Fantasy and Propriety in Familial Lives

Abstract

Fantasy, used as staging of desire, is explored here as a quest for a well lived life in the specific context of forming and living in families. The fantasy scenarios in this paper come from life stories of two women, living in Istanbul, and center on the birth of a second child. Although the breaches and disruptions of normality in these lives are somewhat different, the absence, the missing element is conceptualized, using local vernacular, as not living according to usul, in the sense of designating normative conventionality. The fantasy, therefore, is argued to stage the desire for recapturing the imagined normality of marriage, of family life, rather than a search for escaping the confines of the expected, into the realm of the transgressively magical and adventurous.