Patriarchal Dominance in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence

Abstract

The domination of a male in the life of a woman is a natural phenomenon in patriarchal society and consequent relegation of a woman to secondary position promoted some women writers like Shashi Deshpande to take up issues of women. Indian mythology and ancient literature, both, internalized concept of an enduring wife and a sacrificing mother through the images of ‘Sati, Savitri and Shakuntala”. Indian Woman, like any other society, is controlled in numerous ways to preserve the ethnic collectivities and national identities. Shashi Deshpande, a popular Indian woman writer deals with the inner and social world of women. She took up the cause of Indian women to shake them out of the patriarchal order. She stresses the need for women to break free from the shackles of their traditional position and recognize their need for self-fulfillment as more important than the duty of sacrificing themselves for their children and husbands. Deshpande’s art lies in selecting situations with which most Indian women can identify. Her focus is on the women within marital, domestic relationships. Her novels, featuring female protagonists, reconstruct aspect of women’s experience and attempt to give voice to muted ideologies, registering resistance and on her own admission. She charts the inner landscapes of women in her novels, where the women characters are provided with a context to understand themselves. Deshpande consistently explores the nature of the female world and reconstructs the suppressed records of female experience. She represents different facets of the trapped female psyche and attempts to transcend its’ boundaries.

That Long Silence, an acclaimed masterpiece of feminist writing in Indo-Anglian fiction highlights the image of the middle-class woman sandwiched between tradition and modernity.