Gendered Home in the Short Stories of Shashi Deshpande

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Recommended: What defines a home

Home is a geographical space -- a site where we live but it is also ‘an ideal and an imaginary that is imbued with feelings’1 .Somerville(1992) has picked out seven key aspects of being at home: shelter, hearth,(emotional and physical well-being),heart(loving and caring relations), privacy, roots(source of identity and meaning, fullness),abode and paradise(ideal home as distinct from everyday life)2.Down the ages, we have associated ‘home’ as a haven, far away from the hostility and surveillance of the outside world. It is in the privacy of home that an individual gives expression to his ideas. The domestic items from curtains and furniture to books and records all contribute to the development of an individual. In all its details, a home is thus crucial to how an individual establishes his world.

Significantly, if a house establishes one’s world, then, it is still very much a man’s world. Marion young (1997) brings in Luce Irigaray’s ideas to explore the gendering of home:

‘‘…man can build and dwell in the world in patriarchal culture [Irigaray suggests] only on the basis of materiality and nurturance of women. In the idea of ‘Home’, man projects onto woman the nostalgic longing for the lost wholeness of the original mother. To fix and keep hold of his identity man makes a house, puts things in it and confines there his woman who reflects his identity to him. The price she pays for supporting this subjectivity, however, is dereliction, having no self of her own.”3

In the process, the subjectivity of males gets emphasized while everything that a woman does within the confinement of a home bolsters the male idea of ‘home’. Young emphasizes four important attri...

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...American dream,The future of Housing, work and family life,W.W. Norton,new York, 2002.p.82.

17. Deshpande Shashi, ‘A Wall Is Safer’ from Intrusion and other stories,Penguin,New Delhi,1993,p.120.

18. Friedan Betty, The Feminine Mystique, W.W.Norton, New York, 1963,p.15.

19. Hayden Dolores,Redesigning the American dream,The future of Housing, work and family life,W.W. Norton,new York, 2002.p.84.

20. Deshpande Shashi, ‘An Antidote to Boredom’ from Intrusion and other Stories,Penguin,New Delhi,1993,p.121.

21.Deshpande Shashi,Of Kitchens and goddesses from Writing from the Margin and other Essays,Penguin,Viking,New Delhi,2003, p.18.

22.Deshpande Shashi, Writing from the Margin from Writing from the Margin and other Essays,Penguin,Viking,New Delhi,2003, p.159.

23. Bunkse E., Geography and the Art of Life, The johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2004.p. 94.

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