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First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Emptiness: Identity Formation in Shashi Deshpande's Novels

Within India the position of middle-class women is constructed and broadcast as enviable, given that these women enjoy leisure and material comforts denied to so many around them. As Rosemary Marangoly George contends, women in this class are put on display as symbols of a new independent nation able to afford luxurious consumption, but their individual experiences and sense of fulfillment do not match this picture (170). Many English-language female novelists from India delineate the emptiness that is experienced by middle-class women after they marry. In my estimation, Shashi Deshpande is creating a body of feminist literature that is powerfully evocative and memorably authentic. Deshpande, whose books are finally available in America, 1 explores in great psychological depth the oppression of women by patriarchal society and women's own complicity in their oppression. Her novels capture middle-class Hindu women's daily emotional battles with great vividness and without resorting to easy answers (Menon 265; R.S. Sharma 212). For instance, in That Long Silence we hear the contradictory messages and memories of a "sane housewife": a woman, Jaya, who is so bored that she actually wishes she were going mad, so that she could escape the endless routine of being her extended family's organizer and comforter. Jaya's stream of consciousness enables the reader to encounter oppression in a variety of contexts. We see how a sincere desire to honor family obligations can lead to an emptying of the self when those obligations threaten to become the sole purpose of that self. The following two passages exemplify her growing awareness that the self is impoverished when defined solely in terms of familial obligations: