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representation of women in literature
representation of women in literature
feminism in indian literature
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The predicament of women, their institutional subjection and freedom have been the major concerns of Indian women novelists since the 1960s. Their initial attempts were to challenge the ideal of the traditional, oppressed women in a culture permeated by religious images of virtuous goddesses devoted to their husbands. Gradually however, women writers have moved away from the stereotypical portrayals of enduring self-sacrificing women towards psychically perturbed female characters searching for identity, asserting their individuality and defying marriage and motherhood.
Anita Desai and Bharathi Mukherjee, two prominent contemporary writers in Indian English literature, have made significant efforts to give voice to Indian women’s unvoiced resentments. Many writers of Indian diaspora engage the complexities of modern culture from a feminine perspective, while highlighting the Indian female predicament of maintaining self-identity in a male-dominated society. Often the protagonists in their novels are Anglicized Indian women who, disgusted with their monotonous life and lack of warmth in marital relationships, ultimately covet an escape from the folds of family institution.
Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock and Bharathi Mukherjee’s Wife both deal with the socio-psycho attitudes of human mind caught between personal desires and cultural restrictions. Embodying remonstrance and psychic protest, the protagonists Maya and Dimple strive for the protection and preservation of their dignity and self-esteem in a patriarchal society. They are not totally cut off from familial and social ties but remain within these orbits and protest against isolation, injustice and gender discrimination.
The psychological unfolding of M...
... middle of paper ...
...ere (Bhatnagar 1).
They are alienated from the world, from society, from families and friends, and even from their own selves because they are not ordinary people but individuals made to stand against the general current of life; struggling against it to attain the aspired world.
Works Cited
Bhatnagar, M. K., and M. (Mittapalli) Rajeshwar. The Novels of Anita Desai: A Critical
Study. New Delhi: Atlantic and Distributors, 2000. Print.
Desai, Anita. Cry, the Peacock. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1980. Print.
Gupta, Ramesh Kumar. The Novels of Anita Desai: A Feminist Perspective.
New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002. Print.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Print.
Tandon,Sushma. Bharati Mukherjee's Fiction: A Perspective. New Delhi:
Sarup&Sons, 2004. Print.
Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, places Jane Austen’s emphasis of equality in marriage within an intercultural context, where the difference in culture is the source of social tension. As West meets East, American tycoon William Darcy sparks cultural conflict with his presumption of Indian girls’ “simple” and traditional characteristics and of their ready subordination to American men. Parallel to Elizabeth’s assertion of her father and Darcy’s equal class standing, Lalita’s fierce rebuttal of Darcy’s assumption highlights his ignorance of the Indian culture, especially his inability to understa...
Be that as it may, Deshpande makes gender central to her writings. Her works deal not only with ordinary women in ordinary, urban situations but stem from a firm belief that our lives are to a great extent governed by gender. Women she feels, have not participated in the process of word-making; the stories myths and legends in our Puranas, epics and kathsa have been written by men. Deshpande feels that women never start with a picture of themselves on a clean slate, their self-image honed by the hegemonic influences of myths, movies and current-day soap operas. She sees herself as a writer whose writing comes Deshpande’s real concern is to explore the root cause of the fragmentation and dichotomy of her characters and to observe what happens
In this chapter Mahasweta Devi’s anthology of short stories entitled Breast Stories to analyze representations of violence and oppression against women in name of gender. In her Breast Stories, Devi twice evokes female characters from ancient Hindu mythology, envisions them as subalterns in the imagined historical context and, creates a link with the female protagonists of her short stories. As the title suggests, Breast Stories is a trilogy of short stories; it has been translated and analyzed by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and, in Spivak’s view, the ‘breast’ of a woman in these stories becomes the instrument of a brutal condemnation of patriarchy. Indeed, breast can be construed as the motif for violence in the three short stories “Draupadi,” “Breast-Giver,” and “Behind the Bodice,”
Jhumpa Lahiri is widely recognized as a Bengali-American author whose stories are focused on the Bengali/Indian immigrant experience. With her literary debut, she wins the 1999 O. Henry Award and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1). “Interpreter of Maladies” is a short fiction story about the modern Indian Americans visiting India, which is considered a foreign country to them. Lahiri compellingly demonstrates that all types of relationships are unique and dependent on the efforts and communication of the individuals, which leads to misunderstanding between, couples and even failed relationships or marriages. The author has utilized the lack of communication
Women, as stated by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, are often portrayed in literature as one of two binary opposites, ‘monstrous’ or ‘angelic’. Arguing throughout their theory that women are either represented as the ‘sweet dumb Snow White’ character or the ‘fierce mad Queen’2, Gilbert and Gubar expose how the female protagonist can never be understood as anything in between these two states. This dichotomy is clearly demonstrated in Felecia Hemans’s ‘The Indian City’, throughout which, the female protagonist is seen abandoning a life of angelic domesticity for one of monstrous masculinity. Consequential of this transition is the woman’s taking of her own life, which is presented by Hemans as the only way she can resolve the issue of now being monstrous.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a renowned South Asian Diaspora writer with her ancestral roots at Bengal. The women authors of the Indian Diaspora are the artefacts of two cultures; firstly, they are unsure of their status-quo related to the mainstream and secondly in relation to their minority group; because South Asian Diaspora itself constitutes a minority discourse in respect of the canons of globalization, neo-colonialism or ‘melting pot’. Grappling with the problem of defining their identities they put their utmost effort to shift from the margin to the center. It is this location or ‘in-between’ space which has inspired the leading women writers of Indian origin in America such as Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Narayan, Chitra
In A Passage to India, Forster shows bias against women. One of the derogatory stereotypes Forster uses is lack of intelligence. While reading the novel, Forster gives the reader the impression that the female characters are not smart or important in society. Ma...
Ramamoorthy, P. “My Life is My Own: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s Women” Feminism and Recent Fiction in English Ed. Sushila Singh. New Delhi: Prestige, 1991.
In contemporary society, feminism is emerging as a theory of social construct. In literature it is often challenging to discover female characters that go beyond the limits of marginalized female stereotypes and roles as a means to transgress beyond societal norms. Women are characterized as subordinate objects, amid the dominant patriarchal nature entrenched amid the epic. In The Ramayana, women are portrayed as powerless objects that succumb to the manipulation of men as the text portrays a false empowerment of women, which ultimately succumb to common archetypes accustomed to women in literature; implementing a hierarchy of gender that institutionalizes male dominance amid female inferiority. The women of The Ramayana struggle to oppose the systemic patriarchy and pursue a pathway towards attaining dynamic elements of power, that enable their ability to embody autonomous authority. In Valmiki’s The Ramayana, while women appear to be empowered, ultimately they are feeble instruments utilized to fulfill the desires of men.
Kamala Das has the distinction of being one of the best known Indian women writers in the twentieth century writing in two Indian languages, English and Malayalam. Mrs. Das is the author of many autobiographical works and novels in both languages, several highly regarded collections of poetry in English, numerous collections of short stories, as well as essays on a wide range of topics. Her work in English has been widely anthologized in the Indian subcontinent, Australia, and the West; and she has won numerous awards for her writing, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985 and the nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1984. From the 1970s when her career was at its peak, to late 1990s, India –based, English -language literary critics have written extensively on Kamala Das. Yet, in this criticism all the non hetero normative protests and pleasures in My Story were straightened out. This state of affairs emerges in part because, as elsewhere, many India – based, English
Mahasweta Devi, always writes for deprived section of people. She is a loving daughter, a clerk, a lecturer, a journalist, an editor, a novelist, a dramatist and above all an ardent social activist. Her stories bring to the surface not only the misery of the completely ignored tribal people, but also articulate the oppression of w...
In her novel, Markandaya is all out to enhance the traditional picture of the Indian woman as a docile, weak before her life partner. She reshapes her women characters like Rukmani in Nectar in a Sieve as forceful blasters of male self image hierarchy. From this overview one can get two sorts of parts played by women characters in Indian Women Fiction: the traditional and the modern. The female novelists attempt genuine endeavours to extend the suffering of women with a specific goal to educate men and their cognizant. The unconventional are seen to suffer for their violation of accepted norms of society or for questioning them; death is the way out for them, unless their experiences teach them to subdue their individuality and rebelliousness
In keeping with the trend set up in this field by the pioneer, namely Margaret Atwood and Shashi Deshpande weave their narratives around female protagonists and delineate their struggle as neutral observers. These novelists write in a context of increased activity and new possibility. Even though preoccupied with the personal life of their protagonists, these writers also address social and intellectual
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