Breaking The Silence Analysis

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Remember Jaya…a husband is like a sheltering tree…without the tree, you are dangerously unprotected and vulnerable and so you have to keep the tree flourishing and alive, even if you have to water it with deceit and lies.(32) Jaya was an educated lady differently dealt by her father. She got her father’s support when such a thing was rarely possible. This made her conceive herself a different child coupled with the encouraging words of her father: “You are not like others, Jaya,” Appa had said to me, pulling me out of the sasfe circle in which other girls had stood… “You are going to be different from others,” Appa had assured me. (136) Inspite of her better position as a daughter and her father’s household being characterized by …show more content…

She says, “Why had I done that? Why had I suppressed that desperate woman?”The things which had hitherto appeared smooth and acceptable now appear doubtful to her. She even cannot connect her present image to the one that had lived in her parental house as her identity has completely changed. However her consciousness which she gains after self analysis enables her to understand a gap between the real and present self as she herself says: And now nothing seemed to connect me to this place, nothing seemed to bridge the chasm between this prowling woman and the woman who had lived here. I was conscious of a faint chargin at her disappearance. Wasn’t it I who had painfully, laboriously created her? …show more content…

As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Club Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question- Is this all? Freidan is of the opinion that “the only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.” In order to encourage the women to find their place in the society of men, Betty opines that those women who themselves confine their identity to the role of housewives achieve no more than that. Their fate is no less than those who walked down to the concentration camps towards their own death and created means for their slow death of mind and spirit. What have I achieved by writing? The thought occurs to me again as I look at the neat pile of papers. Well I have achieved this. I am not afraid any more. The panic has gone. I am Mohan’s wife, I had thought, and cut off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife. Now I know that kind of fragmentation is not possible

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