Analysis Of The Identity Crisis In That Long Silence Shashi Deshpande

Identity crisis or search of identity has received a thrust in the Post- Colonial literature. The quest for identity, which involves self-definition, which is often central theme of contemporary women’s fiction. This process is both ecological and psychological that breaks upon the path toward female individuation and an understanding of the individual self. Rites of passage are depicted as the woman’s awakening to reality of her social and cultural role as a woman and her subsequent attempts to re-examine her life and shape it in accordance with her new feminist consciousness. It is significant that it is not solely a search for identity crises that engages women writers in general, but rather an exploration and articulation of the process leading to a purposeful awakening of the female protagonist. This is evidently seen in Deshpande’s novels.

The female protagonist, Jaya in that long silence, like any other educated middle-class woman, conforms to the rules and constraints of the society. She is unable to find out whether she lives for herself or for her family. She is taken for granted by everyone in the family. That is why she feels like

The novel depicts the life of Jaya at the level of the silent and the unconscious. A sensitive and realistic dramatization of the married life of Jaya and her husband Mohan, it portrays and inquisitive critical appraisal to which the institution of marriage has been subjected to in recent years. It centers round the inner perception of the protagonist, a woman who is subtly drawn from inside, a woman who finds her normal routine so disrupted that for the first time she can look at her life and attempt to decide who she really