The Construction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Marital Relationship in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence

Abstract

Over the years, Indian English Fiction has entered a new phase of an incomparable portrayal of the New Indian woman who is not always happy with the constraining cultural, natural, and sexual duties allocated to her by patriarchal India's unconscious dawn. In her parental house, the woman may be a daughter or sister, and in her husband's family, she can be a wife and mother. She will also be required to perform a professional role. Above all, Nature gave her a sex-based position in which she is naturally limited. Divided between her natural and cultural roles, a woman can be only a daughter, sister, wife, or mother but never her real ‘she’. She wants the freedom to think and live for herself as a human being and liberation from her womanhood. She sometimes escapes her culture-bound duties since there is no way out of her nature-bound responsibilities, particularly her function as a procreator and sexual partner.