Critical Analysis Of That Long Silence

Rebecca West, 1913.
SashiDeshpandein her book ‘That Long Silence’ not only forthrightly articulates a thematic and technical maturity but also effectively communicates an intentionally apprehended Feminine Sensibility. It achieves greater creditability from the fact that Jaya, the protagonist is a very well read person and a writer who corresponds with her fictional role. Often in spite of the writer’s best effort, the narrator fails to find a voice of her own and ends up mouthing the creator. Articulate women characters are unseen in tradition bound India as they are made to lead a subservient life from their childhood. The author has managed to overcome this difficulty by endowing her protagonist with abundant creative talent. In the words of Vimala Rama Rao, “Jaya is one of the narrative voices in the Indian English fiction who possesses and displays a literary sensibility commensurate with her fictional role as a writer telling her own story, one whose college education and reading habits are in the evidence in her speaking voice. This indeed is an achievement.” Greatly conscious of the stifling social milieu, the narrator/writer unfolds her story. “Ostensibly, she relates it as the story of a particular couple, but the power relations in the patriarchal structures, the gender differentiation with all its ramifications

Several reviews of the novel bear to this view which emphasizes the fact that the central theme in That Long Silence is to highlight the grossly unequal status of woman in our society. For instances TapanBasu says that this novel is the story of Jaya, “who has spent a lifetime in surrender of her will to social mores and customs that had regulated women to a second class status”