“Women write differently not because they are different psychologically from men, but because their social experiences are different.” – Virginia Woolf
Bharati Mukherjee is the most accomplished diasporic writer. She is a prominent author of the Indian Writings in English who has induced the study of feminism in her writings. She is widely eulogized as the finest of her cohort of Indian writers in English. This paper aims to highlight the female protagonist who is insightful, anxious, luminous and inventive. Initially fatalities of self denial are in conflict with their internal selves because they ignore their real stance. Her major concern as creative writer is to find and preserve woman’s identity as daughter, wife, mother and most important of all as human beings. Concerns related to women are central to the vision of Mukherjee. The paper aims to discuss the victimization of women and their traumatic experience undergone by women characters in the select works of Bharati Mukherjee. The condition of women has gradually changed globally and the docile female has
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Iowa is the place where Jane encounters violent realities. She witnesses how the usually placid farmer, Harlan, turns violent on Bud Ripplemeyer, the banker from Iowa, after being turned down by him for a loan. He shoots Bud in the back and then commits suicide. Jane also hears the story of the nameless Osage man who tortures his wife to death and then “hangs himself in his machine shed” (Jasmine 156). Violence in Iowa, however, is presented in ambiguous dialectics. The narrator insinuates that despite these violent occurrences, the American people are resilient in their hopes and are optimistic about the future. Therefore, violence the trajectory of everyday life, with its usual ups and downs, unfolds in Jane’s life and she tries to carve out her identity in the image of her
Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
However, even though this work was written about a hundred years ago and although Wolf said “in a century’s time very possibly they [values] will have changed completely”, some issues from “A Room of One’s Own” still resonate today (Wolf 30). Respectively, Wolf hoped that a century will be needed for women to reach the same level of recognition and the same opportunities. Nevertheless, up to this day, female writers are not always being treated seriously among public as it is believed that they only write about love and, in general, do not have the same abilities to write. Also, it applies to other spheres that are commonly gendered as male: statistically, there are much fewer women engineers than men in any country. Second, she mentions that male writers are struggling with composing when “material circumstances are against it” while saying that for a female writes the conditions are even worse since no one even believed that writing is a woman’s path. Today, even though the world is a better place for women than it was in her time, women still struggle with the same problem. She brings up the topic of girls being raised differently from boys, and it is a modern issue as well. Generally, girls are expected to be more polite, well-behaved, and calm than boys, and gradually it lead to girls being more
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
Though varied in cultural they share a deep interest in evolving female culture and liberation of women. Our thesis mainly focused on her one of the novel “The hero’s walk” which mainly deals with Diasporic sensibility like “The hero’s walk”, “Tamarind Mem” And “Can You Hear the Night Bird Cell?” Written by her also deals with the same theme of Diasporic sensibility “Tamarind Mem” (1997) grew out of her university thesis. Her novels deal with the complexities of Indian family life and with the split that emerges when Indian move to the west. Her first novel “Tamarind Mem” deal with pungent sugary home sickness of her Indian sensibility portraying her memories of her past days, depicting the descriptions of Indian domestic life. Her second novel “The Hero’s Walk” could be the best illustration to her alien feeling which was clod in a fine garb of refinement. And also she has portrayed the clash between the cultural of East and west. She attempts to explore the nuances of Diasporic consciousness by the quait portrayal of woman characters. Badami’s third novel “Can You Hear the Night Bird Call?” Explores the golden Temple slaughter and the Air India Bombing was set against the back drop of Punjab division “Can You Hear the Night Bird Call?” Could be branded as a historical novel, as the plot conveniently moves between India and Canada in 1947. It tries to explore the
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,”
At the one level the women writing in India are a joyous retrieval of artifacts that signify women’s achievement. At another, they represent a difficult and inventive movement in the theory and practice of feminist criticism. We have reread established writers and are introducing several comparatively little known ones. They will be surprises even for, say Telugu readers in our collection of Telugu literature. In English translation, what we have is a stupendous body of new work. Judge by conventional standards, many of the pieces col...
Being a Feminist and having a Feminist point of view in observing every cultural, social and historical issue had been translated as having a feminine centered and anti-masculine perception. Unlike the general and common knowledge about feminism, it is not only an anti-masculine perception towards social and individual issues. Feminism according to Oxford dictionary is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes that more commonly known as the pursuit of equality for women’s rights. On the other hand, in studying literary books as it will be in this paper, the mentioned definition is not applicable. Therefore, in this paper Feminist criticism will be used in order to study some characters’ lives in “Like water for chocolate” and “Season of Migration to the north” novels. Feminist criticism according to Oxford dictionary is a type of literary theory that points out different genders, races, classes, religions that are depictured in literature and will be used in this paper.
As a result, females were unable to have their writings to be successful under their name in the world of literature, while men have long been the ones who had their literature taken seriously. It was an obstacle for women to get recognition: “the publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood” (Woolf 367). This demonstrates that it was likely that many works written by women are either published under a man’s name or anonymously in order to have their work read and acknowledged. This displays that despite having the gift for literature, women struggled to find their writings to be given the praises they deserve. This issue is due to the fact that many men have longed believe that it was peculiar for women to have such talent as they still held many stereotypic assumptions on women and their abilities. Using Judith as a paragon, Woolf expresses the fact that women who could write were dismissed as if they “have gone crazed or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside of the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at” (Woolf 366). How is it fair that men deemed it eccentric for women to have such abilities? The reality of this situation is tremendously disappointing because ladies are as capable as men when it comes to creating fiction and poetic works. Men should not make such assumption and take away women’s voice and potential to get an audience for her literature
Language constitutes a necessary factor in the analysis of a female voice. Femininity in writing can be discerned in a privileging of the voice: writing and voice are in fact woven together. The speaking woman is entirely her voice for she physically materializes what she is thinking: she signifies it with her body. Woman, in other words, is wholly and physically present in her voice and writing is no more than the extension of this self- identical prolongation of the speech act. What we find is that by adopting a feminine mode of writing Anita Desai is trying to create a feminine textual space, for the woman occupies a space in this world and this allows the existence of a female utterance which has been ignored and suppressed in male literature.
It focuses on three women saint’s life, writing, and their voice for space in the society. The well-known three women Saiva saints are Karaikkal Ammair from Tamilnadu, Akkamahadevi from Karnataka and Lalladevi or Lalded from Kashmir. If the aim of the feminism is to establish equal social identity as well as an individual identity of women, then we have considered that the feminist voice was begun in Indian during medieval period. The three women raised their voice for their place in the sacred world. Before discussing women saint’s view on Identity in the society, there is a need to be known their
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 the novel, the main female character named Dimple Dasgupta breaks the traditional notion of an Indian wife. She is shown in the novel as a vibrant person but with a sort of mental aberration or apathy. Even while she was unmarried, she nurtured number of fixations such as the nature of husband she is going to have, the manner in which her marriage is going to take place and the kind of married life she is going to lead …etc. All her dreams and aspirations about her married life get shattered. She suffers from total loss of personality and it culminates into murder of her husband by herself
People say that Virginia Woolf has had one of the biggest impacts on the world of writing and the world of feminism. A book dedicated to essays of Woolf’s work had said, “Woolf explicitly parallels the dominance of male over female values in literature and life, while implying a different hierarchy that further complicates the women novelists task.” (Bloom 245). This explains that Woolf was very concerned with making the values of women just as important as the values of men.
The passage at the end of the Third Chapter in A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf deals with two major themes of this essay. The first being the ways in which women were kept down and made inferior to men, and the second being how this affected women’s writing. Woolf asserts that women were made inferior as a direct result of men’s perceived superiority. This assertment provides a new way of thinking about women’s lower position in society and the subsequent low opinion men held of women and their capabilties as writers. Woolf firmly believes that it is the prerogative of all writers to pay great heed to what is thought of them and to suffer when that opinion is negative. Because the opinion of women’s writing was negative, women could not write freely. Their minds, Woolf believes, were clouded with agendas. They had something to prove or a grudge to vindicate. This is not the ideal situation for writing, or the proper environment for genius. Therefore, through her revolutionary way of examining women’s position in society, Woolf proves that the “masculine complex” and low expectations of women impeded upon their writing process.
Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing.