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
In the early part of the novel, Dimple gets prepared for her marriage. Here, she is shown as a woman who is quite conscious about her physical appearance. She is very often worried about her lack of physical charm and dark complexion. She employs desperate measures to make herself beautiful. She follows all beauty tips and does physical exercises to appear trim. All these prove to be futile exercises and she develops chest related health problems. This is the first hint seen in the novel about her troubled mind and complicated psyche where lie qualities such as self destruction and murdering tendencies. She is obsessed with desires like beauty and complexion which expedite her marital collapse and breakdown of her senses.
Dimple hopes that her social status would improve after her marriage. Therefore, she wishes to marry a neurosurgeon. She longs for leading an aristocratic life and enjoy all the comforts offered to the upper strata of the society. Without any worry and guilty consciousness, she skips writing her B.A. Degree examinations as her marriage is fixed. She starts spending her time in empty desires and vague imagination. S...
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Despair came easily to Dinesen. Her life was depressing, but she made the best of it. At a young age she was to marry her first true love. He stood her up and she ended up marring her lover's brother. They only married because he wanted h...
In the novel I Regorberta Menchu is slightly different as the status of women in the society are relatively raised. As women play a significant role in the Guatemalan civil war and the community affairs. Menchu herself plays an important role within her community after serving as a house help where she was treated badly and despised as she was treated worse than a dog. After returning home, she takes up a leadership position in the community as the leader. She plays a significant role in developing important strategies that helped the Indians and other rebels in fighting the Guatemalan army. Thus the status of women in the novel are varying, Regoberta Menchu helps advance their course by holding a leadership position within the society in
The practice of bacha posh can empower women and subvert society’s traditional rules. Women dressed up as a boy show society that they can do the same activities as men, which means that women have the capacity to the do the same work as a man. Practicing bacha posh can impact the system of Afghanistan, because women will have more power. They will be able to get an education and to be part of society. Women can then arrive at the point of being part of the government in Afghanistan by the practice of bacha posh. The empowerment of women can strengthen the system. Nowadays, Afghanistan continues having women out of the system, but the difference is that today’s society recognized the value of women because there were and are women
Dimmesdale is living a lie, but he constantly feels guilty over his sin. In fact, he feels so contrite over his sin that he is physically damaged. He tortures himself with a whip, keeps long vigils of wakefulness at night, and starves himself until his knees are trembling. Because of the stress he his continually putting on his body, he becomes physically ill. Another way his iniquity affects him physically is the habit of placing his hand over his heart in pain, the same place where the scarlet letter is on Hester Prynne. Emotionally, as the years pass by, he begins to hate himself and consider himself to be the worst sinner of all civilization; as he said himself, “behold me here, the one sinner of the world.” His constant focus on his sin drives himself t...
What happens in the life of a circus freak doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a middle class woman from the south would ever dream of concerning herself with, and yet Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden was produced by exactly one such a woman. In the short story, Welty exposes a technique of naming and disguise that has always been effective in the blatant dehumanization bigots use to degrade specific members of our social hierarchy. Welty's title character in the story never manages to escape from the diminutive appellation, Little Lee Roy, which is more or less his actual name. Because of his appearance and the persistence of this deplorable nickname it is virtually impossible for him to achieve the status of being a ‘real person’ within the
Women today are still viewed as naturally inferior to men, despite the considerable progress done to close this gap. Females have made a huge difference in their standing from 200 years ago. Whether anyone is sexist or not, females have made considerable progress from where they started, but there is still a long journey ahead. Mary Wollstonecraft was an advocate of women 's rights, a philosopher, and an English writer. One of Wollstonecraft’s best works was “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792). In her writing, she talks about how both men and women should be treated equal, and reasoning could create a social order between the two. In chapter nine of this novel, called “Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society,”
Mathilde Loisel is an unappreciative, materialistic, vain woman who lives life depressed about the simplicity of her surroundings, so she spends much of her time daydreaming about the glamorous life she was born for. “She suffered constantly, feeling herself destined for all delicacies and luxuries.” Mathilde’s husband, Mr. Loisel, is a respectable man who prefers a simple life. He loves his wife very much; her happiness is his primary concern. In her desperate attempt to ...
The story begins in a rural house where a man and woman live without children, near a walled garden tended by a frightening witch. The first line of the story tells us that they yearn for a child. It is clear that there exists in this house an almost tangible feeling of desire to produce offspring. The Freudian concept of the libido or the life force explains this desire as a product of the unconscious id(Guerin 129). To show further the prevalence of the id in this house, which in itself is a symbol of the human mind, the wife covets a vegetable, rampion, which she sees in the neighboring garden from her tiny window to the outside. "I shall die unless I can have some of that rampion to eat."(Grimm 514) The wife comes to represent this selfish element of the mind, and this is her primary function in the story. When she speaks, both times she is only asking for something that she wants. She has no name, as she does not function as a full character.
The fact that goddesses play such a vital role in the mythology of Hinduism, command the same amount of worship, and are allowed to act independent of gender politics is strange, considering the almost totally subservient role expected of women in Hindu society. There is great disparity between the power, freedom wielded by, and worship directed towards these goddesses, and the actual human women who adhere to its beliefs. In the world of myth, goddesses like Parvati are equal to their husbands; their marriage a greater whole made up of the sum of its parts. But in reality, Hindu women are expected to act more in line with human characters in their mythology like Sita, who existed solely to serve the whims of her husband. Despite the revered
Generally, in the depiction of the immigrant woman’s negotiations with the New World, Bharati Mukherjee’s treatment of the past spacetime becomes crucial. Usually, her novels portray the past spacetime as a circumscribing space that must be escaped in order to (re)construct identity. For instance, in Wife, Mukherjee depicts Dimple’s inability to escape from the past as an inability to transform into an American individual who has the agency to define her self. On the other hand, in Jasmine, the protagonist almost completely rejects her past and her Indianness to facilitate her transformation and assimilation in America. Both novels depict the past as a constricting spacetime. However, in Desirable Daughters, instead of depicting the past as an essentialist, fixed entity that thwarts the transformation of identity, Mukherjee highlights the active participation of the past spacetime in (re)defining identity. Mukheree’s new artistic vision parallels Homi Bhabha’s theory of the performative space, whose dynamicity challenges pedagogical fixity and contributes to the continual (re)structuring of both individual identities and nation-spaces. Meanwhile, Mukherjee’s new treatment of the past spacetime resolves some of the dialectical strands of her artistic vision. To delineate the dissolution of these dialectics, this article traces Mukherjee’s portrayal of the past spacetime, first as an essentialist entity, then as a fluid metaphor, and lastly as an ambivalent entity that helps the protagonist redefine her identity. In the process, critics who brush off Mukherjee’s novels as having an Orientalist vision may be made to reconsider her aesthetics as well as her novels.
Raji Narasimhan, a writer, translator and journalist, has skilled hand in portraying women’s world. She has written five novels - The Heart of Standing is You Cannot Fly, Forever Free, Drifting to a Dawn, The Sky Changes and Atonement. Her novel Forever Free, which is shortlisted for Sahitya Academy Award, is the story of a young woman Shree, who sets out in search of freedom and fulfillment of her life in the patriarchal society. It became famous due to its realistic depiction.
In the novel This Earth Of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, discrimination against social structure, race, and gender is apparent. The setting is in the Indies, or now called Indonesia. At that time, there are terms for different races in the book, which are “Native” indicating someone who is pure Indonesian, “Indo” a half European and half Indonesian, and “Pure Blood” or “European” when someone is pure European. An Indo and a Pure Blood receives more respect in society than a Native. Furthermore, European or Pure Blood is at the top of this social hierarchy, people who are European or Pure Blood receives the utmost respect in society. Differences in gender is prevalent in this novel, where most women in this book have power in their own homes, but in society is looked down upon. Female characters experiencing these are Annelies, the main character’s love interest, Nyai Ontosoroh, Annelies’ mother who is a concubine, and Magda Peters, the main character’s European teacher. Women in this novel are portrayed differently according to what race, social structure, and gender they are born in, which can be seen through Nyai Ontosoroh, Annelies, and Magda Peters.
Bharati Mukherjee’s novels range widely across time and space dealing especially with the consequences emerging out of cultural confrontation of the East with West in the alien land. All her novels are female centered and deals with the changed psyche of the protagonist’s behaviors. But her latest novel Miss New India (2011) takes a U-turn in dealing with the protagonist, Anjali Bose, in her own country i.e. India bringing the western cultural confrontational effects of highly sophisticated life style in rural and urban India. This paper focuses on the issues of marriage in typical Indian family in which marriage is considered as the utmost holy duty of parents. It also brings out the challenges, implications, outcry and outcome of marriage of the protagonist. Miss New India is the last of the trilogy consisting others two as Desirable Daughters (2002) and Tree Bride (2004).
In The Country Wife, women are treated as mere objects and are viewed by the men of the play as being inferior. Sparkish views Alethea as an object that should be flaunted around and is only interested in marrying her for her wealth. Sparkish revels in the idea that he be envied for his wife because he believes that allowing more men to love her and envy him for owning her will increase her worth. In viewing her as something that gains value, Sparkish likens her to a treasure at an auction, whose value goes up as the number of bidders rises. Mr. Pinchwife also does not view his wife as a person because he refuses to let his wife go out and enjoy the sights and wonders of city life and instead keeps her confined to the house. Like Sparkish, Mr. Pinchwife did not marry Margery out of love, but as he says he marries her because she is a fool which will guarantee that he does not become a cuckhold. Mr. Pinchwife’s statement shows that views women as being objects that influence men’s status depending on whether their wife is faithful or not. While Sir Jasper appears to express women in a positive light when he says, “That sweet, soft, gentle, tame noble creature woman, made for man’s companion” (II. i.460-461), he reveals that he has a preference of characteristics that make women docile and obedient towards their husbands. As pointed out by Horner, when he says, “So is that soft, gentle, tame, and more noble creature a spaniel, and has all their tricks-can fawn, lie down, suffer beating and fawn the more” (II. i.462-464), the words that Sir Jasper uses to describe women can ideally be used to describe a dog as well. The words “tame”, “noble” and “man’s companion” (II. i.459-461) dehumanize women because women are likened to accessor...
The Das parents’ negligent relationship with their children in Clear Light of Day mirrors India’s independence from Britain. Before their deaths, Mr. and Mrs. Das were preoccupied and inattentive to their four children, Raja, Tara, Bim, and Baba. They spent most of their time at the club, playing “their daily game of bridge” (Desai 50). This pastime is so important to them that they neglect to take care of their kids. For example, Mrs. Das tires of “washing and powdering” Baba, her mentally disabled baby, and she complains, “My bridge is suffering” (103). Mr. Das also does not focus on his children and “he [goes] through the day without addressing a word to them” (53). Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Das are unable to ever form a loving relationship with their children because they both pass away. After Mrs. Das falls into a...