is not difficult to see that cause is “actual” only in its effect, which is then “the manifestation of the cause”; accordingly cause and effect entail each other (Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1, Book 2, Section 3, Chapter 3, here p. 494). However, we unfortunately cannot extend our investigation to the various violent consequences of honor and face loss in the space of this volume. A further volume concentrating on such consequences (including honor killings and suicide, among others) is planned to address these matters, also further intercultural situations.
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In their novels, writers like Khaled Hosseini, Sema Kaygusuz, Sindiwe Magona, Yasmina Khadra, Robbin Yassin-Kassab, Ayfer Tunç, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak, Négar Djavadi, and many others describe how a male, traditional understanding of honor codes which often results in an honor-related crime can lead to serious violations of the female body and soul, while at the same time having a lifelong impact on the perpetrator’s and his family’s conscience. Owing to the nature of the topic, literary research sources in some cases tend to foreground the fictional works’ referential quality. Existing research generally clusters around very few of the authors and works we are studying, in particular the work of Ben Jelloun and of Khaled Hosseini, while our analyses go well beyond these. In the following, we will examine the various sources of both female and male honor violation from the perspective of social sciences as well as literary studies, since literature sometimes presents realistic situations which women interviewed in case studies might not have the courage to talk about. In doing so, we are mindful of Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim in Genealogy of Morality (1887) that one should know
how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge. […] There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity” be. (85)
Only if we employ more than one “seeing,” can we recognize the ways in which literature offers “a counterdiscursive staging and semiotic empowering” of what is marginalized (Zapf 63).61
1.1.0 Mothers and disobedient daughters
In honor cultures, mothers pass on the gender-specific notions of female honor as an essential value to their daughters by underlining the importance of a girl’s modesty and decency. Any form of disobedience to honor-based rules that are closely related to a respectable social appearance can lead to the daughter’s immediate honor loss. Having carried out a study with university students, Gursoy et al. confirm that certain ideas related to the female body, a woman’s sexuality, ←44 | 45→and her appropriate behavior in public “are most likely formulated from early childhood within the societal structures of the family and the community” (196). Protecting her honor is one of the main duties a girl or woman has to fulfill during a lifetime, which also requires obedience to her parents’ rules. In contrast to dignity cultures, where the concept of honor does not play a significant role in a child’s education, in honor cultures mothers generally make their daughters understand the importance of honor-related values like sexual purity and innocence very early, thus providing them with precise guidelines for their future. Sev’er and Yurdakul’s statement that “[w];omen are also expected to protect the namus of other women and girls related to them, for example their daughters and granddaughters” (973) follows the same logic.
Spenlen creates a clear link between educational efforts and social appearances in honor cultures by pointing out that a family’s good reputation in public often depends on how children are brought up by their parents, meaning especially how daughters are trained by their mothers and warned about the consequences of potential disobedience: “Auf die Familie darf kein schlechtes Licht fallen, die Selbstdarstellung in der Öffentlichkeit muss positiv ausfallen, und die Meinung der Umwelt wird Gradmesser für den Erfolg elterlicher Erziehung” (142). If daughters do not behave in an adequate way and therefore bring shame on their family’s name, this failure is automatically traced back to bad parenting techniques.62 The patriarchal structure of honor cultures promotes inequality in the upbringing of boys and girls: “Es wird zu einer Ungleichheit zwischen Mann und Frau, Bruder und Schwester, Vater und Sohn erzogen” (Spenlen 141; see also Churchill 110–12). Since, according to Pitt-Rivers, honor can be considered a “hereditary quality” (52) in honor cultures, “the shame of the mother is transmitted to the children and a person’s lack of it may be attributed to his birth, hence the power of the insults, the most powerful of all, which relate to the purity of the mother” (52). It is in the mother’s interest to prove her own honor through the education of her daughter(s) toward obedience: “The purity of the daughter reflects that of her mother, and thereby, the honour of her father” (53).
Sana Al-Khayyat emphasizes that in the “socializing process” of girls, “the most important issue for the mother – and other adults in the family – is how to make them totally submissive. A girl is taught to be obedient from an early age and will be punished if she refuses to do what adults in the family demand of her. It is aib (shameful, immodest) for her to disobey, although it is not necessarily aib for a boy.” (31–32). Gursoy et al. also state that “women are raised from early ←45 | 46→childhood with concepts such as ‘forbidden’ or ‘disgrace’ attached to female sexuality” (197). In her article “Motherhood Creating Its Killer” (in Turkish with an abstract in English), İlknur Meşe questions feminine and masculine roles in the education of children through an analysis of Elif Shafak’s novel Honour. Among other observations she underlines that mothers tend to devalue and belittle their daughters by not expecting anything from them except becoming “marriage material” by finding a husband (see p. 403). By doing so, they treat them like they were treated by their own mothers, remaining an active part of a cycle that has been working for generations. This also appears to be a way for a mother to “make sense of her own suffering”: “she will force her daughter, whether consciously or unconsciously, to surrender to the very same gender system that she herself has surrendered to” (Ghanim, Gender 145). Apart from a few articles which mention the influence of mothers on their daughters, the social sciences do not seem to pay much attention to the responsibility
