Lovleen Bains
Negotiating Female ‘Space’ in Shashi Deshpande’s The Miracle & Other Stories: A Reappraisal
The quest for freedom and self assertion is the dominating theme that almost every female writer of the post- modern era has tried to express in magnificent proportions. Women writers have opened new vistas to explore the question of identity and stability. Writers as Anita Desai, Gita Mehta, Rama Mehta, Shashi Deshpande and many others have tried to explore the complex identity of women in the patriarchal set up and the tabooed social system. The fact that Shashi Deshpande’s writings stand apart from other writers is that she writes whatever she feels. While Desai tries to take refuge in alienation, Rama Mehta in spirituality, Deshpande’s women try to negotiate space with a sensible understanding of human relations. This study deals with this new generation of women depicted by Deshpande in her stories especially “The Miracle and Other Stories”.
The major concern of Deshpande is conflict in which the modern, educated and hence more awakened women is caught up. Torn by the pulls and pressures which tradition and patriarchy exert on her physical, social, psychological and mental make up, the feeling of self expression, individuality and independence becomes all the more strong. Deshpande talks of the difficulty of playing the different social roles enjoined on a woman by society; “it comes out of the knowledge that I am something more and something different from the sum total of these roles. My writing comes out of a consciousness of the conflict between my ideas of myself as human being and the idea that society has of me as a woman”(In Feminism in Indian Writing In English:182)
The quest for self identity, crossing all barriers of social, domestic and sexual oppression, makes the works of Shashi Deshpande, especially her short stories, stand as a class apart. A society in transition is bound to create the sense of alienation, insecurity and fear in a woman who tends to oscillate between tradition and modernity. Deshpande’s women characters emerge victorious as they wrestle with their problems with vehemence and might and refuse to be cowed down. The new women of Deshpande, not wholly vanquishing the past, strive to voice their suppressed, though bold protest, for their meek and the submissive counterparts. The women in her short stories, most of whom, having acquired a professional equilibrium with their male counterparts, refuse to be cowed down and try to reconstruct a space for themselves in this oppressively conditioned social system. As Carol P. Christ defines:
“In the social quest a woman begins in alienation from the human community and seeks new modes of relationship and action in society…”(Diving Deep and Surfacing:106)
The women, who have the capacity to make a choice, are experienced in the short stories of Shashi Deshpande. Her female characters are the ones who have suffered harassment, both physical and mental, at the hands of patriarchal rulers .Although gasping in such a scenario, all is still not lost for them as the inner strength, wavering though it may be, emboldens their spirit and envisions for themselves a regenerative future, where salvation would not be partial but complete. Deshpande believes:
“Until women get over the handicaps imposed by society, outside and inner conditioning, the human race will not have realized its full potential.”(In Studies in Women Writers in English:135)
In a society, as traditionally male dominated as the Indian society is, women have to try harder to find their identities. But the modern Indian women, as portrayed in Shashi Deshpande’s novels, are definitely working towards that goal. The conflicting traditional and modern tendencies as regards the female identification have been subtly brought out in Shashi Deshpande’s short stories. The spirit of post modern Indian English literature muffled with the strains of past and present and the yearning to usher in a more satisfying futuristic era have been aptly drawn in the works of Shashi Deshpande. As Walters opines:
“Modern women are torn between the past and the possible, but difficult and yet unexplored, future”(Feminism:A Very Short Introduction:99)
Shashi Deshpande’s fixes the Indian socio-cultural value system but at the same time endows her women characters with such personality traits which enable her to merge herself completely into the system, failing not at the same time to arise phoenix-like in the whole process. In her effort to break the silence, though silently most of the times, she hankers to seek an ultimate break from her agonizing feminine world. The choice between modernity and convention notwithstanding, the search for freedom and self identity becomes sterner and sterner. In most of the stories, her women protagonists pass through the process of introspection but towards the culmination successfully find a way by siding once again with the traditions, conventions and the system as a whole.
Deshpande asserts that the best way out is compromise. Lack of conciliation would lead to nothing but death and destruction. Her female characters indicate a steady progress from self-alienation to self-discovery i.e. from darkness to light. They realize the acceptance of existence and face life boldly. They look at life with open eyes and force it with an open mind. In one of her stories contained in “The Miracle and Other Stories” entitled “I Want…” the female protagonist is:
“a daughter of 24 and not married”(The Miracle and Other Stories:35)
She wishes to assert her individualistic self by trying to put forth, though not really, her wishes and desires, which her parents simply ignore. Every time the match is decided the protagonist feels that one factor has been entirely overlooked and that is “me” (36) as she comments “as if I had no shape of my own .As if I was capable of taking any shape” (37).Time and again when a match is about to be decided she says-
“the woman in me was outraged and protested, I crushed her. She had no place there. None at all”(37)
The protagonist of this story named Alka is never allowed to be a child. The patriarchal set up in which Alka is reared, dwarfs her growth. She is helpless as she has no other option but to marry a partner of her parent’s choice, having turned to be twenty seven now. She herself bemoans, “..27. Time to forget dreams and compromise for security” (42)
As the priorities are being fixed by her would-be husband, she feels like yelling at the top of her voice-
“I want…I want…I want…What about me? My silence was such a loud cry of indignation. I was surprised he couldn’t hear me. But I had an odd feeling he would never hear me” (40)
She feels that thus-“No one has ever asked me what I wanted” (40) When her life was being handed over to a man-a so called husband she thought “My own wants began to dwindle. They were too insubstantial. (42) How had she wished to convey her silent rebellion to her parents and tell about her choice of a partner, the shadow of whom she had nurtured in her bold feminine psyche: “A man who hears my voice when I speak. Who understands me even when I don’t”. (42) But finally, she has to take a step of conformity as she ‘surrendered’ her ‘illusions and embraced reality’. (42) On the social level, the women like Alka have been struggling since ages to assert themselves but are still being heckled by their male counterparts and forced to remain silent. The norms of society, which compel them to lead a pragmatic formal life, are unacceptable to them. Since they are neither in a position to conform nor confront, they suffer from an existentialist dilemma. As K. Horny observes:
“We cannot suppress or eliminate essential parts of ourselves without becoming estranged from ourselves… The person simply becomes oblivious to what he really is. The person loses interest in life because it is not he who lives it; he cannot make decisions because he does not know what he really wants; if difficulties mount, he may be pervaded by a sense of unreality – an accentuated expression of his permanent condition of being unreal to himself.”(Our Inner Conflict:111)
Staying within the ambit of cultural traditions and social norms fixed by society, Deshpande’s women try to resolve their inner conflicts by meeting hassles with resolution and negotiation. Deshpande once remarked-
“It is necessary for women to live within relationships. But if the rules are rigidly laid that as a wife or mother you do this and no further, then one becomes unhappy”(A Critical Spectrum:236)
Deshpande’s women are no doubt independent, bold and courageous who try to revert the traditional model, though in the process, they may have to pass through a tormenting phase of existentialist dilemma, self alienation, confront indignities and frustrations. “The Awakening”, another short story by Deshpande, tells about a girl ,again Alka, who has to sacrifice her studies in order to rear her father, mother and a number of brothers and sisters. She is utterly disgruntled by the fact that her father had been a nincompoop all through his life, who but for adding to the population, had not done anything worthwhile. So embittered does she feel towards his father that she says- “I can’t forgive him for being what he is; I’ll never forgive him” (The Miracle and Short Stories:21) Even the words of praise uttered by her father towards her, strike her as an arrow making a deep hole somewhere in her heart as she openly retorts -
“You know I have to give up studies…You know you have ruined my life” (21)
She says that she is 17 and feels herself to be “a million unfulfilled dreams old” (21)Her agonized self bleeds when she tries to escape into reverie and think-
“I do know what I want. I want to go to college. Attend lectures and take down notes. And read and read. Pass exams with distinctions, go abroad for further studies. Come back and take up job. Put up my hair and wear glasses and crisp ironed saris like the girl I see on the bus stop every day. Marry (what kind of a man? the face is a blur) and never quarrel with only a curtain between us and the children. And live in a house with a room of my own…”(23-24)
Her bitterness towards her father, who could not but arrange a ‘room’ for them all through his life, is exhibited once again as she asks her mother - “How could you have married Baba and got into this mess?” (22) The agony she is foreseeing for herself, she does not what her sister Rekha to suffer the same. She loses her normal self when Rekha’s match fixing is going on as she does not want her mother’s history to be repeated through her sister .She tries to arouse her sister from blind compliance to her parents orders who are in no position to find anything better for her than the hell she is already living in .She speaks to her sister thus:
“Look at the kind of husbands they are trying to get for you. All are the same sort. All clerks. And you’ll marry one of them and live in another chawl like this all your life and have three or four children. Like mother. And one day they’ll become clerks too”. (23)
Madhu, the protagonist of “Madhu”, another short story by Deshpande is a teenager who is modern in her looks as well as in her thoughts. She dresses up like a boy. But unfortunately she is not allowed to be a boy and never given the freedom which a boy normally gets in this patriarchal set up. She knows there are “lots of things” she “can’t decide”. (46) Hence she turns “Impertinent, casual, careless, impatient, intolerant to her parents”(46) She knows his brother is lucky in every way as he is never questioned and is free to move and do anything at his own will. She feels –
“Vinay is lucky. I have to face this how, what, where, when every day of my life. It’s too boring”. (46)
But despite her outward manly posture and rebellious attitude towards her ‘orthodox’ parents, she is aware of the fact that she is a girl after all and has to bow in front of the family needs as and when required. She confesses-
“When I was a kid, if I wanted something very badly I used to tell myself, I’ll sacrifice something I like very much and may be I’ll get the other thing” (52)
Though in the women of Deshpande conformity over powers confrontation but dissidence persists as Alan Sinfield aptly puts it thus-
“Dissidence I take to imply refusal of an aspect of the dominant, without prejudicing an outcome. This may sound like a weaker claim, but I believe it is actually stronger in so far it posits a field necessary for continuing contest…”(Faultlines:48-49)
Thus, most of these female characters are regenerative struggling with forces that condition their growth in a patriarchal, male dominated Indian society. They come into conflict with society as their individualism asserts itself heavily. They undergo the ‘'terror of facing single handed the ferocious assaults of existence”(Novels of Anita Desai:167)
Still despite all calamities, anxieties and frustrations, life should be continued, they feel. Deshpande’s woman is compelled to make a choice between death and life-in-death, have the guts to challenge their male counterparts but without a frown.
Works Cited
Christ, P. Carol. “Diving deep and Surfacing”, Women Writers In Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Deshpande, Shashi. The Miracle and Other Stories. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1986.(Subsequent references are to this edition).
Deshpande, Shashi. A Critical Spectrum. Mohan, T.M.J. Indra (Ed.) Delhi. Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd, 2004.
K. Bhatnagar, Manmohan & Rajeshwar, M. The Novels of Anita Desai-A Critical Study. (New Delhi. Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd). 2000.
K. Horney. Our Inner Conflict. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1946.
Prasad, Amar Nath & Paul, S.K. (Ed.) “Feminism In Indian Writing In English”. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006.
Ray, K. Mohit & Kundu, Rama. (Ed.) Studies in Women Writers in English. Delhi. Atlantic Publishers &Distributors (P) Ltd, 2005.
Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. London. Oxford University Press, 1992.
Walters, Margaret. Feminism: A Very Short Introduction. London. Oxford University Press, 2005.