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Conflicting Women In Anita Nair's 'The Better Man'

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INTRODUCTION Indian Writing in English has placed an independent status in the realm of Indian literature. Fiction by women writers occupies a major role in the contemporary writing in Indian English. Women writers have come away from traditional portrays of enduring, self -sacrificing women toward conflicted female characters searching for identity and defined their victim status. Anita Nair is one of the finest writers in Indian writing in English. She was born at shoranur in Kerala. Anita was brought up in a suburb in Chennai. Her grandparents lived in Kerala. So, she made her visits to Kerala and that enabled her to know the heart of rural Kerala. Her first book, a collection of short stories called “satyr of the subway” (1997), won her …show more content…

Her novels are passionately woven on the thread of human nature and values; with a female oriented subject. Nair conveys her protagonists’ dilemmas with a freshness and charm that marks her story feminism. Anita Nair writes with great energy and creates amazing work. The theme of my paper is self-discovery and problems on “The Better Man” by Anita Nair. This paper is a critical study of the characters named Valsala and Anjana in Anita Nair’s “The Better Man”. Nair’s women are real, flesh and blood protagonists who are awesome with their relationships to their surrounding, their societies, their families, their mental makeup and themselves. Valsala in “The Better Man” is the wife of Prabhakaran, an aged schoolmaster. Valsala is not satisfied with him. So, she falls in love with Sridharan. She doesn’t bother about society. She realizes her inner mind and becomes the mistress of him. This incident shows the feminist point of Valsala in the form of morality. As a matter of fact, she is aware of the fact that every woman needs the energizer of love, freedom, equality and sex. She puts forth the new issues of woman’s sexuality and gender. She justifies herself

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