The Self -Effacing Role of Woman in Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Short Stories

Abstract

Human civilization is divided into two parts- Man and Woman. Woman occupies nearly half of the civilization. Hence, woman and her travails, predicaments, turbulences have become the core part of Indian Writing in English in the hands of writers like Nayantara Sehegal, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande ,Jai Nimbkar and so on. Indian society, being a male-ordained society causes the self-effacing portrayal of woman in literature. Shashi Deshpande, the most widely acclaimed Indian woman writer in English majorly probes into woman’s issues through her novels and short stories. The present paper is a modest attempt to analyze the image of woman in a self-denial mode as reflected in some of her short stories. The paper aims at studying the four selected short stories from her short story collection, The Intrusion and Other Stories (1993), which deals with a variety of women with their both bashful and forceful appearances. The First Lady depicts a story of a woman, who is agreed with her husband’s decision to adopt a celibate lifestyle on the ground that the purpose of sex i.e. ‘procreation’ is served. Being a wife of a political leader, she desires to be in her withdrawn status, as she is fed up with wearing masks in different occasions. The Intrusion, a title story deals with a newly married woman, whose self respect is dishonored by the appalling treatment by her husband, whom she thinks as an intruder. The Wall is Safer reflects a woman, who is willing to resign into isolation and rejoices at the wall as a symbol of safety. The woman in Death of Child appears to be little different comparing to the previous three female characters. Her being uninhibited while taking a decision of abortion finally makes her diffident and weary of herself. Thus, Shashi Deshpande emphasizes the self-effacing role of female protagonists in the short stories under study in a trenchant manner.