Traditional Outlook in Shashi Deshpande’s “that Long Silence”.

TRADITIONAL OUTLOOK IN SHASHI DESHPANDE’S       “THAT LONG SILENCE”.

K.A.AGALYA, Assistant Professor  & Head, Dept of English, Sri Vasavi College (Self-Finance Wing), ERODE -638316

    K.SARAVANAN Associate Professor, Dept of English, Erode Arts and Science College, ERODE

Indian English literature in the recent past has attracted a wide spread interest, both in India and abroad. It has come to be realized of a great significance in world literature. One feels that this writing in English has now entered a new phase, the phase, of an inimitable representation of the ‘New Indian Woman’ who is dissatisfied with the inhibiting cultural, natural or sexual roles assigned to her from the unconscious dawn of the patriarchal India.

The term ‘New Woman’ has come to signify the awakening of woman into a new realization of her place and position in family and society, conscious of her place and position in family and society, conscious of her individuality. The New woman has been trying to assert and assertion her rights as a human being and is determined to flight for equal treatment with men. Ellen E. Jordan observes that “the English feminists endowed the ‘New Woman’ with her hostility to men, her questioning of marriage, her determination to escape from the restrictions of  home life and her belief that education could make a woman capable of leading a financially self sufficient single and yet fulfilling life.” There are a number of Indian novels that deal with woman’s problems. However, the treatment is often peripheral and the novels end up glorifying the stereotypical virtues of the Indian woman, like patience, devotion and abject acceptance of whatever is meted out to her.

Woman is the central object of her fiction. Sashi Deshpande’s women characters are born out of a typically Indian situation. They represent middle-class society. Her theory is not the theory of Western feminism. In fact, she has no theories; she rejects them and she gives her own assessment tradition and modernity, between family and profession, between culture and nature, between assertion and confrontation, between freedom and loneliness, between self-aggrandizement and self-realization. The problems and conflicts faced by women in her novels are existential in nature.

 They occur for any woman in the society. Their self-assertion is self-alienation. The more the search for freedom and independence and the meaning of life, the more it results in alienation and loneliness. This is the typical of an existential problem every man encounters, and every modern woman according to Deshpande. Deshpande, however, takes pity in her women characters for the predicament created by themselves through self-delusions and hallucinations; and towards the end, she provides a touch of humanism mixed with love.