A Desire for An Eventful Life of Jaya in Shashi Deshpande’s “That Long Silence”
- June 24, 2018
- Posted by: RSIS
- Categories: English, Language and Literature
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume II, Issue VI, June 2018 | ISSN 2454-6186
A Desire for An Eventful Life of Jaya in Shashi Deshpande’s “That Long Silence”
M. Kavitha1, Dr. Padmini Bernard Fenn2
1Assistant Professor in English, Sree Sakthi Engineering College, Karamadai, Tamil Nadu, India
2Associate Professor in English, G.R.D. College of Science Commerce, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
Abstract:-Love and marriage are interrelated concepts of human relations. Love has many forms and one of its forms is seen in the relations of husband and wife. This relation has been the major concern of feminists all over the world. The most stable, pious and natural form of love, and its expression in daily life changes with time and space, from a permanent fountain to occasional drops. Even in this expression, a woman has no equal share and these results in dissatisfaction, subjugation and suffocation, which is well brought to the fore by Shashi Deshpande in That Long Silence. A male partner not only changes a female’s identity from a girl to a woman, but dominates her whole life to such an extent that she accepts herself as a part of his identity. She accepts everything silently, not because she is afraid of changing the society, but she fears changing herself, her relation, and her forced identity. She becomes so suppressed from within, that hardly she feels the need to change her pre-decided roles and assume her new identity. The roles, she imbibed with the help of her darling mother. Many times she feels herself tied with invisible chains, invisible chains but harder and stronger than visible.
Shashi Deshpande’s novel That Long Silence is the understanding of woman’s desire, silence and its suffocation. Jaya internalizes silence as the heritage of her culture. But it continuously sickens her soul. Throughout the novel she tries to calculate the gain and loss of being silent and eventually finds that she always hides her faults behind her relations and responsibilities. Her growing dissatisfaction comes to an end with the sermon of Lord Krishna who gives freedom to every individual to do as they desire. It is the tale of every woman living in a patriarchal setup. This paper tries to illuminate the impact of silence in Indian women’s life and Jaya’s overcoming of it. The study tries to understand what makes a woman to stay silent and what eventually forces her speak up.
