Monday, 25 March 2019
Sunday, 17 March 2019
Short Story: 'Girls' from Yuvakatha
Girls is a short story written by Mrinal Pande
1. Eight years old narrator
The story is told from the viewpoint of eight years old girl. His father is a kind man and he wants to educate his daughters. The narrator's mother, Lali, has three daughters and is expecting a fourth child, fervently hoping that it is a boy so that she will be rid of the nuisance of going through another pregnancy. Lali, the narrator and her sisters go to Nani's house for the last month of Pregnancy.
2. Inferior position
The narrator overhears her aunt complaining in whispers to her mother of the problems she has to endure as a woman. Such incidents leave a lasting impact on the already insecure mind of the narrator who is curious to know why the elders consider women and girls to be inferior. Her innocent curiosity greatly angers lali, Nani and the others.
3.The story ends with the celebration of Chaitya Shukla Ashtami, a Hindu Holiday when Young girls are worshipped as incarnations of Devi, or the divine feminine spirit. Part of the celebration involves all the girls wearing a red tikka on their foreheads, but the narrator refuses.
"Why pretend to worship girls on one day, when you hate them on all the others"
The narrator strongly shows her anger in the end against the male dominating system of society.
Criticism: Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness
Elaine Showalter was born in 1941 and has worked as a professor of English at Princeton University. Showalter's work was a major contribution to the project of feminist criticism. Her article 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness' was first published in 'Critical Inquiry' in 1981. She finds Feminist Criticism no more unified but more adventurous in assimilating and engaging with theory.
In the beginning of the article Elaine Showalter talks about the two modes of feminist literary Criticism.
i) Righteous, angry and admonitory compared to the Old Testament
ii) Disinterested seeking the grace of imagination compared to the New Testament.
The well known critic Geoffrey Hartman tells that all criticism is in wilderness. It is also observed that the feminist literally criticism appeared more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school. Black Critics protest the 'massive silence' of the feminist criticism regarding the black and also the third world women writers and call for the black feminist aesthetic that would deal with both the racial and sexual politics.
All the above observation suggest that feminism is a vague term and feminist criticism includes numberless ideologies. One of the chief quality of feminist criticism is openness to all outside factors.
Feminist Critics like Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Riche, Marguerite Duras are advocates of the anti-theoretical position in feminist criticism.
There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.The first is ideological; it is concerned with the feminist as a reader and it offers feminist reading of text which considered the images and stereotypes of women in literature. The second mode of feminist Criticism is engendered by the study of women as writers and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres and structures of writing by women.
Gynocritics
Showalter gives new critical term 'Gynocritics' and says that unlike the feminist critique, Gynocritics offer many theoretical opportunities. All feminist criticism in some sense revisionist, question in the adequacy of accepted conceptual structures. Patrician Meyer Spacks was the first academic critic to notice the shift from Androcentric to a Gynocentric feminist criticism.
Four models of difference:
i) Biological
ii) Linguistic
iii) Psychoanalytic
iv) Cultural
Each model is an effort to define and differentiate the qualities of the woman writer and her text. Each model is also offers a school of Gynocritics feminist criticism with its own favourite texts, styles and methods.
Novel: The Great Gatsby
i) Thriller novel
The Great Gatsby is most popular thriller novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 20th century many literary forms developed and old forms were modified. In modern times, new literature known as popular literature emerged. The thriller falls under the category of popular literature. It essentially include the elements of suspense and romance. The thriller novel thrills reader through its content. The hero of Great Gatsby is romantic by nature. He leads the life of 'eat, drink and be merry'. He is fond of giving parties not only to his friends and relatives but also to the strangers.
ii) Love Triangle
The central theme of the novel is love triangle in which Tom Buchanan is the husband, Daisy Buchanan is the wife and Jay Gatsy is the outsider. The story revolves around these three characters. Jay identifies himself as the old lover of Daisy and claims that she is his first and true love. On the other hand Tom develops an extra marital relationship with Myrtle Wilson , The wife of George Wilson. Though Tom loved Daisy very much, he kept myrtle as his mistress. The novel reflects loose moral standards of the American society.
iii) Narrator
Nick Caraway is one of the major character of the novel. He is the narrator character as we know the entire story through him. He is the young bachelor from a Patrician mid-Western. He belonged to the wealthy family but he had very modest living.Daisy Buchanan the heroine of the novel, was Nick's second cousin once removed. Nick becomes the next door neighbour of Jay Gatsby and he also proves to be the well wisher of Jay Gatsby. He narrates the thrilling life story of Jay Gatsby with a neutral attitude. Daisy's friend Jordan was attracted to Nick and the affair begins between the two but Nick predicts the relationship as a superficial one.
"He is a bootlegger," said the young lady, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers"
This is the sentence spoken by one of the lady in the party of James Gatsby. She reveals the true identity of James by saying that he is is a bootlegger. She knows that Gatsby was connected to the underworld activities. The references suggested that the entire life of Gatsby was connected to sensuous pleasures.
iv) Failure in love
"Nothing happened," I said vainly. "I wailed, and about 4 o'clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light."
James wanting to revive his past love speaks to Nick. Hence, he came to long island and bought a house in West Egg not very far from the Buchanans' at a visible distance. He desperately longed for getting back the love of Daisy for him. He wanted to see her face at the window of his house but did not succeed. The present reference shows Jay's intensity of love feeling for Daisy. These love feelings are marked with a sense of disappointment.
Saturday, 16 March 2019
Poem: Daddy by Sylvia Plath
When we read the title of the poem, then the first thought came in our mind is love between Daddy and Daughter. But this poem is not about the love but hatred. Sylvia Plath represented her hatred for daddy through this poem.
The question came in our mind is that why she needs to write such poem?, Why she needs to destroy her relationship with her dad?
The answer to this question is difficult to understand. She has given many reasons but mostly all believes that because of her mental instability she wrote such piece of work. Otherwise there is nothing cruel in the relationship between her and her dad.
1. Male Domination
The poem is very strong expression of resentment against the male domination and also the violence of all kinds for which man is responsible. 'Daddy' is a symbol of male dominating society. This is also a symbol of general agents and forces like science and reason, violence and war, the German and their Hitler, and all other inhuman agents. Thereby the speaker is a symbol of female and creative force.
2. Psychological point of view
This poem can be analyse from psychological point of view. Sylvia Plath is suffering from neurotic anger. Though it is slightly autobiographical, the poem must be interpreted symbolically and psychologically. From the very beginning to the end, Sylvia keeps on attacking on her daddy through words. There is no stronger weapon in the world than our words.
"You, "Black Shoe", I have had to kill you"
The speaker wants to kill her dad, she lived for thirty years, poor and white, as in the Nazi concentration camps of the second world war. She is not able to breathe or express her pain. Her tongue is struck in her jaw. She is always scared of daddy or the German images of terror. She feels she is descendant of a gypsy ancestress. She is afraid of the neat Moustache like that of Hitler, and the Aryan eye. She thinks that her daddy had a brutish black heart
3. Mental Death not Physical
The speaker's daddy is already died when she was ten years old. But she wanted to kill him again and throw him out of her mind. She also tried to die herself, but they prevented her. She made a model of her daddy and killed it. She had killed him and his vampire that drank her blood for seven years. The worst thing she did is calling him a Bastard.
4. Extremity of anger
The entire tone of the poem is extremity of anger. This signifies that it is not common with a normal person in real life. The poem does not literally express the reality alone: it is the relieving anger and frustration in the form of poetic expression. In reality Plath's father loved her very much when she was a child. So her death was always a shock to her. But while she felt tortured without her father, she also felt suppressed by her father's dominating image.
5. Female protest
The female speaker represents the creative force and she is angry with the destructive forces symbolised by he daddy. The speaker says, " I'm trough", meaning "I, m satisfied" at the end. She is relieved.
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