Feminism In Indian Literature

She is a scintillating Indian woman novelist who delineates the identity crisis of modern educated women in the patriarchal system of family. G.S. Amur aptly remarks: “Woman’s struggle in the context of contemporary Indian society to find and preserve her identity as a wife, mother and most important of all, as humanbeing is Shashi Deshpande’s major concern as a creative writer, and this appears in all her important stories.” Though there are many educated women characters in the novels of Shashi Deshpande The present paper is an attempt to trace out the identity crisis in the fiction of Shashi Deshpande with special reference to Roots and Shadows. “We talk of revolution- political and economic and yet the greatest revolution in a country is one that effects improvement in the status and living conditions of its women.”- Jawaharlal

Her response to the text which, “by the end of the fourteenth century, had established itself as the vernacular authority on misogyny” (Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women, p. 7), came in the form of Letter to the God of Love. In it, Cupid presents to the other gods a women’s petition asking for an end to the outrages they were forced to bear. The debate generated by this work grew as de Pizan continued exchanging contentious letters with famous scholars of her day. In addition to establishing herself as a female intellectual, this exchange eventually led to the beginning of a series of literary debates on women, known as ‘Querelle Des Femmes’ or ‘The Woman

Through Tally, the Uglies trilogy invites readers to think about how, in YA dystopian fiction, female characters face internal struggles that are mirrored by the external challenges they face. This is important because the target audience

In conclusion, Bronte uses this novel to portray gender roles and societal rules pertaining to women to send a message to the reader in an effort to sway ideologies of this time. In this passage within the book, Bronte shows Janes struggle as women when trying to abide by expectations while internally she suffers. The silence and obedience of women are portrayed and revealed through the actions of Jane that shows that even the strong women at that time were weak when pertaining to the judgment of

Throughout history, women have made a name for themselves. By rising up and fighting for something that they believed in, the Mirabal sisters made a name for themselves in the Dominican Republic and in Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies. By applying a theory to a novel, readers can relate the book to the world they are living in today (Davidson). Feminism can be defined as a dynamic philosophy and social movement that advocates for human rights and gender equality (“Feminism”). Feminist Theory involves looking at how women in novels are portrayed, how female characters are reinforcing stereotypes or undermining them, and the challenges that female characters face (Davidson).

Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia summarizes Atwood’s story as one that “depicts one woman’s chilling struggle to survive in a society ruled by misogynistic fascism, by which women are reduced to the condition of property.” Although written 100 years earlier, this is also seen in the novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, because both authors show the oppression of women through the experiences the characters go through and the means of survival they use. The two novels, The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas

This reductive literary tradition of portraying women as inherently crazy by authors is well explored in the book The Madwomen in the Attic: The Women Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In their tome of literary criticism, Gilbert and Gubar delve deeply through a feminist rereading of many celebrated 19th century literary works by female (and male) authors and quickly came to see the challenges these female writers encountered and the mechanisms they used as to navigate the confines of such tropes out of the scholarly and literary tools left from their male writer

Alejandra Metcalf Mrs. Cottom ENGL1010 03 November, 2017 The Haunting Feminist Theory     By dictionary definition, feminism is the advocacy of women 's rights based on the equality of the sexes. Throughout the years, society has had three ¨phases¨ of feminism, and the definition of feminism has changed through those phases. Currently, feminism is a debateable word on whether the term is good or bad. Despite the controversy and debate over feminism, the theory of feminism in literature cannot be ignored, even by the most misogynistic of people. Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's ¨The Yellow Wallpaper¨,  Roddy Dowell´s ¨The Pram¨, and Kate Chopin 's ¨The Story of an Hour,¨ can all be viewed with the application of the feminist theory.

Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672) has been a long-lasting leading figure in the American literature who embodied a myriad of identities; she was a Puritan, poet, feminist, woman, wife, and mother. Bradstreet’s poetry was a presence of an erudite voice that animadverted the patriarchal constraints on women in the seventeenth century. In a society where women were deprived of their voices, Bradstreet tried to search for their identities. When the new settlers came to America, they struggled considerably in defining their identities. However, the women’s struggles were twice than of these new settlers; because they wanted to ascertain their identities in a new environment, and in a masculine society.

Beena Agarwal points out that, on one hand the phenomena of migration has helped to break the barriers of traditions; it has also made the life of Indian woman more complex. Indian woman with her traditional moral consciousness and limited professional skills find herself more isolated and insecure (10). The process of formation of identities continuously morphs. It keeps on shifting. As Avtar Brah suggests, such variable identities are “constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively” (183).