Reflection of Gander Biasness in Shashi Deshpande’s ‘The Dark Holds No Terrors’

Abstract

“The treatment of a person or particular group of people differently, in a way that is worse than the way people are usually treated:” Literature is a true expression of life through the medium of language. Its success lies in amalgamation of both ability and morality in such a striking way that art, in the long run, becomes the thought. The Indian English Women Novelists enhanced Indian English fiction through female awareness. Shashi Deshpande is one of the renowned women novelists whose novels bring into light a realistic and influensive demonstration of Indian women’s status in the broader societal context. The Dark Holds No Terror explores the trauma of a middleclass working women who has become a trap in the male dominated society. Women were treated as second class citizens were assigned their due place in the novel The Dark Holds No Terrors. In modern Indian fiction the credit of representing the “silent voice” of woman goes to Shashi Deshpande. She unfolds the true picture of educated women, her condition in the society. Deshpande’s novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors, brings out the efforts of a female in a family where a male child is preferred to a female child. The novel reveals how the insensitive attitude of the family towards a female can drive her into a psychiatric state of mind. The central character of the novel is Saru who experiences the lack of interest of her mother and feels guilty herself because, the guilt of mothers’ death, her own marriage and her thinking about her husband. He is drowned at the age of seven. Her mother preferred her brother and she is always neglected. Simone de Beauvoir once said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature which is described as feminine". The present paper is aimed to discuss the Feministic Perspective in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors.