Research
Shashi Deshpandes That Long Silence Novel of Restoring Conjugal Life
Shashi Deshpande (1938-), as an award winning feminist writer, focuses on the tortures and sufferings of middle-class Indian women who are educated, sensitive and are aware of their legal, social and conjugal rights. She highlights the domestic conflict between wife and husband operating at the emotional, intellectual and sexual levels. The novelist, being fully aware of the patriarchal system of Indian culture, does not plea for any kind of conflict or aggressiveness between man and woman; husband and wife. There is an old but true maxim that silence, tolerance, sufferance is golden and though the novel is in the feminist framework, the novelist does not cross the limits of Indian socio-cultural authenticity. That Long Silence is essentially a domestic novel. Shashi Deshpande has superbly picturized the ins and outs of a conjugal life. The novel endeavors in launching peace between the pained, sensitive wife and the egoistic and selfish husband. Lack of proper communiqué between them is the real culprit. And it is seen that when Jaya decides to communicate with her husband, the gloomy silence is broken. Deshpande’s approach of feminism is not aggressive and emotional as the western writers have. Indian feminist activist do not accept a still attitude towards the males as their western counterparts do. They are alike cultureoriented and gender-oriented.
John Updikes of the Farm Novel of Mother Son Relationship
Since John Updike (1932-2009) is an interpreter of the spiritual hollowness of contemporary America and gives a structure to the great American chaos through his novels especially Of the Farm, one hopes that his books are the source of inspiration for generations to come. Like all the great writers of the world, Updike meditates on common place but elemental themes, and magnifies, transmutes and patterns them into a paradigm of life, and turn into enduring works of art. Updike, like Melville and Norman Mailer, began writing fiction in his mid-twenties. Melville was led to withdraw into silence because of the hostile criticism meted out to his books. The same thing happened to Updike as a novelist and his works. It is not that Updike’s novels have not been disparagingly dismissed and out rightly rejected. But at the same time they have also received high critical commendation that has given him impulse and encouragement to produce book after book, almost over sixty in number in fifty years. In his novel, Of the Farm (1965), Updike brings to the foreground a mother-son relationship through which the theme of freedom, not only personal freedom but also the recognition of privilege of others, is subtly explored.
