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Essay on woman in indian society
Women in Indian society
Essay on women in Indian history
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Shashi Deshpande is prize winning Indian novelist who was born in Dharwad of Karnataka State in the year of 1938. She is a conqueror of Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel That Long Silence. In the context of Indian writing in English, Shashi Deshande is one of the simplest yet confident voices searching the individual and universal quandaries through the female awareness. Her work reflects the whole extent of Indian cultural issues, the working out of relationships within families and marriages, the fine insight of human temperament which have been the major concern of her fiction.
Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1988) carries on directly with feminist narratological preoccupation with the context of how a woman writes. Deshpande
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Yes, the Indian women in this era are born at a time when there is much consciousness about her rights, liberty to convey her ideas, freedom to enjoy finance and the chance to stand for a cause. Still the silence continues, the protagonist Jaya is an educated middle class woman who lives with her husband Mohan and their children Rahul and Rati. She is stereotype Indian middle class woman in the present century who is confined between her realizations and the restrictions. Her father brought up as an “individual”, who has the rights in the society as well as in the family irrespective of gender, but a society in which we live hesitates to accept the woman as an individual. Jaya, a father supported child,confident and ambitious girl, tries to find the true meaning and identity, in various roles assigned to her by familial and social codes. She starts her journey with her father’s favorite name Jaya and passes through different phases of daily life with other identifications as Suhasini and Seeta. She finds her role and life fit, only in Jaya, “Jaya, the winner as papa wanted to make her”. Her papa has made her different, indifferent to social taboos and familial rituals, as he often said
Is Wally Lamb, author of She's Come Undone, "qualified" to write a first-person narrator in a female voice? After all, as a man, what does he know about women's issues? In this essay I will discuss the issue of "gender-bending" writers and discuss Mr. Lamb's use of such tool.
The main way in which the feminist standpoint is shown within both novels is through the use of free indirect style, a technique of narrating a character's thoughts, decisions and feelings through a combination of first- and t...
The entire society never really knows the true them. Gladwell would impose that “our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances” meaning that we are products of our environment, or immediate social context (157). The way being a women affected Jayanthi immediate social context is by her having promiscuous relationships without her family knowing. Gladwell would impose that the power of her social context, which is one of a traditional Hindu family where she is supposed to have one sexual encounter would make Jayanthi behave in that manner. Although she goes against this she is not in control of her identity because her new immediate social context that shapes her. Bell states Jayanthi’s bad-girl mentality allowed her “to control her identity, rather than having it controlled by either her family or the men she encountered” (34). Jayanthi believes that she is finding herself by changing her social context, but in reality she 's becoming a product of her new environment. The first man she had feelings for, played her and after she “vowed not to be played by a man again” (32). This experience is what cause Jayathi to take up this bad-girl persona in hopes to find herself. Unfortunately she is unable to because she just becomes like the men who played her, and starts playing men. Her identity becomes one of her new social
There is no doubt that the literary written by men and women is different. One source of difference is the sex. A woman is born a woman in the same sense as a man is born a man. Certainly one source of difference is biological, by virtue of which we are male and female. “A woman´s writing is always femenine” says Virginia Woolf
Throughout literature’s history, female authors have been widely recognized for their groundbreaking and eye-opening accounts of what it means to be a woman in society. In most cases of early literature, women are portrayed as weak and unintelligent characters who rely solely on their male counterparts. Also during this time period, it would be shocking to have women characters in some stories, especially since their purpose is only secondary to that of the male protagonist. But, in the late 17th to early 18th century, a crop of courageous women began publishing their works, beginning the literary feminist movement. Together, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, and Mary Wollstonecraft challenge the status quo of what it means to be a woman during the time of the Restoration Era and give authors and essayists of the modern day, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a platform to become powerful, influential writers of the future.
The Anxiety of Authorship in Women’s Writing For women throughout the 19th century, there has been negative literary tropes done through written writing, and most recent works have been developing ways to resurface more positive ones. I will analyze the theories from the critical essay “From Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar to “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This will include ways in which “The Yellow Wallpaper” not only emphasize theories made Gilman and Gubar in the critical essay, but ways this work has broken boundaries for the authorship of woman. In Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the story displayed similar theories of Gilbert and Gubar’s
In Urvashi Butalia’s book, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, she interviewed multiple people, specifically women, who lived through the horrific Partition of India. One significant woman who Butalia interviewed was Damyanti Sahgal. Butalia wrote that, along with being a victim of violence caused by the Partition, Damyanti later “worked for many years in the Indian State’s recovery and relief operation” (91). Damyanti’s detailed account offered significant insight into the true nature of the Central Recovery Operation. As Butalia described the broad account of what happened to women with statistics and general knowledge, Damyanti provided a first-hand account that truly illuminates the severity of the “recovery”
This is how Judi Long, the author of Telling Women's Lives: Subject/ Narrator/ Reader/ Text, opines when she refers to Audre Lorde’s (1934-1992) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, A Biomythography (1982). Long’s comment speaks volumes on the notion of a woman’s autobiography that denies traditional generic approach. Long aptly observes that the women autobiographers such as Toni Morrison (1931-), Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-), Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) and Kate Millett(1934-2017) have denied ‘the leanness of generic autobiography’ and written their autobiographies in ‘the form of fiction’. Hence, ‘Telling women's lives often involves new or mixed genres’, asserts Long, because of the ‘messy accounts’ they have incorporated into
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
Women who want to escape the label "woman writer" (as opposed to writer--the masculine norm) have had to write like one of the boys, de-sexing themselves. Super-feminine lady writers, if they stick to their nice nook, will be both praised and despised for doing what comes naturally. But the woman writer who refuses these categories blows the scheme sky-high and incurs the wrath of the gods. (Michele Roberts in The Independent, 1997)
Throughout history, women writers used pen names and pseudonyms to avoid the eyes of the patriarchal society. The female writers were no strangers to harsh criticism from the gender-biased readers regarding their artistic works. However such emphasis on gender discrimination coined the words, feminism and sexism, which now reflect on the past and the present conflicts. In the book A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf tracks down the history of women and fiction to find the answer. She argues, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. She chants on and on about the topic of “women and fiction”, contemplating the role of women in the traditional domain and the virtues of women writers. Although, Woolf may have contemplated over such awareness that a woman needs an atmosphere of her own in which nobody can intrude, the modern world has prevailed over such hindrances throughout technological innovations that offer freedom of speech. Also, economical affluence is not a necessity for women to engage in the fictional world but rather a sufficient condition in the modern world. Thus Virginia Woolf’s predictions failed to represent the current vantage point revolving around women and fiction.
Right from the ancient epics and legends to modern fiction, the most characteristic and powerful form of literary expression in modern time, literary endeavour has been to portray this relationship along with its concomitants. Twentieth century novelists treat this subject in a different manner from those of earlier writers. They portray the relationship between man and woman as it is, whereas earlier writers concentrated on as it should be. Now-a-days this theme is developing more important due to rapid industrialization and growing awareness among women of their rights to individuality, empowerment, employment and marriage by choice etc. The contemporary Indian novelists in English like Anita Desai, Sashi Deshpande, Sashi Tharoor, Salman Rusdie, Shobha De, Manju Kapoor, Amitav Ghosh etc. deal with this theme minutely in Indian social milieu.
Discourse is regarded as a means of affirming the man's control and superiority on his female partner. Through the predominance of his powerful discourse, he imposes phallic codes on her. In patriarchal value system, the female voice is considered as inferior and trivial, too emotional in contrast to the male dominated speech. However, Anita Desai contests this belief by inserting oral forms in her work. The narrative itself develops from conversations between Bim and Tara. (Clear light of day) By making the women talk, she creates the impression of their verbal presence and at the same time, she questions their voicelessness in androcentric literature. She makes a more powerful representation of the Indian woman who is not mute, for her voice is felt and heard in her daily existence. What comes to our mind is Gayatri Spivak's question: Can the subaltern speak? And we immediately answer Yes, she can speak.
Shashi Deshpande is one of the India’s leading contemporary novelists. She writes about issues related to women. Man-woman relationship is one of the most important areas of interest in her novels. Love in all its forms is an important theme in her novels. Deshpande is equally interested in mythology. A perceptive reader of Deshpande novels is familiar with her use of cultural narratives as allusions, reference-points and embedded-narratives. One of her concerns is to address contemporary issues with the help of myths and legends. Her novel In the Country of Deceit (2008) deals with the themes of desire, adult-love and deceit. The novel is a revisionist mythmaking of king Yayati and his maid Sharmishtha’s adulterous love-affair. This paper
She also admits that Mohan is solely responsible for her writing career. Mohan had obviously expected something from her as his wife and she had failed him. And now she decides that she will “erase the silence between us” (TLS 192) because silence can ever make one’s marriage meaningful. In this silence is an image of alienation and obscurity of Jaya’s existence. When she erases the silence, she evolves and turns into a confident mother and wife for silence played a role but, it is of a woman owns making. In the novel, has evokes different feelings such as pain, woman characteristics, fear and marital suffering. However silence in this case is acceptance ones duty as a wife and mother also, fulling the roles to a boy and