A Look At Repression English Literature Essay

Ladies Coupe: A novel in parts narrates the tale of six women who meet purely by chance on a short train journey. It traces the lives of the six women as they travel in the ladies compartment. The stories they relate help the protagonists Akhilandeswari to find resolutions for the tormenting questions that taunt her and enable her to establish her true identity. The other five women belong to different age groups and classes of the society. Their individual struggle against the myriad repressive forces instills in Akhila a sense of courage and clarity in action.

The repressive forces in their multiple manifestations as patriarchal attitudes, sexual politics and sexual stereotyping impose a restriction on women’s individuality and leads to their marginalization which is effectuated by traditional and cultural institutions. Feminist perspective as a woman centered theory provides strategies for change. As such the feminist principle is an “uncompromising pledge” and an antidote to all types of exploitation and repression of women. The fundamental goal of feminist perspective, according to Maggie Humm, is “…to understand women’s oppression in terms of race, gender, class and sexual preference and how to change it.” (Maggie, x)

The personality of woman has been sought to be damaged and distorted and her very status as human being has brought down under the overwhelming male – domination. Thus, a woman who protests against her depersonalization and annihilation and who walks out of home to live and to be human are made aware of the futility of her actions. Clearly, the forces of cultural and social inculcations are too strong to be completely overcome. We find the Indian women being torn between individual desires and societal expectations.

In the tradition bound society like our Indian society, it is no wonder that writers like Anita Nair has reflected such types of repression in her novels. The problem of repression faced by women varies according to their social, cultural and economic status. The tradition bound Indian society considered the very birth of girls a curse and rearing a girl child is more expensive and risky than a male child, so people dreaded the very birth of girls.

The girls have to undergo a lot of difficulties in this chauvinistic society, after their difficult entry into this world. Discrimination was shown even in education. People firmly believe that a girl’s place is only at home, so they were reluctant to give her education. Even when she was educated, she was trained only in domestic traits. This is because a girl is viewed only as wife and a mother. Therefore, the one and only idea instituted in her mind, right from her birth was to ‘please the male’. This becomes the soul purpose of her life. So, even right from her birth the repressive problems are faced by women.

In Ladies Coupe, Anita Nair delineates various women characters and provides a macro picture of women’s society. Janaki got married at the age of eighteen. As a girl of eighteen, she is not matured enough to know the meaning of marriage and what to expect of marriage. Janaki accommodates her body and mind to marriage and what it had to offer her in life. She did not live for her own self; she lived for her husband.

Janaki didn’t know what to expect of marriage. All through her girlhood, marriage was a destination she was being groomed for. She wasn’t expected to know what it really meant to be married, and neither was she curious about it. It would come to her as it had to her mother. (LC 25)

As a wife in the patriarchal society, Janaki finds her husband a loving and protecting one in the initial of her life. She is not matured enough to understand her suppressed condition in the patriarchal society. She remembers the words of her mother, “He is your husband and you must accept whatever he does” (LC 25). They have a son and daughter-in-law. They were branded as the ‘golden couple’ and were exemplary perfect parents. As she got married at a very early age, she doesn’t even know that she is suppressed in the bond of marriage. Only at the age of forty-five, she realized that all her desires are oppressed. But, Janaki resents her husband’s overbearing nature over their son and revolts against it. She questions his right to control their son and slowly she begins to hate her husband’s actions. Janaki could not unlearn what patriarchy had instituted in her. Even the initial revulsion of the physical act in the beginning of her married life, turns into an acceptance of the “… pleasures hidden in rituals of togetherness…” (26). She is confined in the bondage of a wife, mother and most importantly the woman that patriarchy has moulded into her.

Marriage life is the next stage of repression. After marriage, a girl becomes a woman and she has various roles to perform. She has to play the roles of a daughter – in – law, wife, mother and mother – in – law. Of all the roles mentioned here, the most difficult roles are a woman as daughter-in- law and wife. They could never come out of tradition. The inborn feminine traits of the traditional never allowed them to mould away from tradition. They never opposed or questioned their men folk. Instead, they suppress all their emotions and desires and are being controlled by the repressive forces. Janaki, an elderly and wise woman, comes out with a meaning of life that all women are prone to:

I am a woman who has always been looked after. First there was my father and my brothers; then my husband. When my husband is gone, there will be my son, waiting to take from where his father let off. Women like me end up being fragile. Our men treat us like princesses. And because of that we look down upon women who are strong and who can cope by themselves. I believe in that old cliché that a home was a woman’s kingdom. I worked hard to preserve mine… and then suddenly one day it didn’t matter anymore. My home ceased to interest me, none of the beliefs I had built my life around had any meaning. I thought if I were to lose it all, I would cope. If I ever became alone I would manage perfectly. I was confident about that. I think I was tired of being this fragile creature… Now I know that even if I can cope it wouldn’t be the same if he wasn’t there with me. (22-23)

Evelyn Cunningham says that ‘the women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors.’ They even felt glorified in their sufferings, and if any women had rebellious attitude, the people around them curbed that in the beginning itself. Women were brainwashed right from their birth to be polite, submissive and obedient. She was expected to be chaste and faithful even when her husband was unfaithful.

It is not only these illiterate home birds who were afraid to rebel against tyranny and exploitations but even the educated house wives stuck firmly to the traditional role. Such women inspite of their education considered suffering in their husband’s place was far better than leading a lonely life.

Margaret Shanthi, is one of the important characters in the novel Ladies Coupe novel. She is a chemistry teacher by profession is married to Ebenezer Paulraj, the principal of the school she worked in. He was a pompous self-opinionated individual who successfully destroyed Margaret’s self-confidence by bullying her always and then treating her as a house keeper and a cook. She goes through many physical, mental and spiritual crises. Their marriage had a fairy tale like charm initially which slowly disintegrates when Margaret begins to see the true nature of Ebe. He loved her but she dare have no individuality. Margaret initially is the little girl who says yes to whatever he says and is out to please him always. Margaret’s husband wanted her to become a docile wife. “This is the life of the women to look after her home, her husband and her children and give them food she has cooked with her own hands” (LC 40). She leads a life of obscurity in some corner of the house all the time pretending to be satisfied and happy. As Kamala Das says in her poem The Suicide,

But

I must pose

I must pretend

I must act the role of a happy woman

Happy wife. (227)

She is forced to pursue B.Ed though her real interest is to do Ph.D. Ebe insists and forces her to abort their first child which ultimately is the last straw for Margaret. She sees through his dual nature of pretentious politeness and inner cruelty. His ridiculous theories, derisive contempt of her way of house keeping and cooking and collection of defacing books with ugly drawings only intensifies Margaret’s hatred. She hates her husband whom she once adorned and worshipped because her dreams were broken and she comes crashing down to reality, when she is forced to abort her first pregnancy. Gnawed by indecision, guilt and pain, she allows herself to be coerced into it. She sees another side of her husband when after her abortion, a week later, he says: “I love it when you call me Ebe… I like you like this… unstained and clean… I never want you to change. I want you to remain like this all your life” (LC 111). Whenever she tried to share her feelings with her mother she is advised in turn: …and like I have said many times before, it is a woman’s responsibility to keep the marriage happy. Men have so many pre occupations that they might not have the time or inclination to keep the wheels of a marriage oiled (112).

Ebe became more and more over bearing after he becomes the principle of a school. He begins to nag her and find fault in her house keeping and cooking. She begins to hate him. Margaret’s family cannot accept the idea of a divorce and though she feels stifled in her marriage she continues living with Ebe. Her only consolation is food and she puts on weight. His dual nature, artificial politeness and warmth and inner cruelty; his ego, his defacing books with ugly drawings, his various theories and his constant derisive contempt of her, make her suffer intensely.

I, Margaret Shanthi did it with the sole desire for revenge. To erode his self-esteem and shake the very foundations of his being. To rid this world of a creature who if allowed to remain the way he was, slim, lithe and arrogant, would continue to harvest sorrow with a single-minded joy. (LC 96)

Repeatedly discouraged by her mother and the fear of the stigma of divorce, she stops short of openly asking questions that torment her mind and soul: “What about me? Don’t I have a right to have any expectations of him? Don’t I work as hard as he does and more because I run the house as well…” (112).

Liberation is meaningful, if we do not confine women within the bonds of family. The marriage makes women submissive. This is one of the main repressive forces that every woman in the society is facing. Margaret Shanti is a good example of how women are repressed upon by male power. The powerlessness is like the colonized who fail to see and appreciate their true worth.

Societal expectations far outweigh personal needs and so Shanti negates herself again and again. From an ambitious and brilliant student who wants to chart out a career on her own, she becomes a dutiful wife to Ebenezer who rouses fear in everyone around him. She silences her aspirations in order to be what Ebenezer wants her to be. She decided to become a teacher instead of working on her decorate. She cut her hair short. She stopped going to church every Sunday, eating bhelpuri outside and finally agrees to abort her child though she knows that her religion forbids it. As usual, he takes the decisions and “I (Shanti) let his voice smooth away my fears. He was Ebe. My Ebe. He was right. He was always right” (LC 109). Shashi Deshpande, in her novel The Dark Holds No Terror, defines the lopsided gender equation within the context of urban marital relationships.

A wife must always be a few feet behind her husband. If he is an M.A., you should be a B.A… Women’s magazines will tell you that marriage should be an equal partnership. That’s nonsense. Rubbish. No partnership can ever be equal. It will always be unequal, but take care that it’s unequal in favor of your husband. (The Dark Holds No Terror 85)

The belief that existed in the past and continued to be fresh in the minds of the people was that the man should be the bread winner and woman the home maker in the family. It was the husband who slogs way at job or business, to give the family a decent way of living, fully confident that the wife at home would efficiently manage the house, also look after his parents and children, awaiting his return for a conjugal round of dinner. In the present day, the situation becomes different. Women now demand more space, the rights and freedom because they want to come out of the repressive forces. They are not ready to be submissive and meek as their mothers. The problem of violence against women is not new. Women in the context of Indian society have been victims of repression, torture, humiliation and exploitation. All were merely trying to seek fulfillment by playing the role of a devoted wife and a caring mother. Friedan writes,

For a woman, as for a man the need for self-fulfillment autonomy, self-realization, independence, individuality, self-actualization – is as important as the sexual need, with as serious consequences when it is thwarted. Women’s sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminism fulfillment ignores. (282)

Nair’s women suffer from a system of sex – role stereotyping and repression that exist under patriarchal social organizations. Of course, patriarchy, in its different forms, has tried in many ways to repress, debase and humiliate women especially through the images represented in cultural and traditional forms. “She is supposed only to listen, not to speak; only to suffer, not to shriek” (42).

In Ladies Coupe, Marikolanthu is the last one to narrate her story. She is a young girl and uneducated who is poorly dressed and lives in a tamed and controlled environment. She lives in a noisy psycho-social group and she is stressed by it. Hans Seyle, an endocrinologist says that ‘stress is the rate of wear and tear in the body.’ Her mother works as a cook at the Chettiar household. Her mother stopped her schoolings and allowed only her son’s to go for school. Marikolanthu was repeatedly warned by her mother because she was easily impressed by people: “…you give your heart too easily, child. They will break it into thousand pieces and leave it on the ground for others to trample into dust” (LC 216). On such occasions she had always teased her mother asking her if the “heart was a glass bangle” (LC 216). But her experience results in her realization of the value of her mother’s words. She says,

But you know what, the heart is a glass bangle. One careless moment and it is shattered. We know that, yet we continue to wear glass bangles. Each time they break, we buy new ones hoping that these will last longer than the others did. How silly we women are. We should wear bangles made of granite and turn hearts into the same.

When the girls are trained in the domestic affairs, the boys are expected to keep away from the domestic traits. Much discrimination are shown in the upbringing of boys and girls. In a male chauvinistic society like India, boys are given a long rope, while the girls are confined at home. Even the girls themselves never minded such discriminations. On the contrary they are well contended with their role.

Later Marikolanthu is employed as a domestic helper and also she has to look after Sujata akka’s son. She adores that kid but hates her own son Muthu who is born after a rape encounter with Murugesan so she resents the birth of her unwanted son. Her life revolves around the Chettiar household. She looks after the households and in the afternoons, she willingly obeys whenever Sujatha akka needs her for her physical fulfillment and whenever the master needs her for the same. When Sujatha akka learns about her husband’s affair, she rejects Marikolanthu and throws her out of the house. Marikolanthu leaves Kanchepuram and before that she mortgages her son Muthu for rupees five thousand at her rapist Murugesan’s looms. Later, there is a change in her heart when she sees her son lighting the pyre of the dead Murugesan. She decides to take care of her son Muthu.

Marikolanthu has to face the strains of life herself. She is a victim of repression, a virtual slave, the victim of men, of casteism and of innumerable social injustices. It is that gender bias and oppression of women emerges as a powerful theme of the novel. She is being repressed by Murugesan. The device he uses to control her is rape. She feels defiled and corrupt. She evokes our sympathy when she says,

In the distance, I heard the calls. Bogi! Bogi! The sparks would fly as the bonfire was set alight and the night would crackle with the sound of dried logs and twigs waking up. With my past, my future too had been torched alive. (LC 241)

Marikolunthu suffers extreme repression social, familial and financial. It is ultimately love that brings her on the right track where she will find happiness and fulfillment. Her struggle has been one of hate for herself and accommodating with humiliating relationships thereafter. Her resolve to bring up her child shows her forming in to a new character. The words of Marikolunthu could be quoted as an apt conclusion to the motif of the novel:

Women are strong. Woman can do everything as well as men. Women can do much more. But a woman has to seek the vein of strength in herself. It does not show itself naturally. (LC 210)

The female body becomes the site of violence in the case of the rape of Marikolanthu. Like the violence unleashed by the colonizer on the powerless colonized, she has to face physical repression and mental torture when left to fend for her. With his brute strength, Murugesan attacks her and she is left helpless. She is different from the other women in the coupe because her experiences are far more painful. The traditional image that a girl forms in her mind is to be submissive, committed, docile and tolerant so that she may prove herself an ideal woman not only for her husband but also for her father – in – law, mother – in – law and the other – in – laws.

The Brahmin heroine, Akhila, whose life has been taken out of her control, is a spinster, daughter, sister, aunt and the only provider of her family after the death of her father. Getting fed up with these multiple roles, she decides to go on a train journey away from family and responsibilities, a journey that will ultimately make her a different woman. In the ladies coupe compartment, she meets five other women each of whom has a story to tell. The stories are all an attempt to answer Akhhila’s problematic question. ‘Can a woman stay single and be happy at the same time?’ Akhila asks such a question because she is being suppressed by all the members of her family. She has never been allowed to live her own life. She questions her family members,

Why shouldn’t I live alone? I’m of able body and mind. I can look after myself. I earn reasonably well. Akhila paused when her voice chocked with tears, and asked me what my desires were or what my dreams are? Did anyone of you ever think of me as a woman? Someone who has needs and longings just like you do? (LC 206)

The protagonist Akhila loses her father at a very young age and since then she has been shouldering the responsibility of the entire family. She served as a clerk in the income tax department. When Akhila’s father died, the family responsibility falls on her fragile shoulders. The narrator elucidates: “When Akhila’s father died, two things happened: Sunday become just another day of the week and Akhila became the man of the family” (LC 75).

Manning the responsibility of the family begins to repress her desires. Even her mother does not care about her desires. They have never asked, “What about you? You’ve been the head of this family ever since Appa died. Don’t you want a husband, children, a home of your own?” (LC 77). Akhila wanted to lead her life with Hari who is younger than herself. But her desires have been repressed by the social norms. Akhila wished for once, someone would see her as a whole being. “What Akhila most desired in the world was to be her own person; in a place that was her own. To do as she pleased. To live as she chose with neither restraint nor fear of censure” (LC 201).

Akhila’s youthful days were spent bringing up her sister Padma and two brothers Narayan and Narsi. They are happily married and settled. She is seen as a bread winner and they continue to suppress her desires with their needs and demands. Akhila says “Don’t you think you should wait for your elder sister to get married before you think of a wife and a family?” (LC 77). Her selfish siblings were concerned only about their own well-being. They married and moved on in life without even bothering to think about Akhila’s future. Akhila has wasted away her precious youthful days and when she finally mustered the courage to make a ‘difference in life’; she was given a lot of advice by her siblings about the dangers of living alone as a spinster. Her sister Padma needed the financial support of Akhila to run the household. The brothers Narayan and Narsi were worried about society.

Narsi – it’s improper for a woman to live alone. What will society say? That your family has abandoned you. Besides, there will be a whole lot of questions that will pop up about your reputation. You know how people put two and two together and come up with six. Nalini’s family will be scandalized if they hear about this. Have you thought of how embarrassing my position will be? (Ladies Coupe 205)

Akhila’s brother tried to smoothen her ruffled feathers. He said that he owed his life to his sister. But he too was worried about Akhila’s decision to live alone. He said, “How will you cope? This is not a reflection on who you are. How can any woman cope alone? (206). Thus a patriarchal society did not approve o a woman’s decision to live alone without the protection of the men of the house, even if they financially depended on the women. Akhila saw the irony of the situation and later developed the succor to overcome such tyrannical systems.

Initially Akhila undertakes the journey to Kanyakumari as a form of escape. Akhila is placed in a situation of unfamiliarity and dislocation precisely because her struggle for identity should come out more clearly. What she hated most “…was not having an identity of her own. She was always an extension of someone else’s identity. Chandra’s daughter, Narayan’s Akka, Priya’s aunt… she wished for someone would see her as a whole being.

Akhila undertakes this journey as a form of escape, a desire to go away alone, a sense of excitement of being able to do something all by herself, not having to take permission, of taking an independent decision. She moves on to see what has never been seen, go where she has never gone before. Akhila’s journey begins with a sense of escape: “the smell of a railway platform at night fills Akhila with a sense of escape” (1).

Always the daughter, the sister, the aunt or the provider, she had no time to actualize herself, until one day she bought for herself a one-day ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. She is gloriously alone for the first time in her life and is determined to break free from all that her conservative Tamil Brahmin life had forced on her. Akhila had always “dreamt” of this “…eyes looking ahead. Of leaving. Of running away. Of pulling out. Of escaping”(1). Akhila has never done anything that she desired to, but only what she was expected to do. But now she has a strong desire to be free and want to experience the real happiness of freedom. She decides to go the land’s end to make a new beginning of experiencing the real meaning of freedom. And we are introduced to Akhila as “… that sort of a woman… (who) does what is expected of her…”(1).

In their minds Akhila has ceased to be a woman and had already metamorphosed into a spinster. Akhila is a woman who is throbbing with life, vitality and sexuality. All these are suppressed to cater to the needs of her family. Akhila understands that matrimony is a patriarchal practice which sanctions men power to overpower woman. All the women characters in Ladies Coupe have been affected in one way or other because of patriarchal system. It provides an insight into emotional challenges of each of the women overcame in their life. It is the emotional outburst of the deprived women that Akhila has tried to portray. Women hesitate to take decision on their own and they think marriage is the ultimate aim of their life and pleasing their husband is a main concern of women. In the due course, they failed to create identity of their own. The self abnegation of women goes unrecognized in a patriarchal society and this leads to the self abasement of women’s importance in society. A woman in the post independence era is aware of the discrimination she has to face, the sexual harassment and violence which she explores in the male dominated society.

Nair discusses marital rape perpetrated by the modern Indian male in her novels. The restrictions prevalent in Indian family prevent the Indian girls from youthful love before marriage. Girls are generally not allowed to mix with boys during their adolescence. The girl’s feelings are not shown as they are rarely expressed in real life. It is common for all girls in the middle class to express their love or make decisions. As the girls are confined at home the most part of their ‘pleasing others’ becomes their prime duty at home. Shashi Deshpande rightly judges that, “everything in girl’s life, it seemed was shaped to that single purpose of pleasing a male” (79).

The novel Mistress discusses the sexual violence and the repressive power of Shyam in the marital relationship of Shyam and Radha. This novel revolves around the life of Radha, Shyam and their morbid marriage against the backdrop of the narratives of Radha’s uncle Koman, who is a Kathakali exponent. Her unhappy situation in the ill – matched marriage drives her into the arms of Chris, an American writer. The novel culminates in Radha finding her own voice and deciding to go against the repressive force of her husband.

The most remarkable part of the novel is the characterization of Shyam, which is a perfect mould of a modern, educated, tech – savvy Indian male who finds it hard to shed his traditional role as a man. Nair has given Shyam his own voice through his first person narrative and thereby taking the reader straight into his mind. Shyam is a twenty first century male through and through. He is extremely successful in his business, which is his undoing in a sense. He is never reluctant to turn any opportunity into a money making venture. His only failure perhaps is his inability to understand his wife and treat her as an individual who has a mind for her own. To him, Radha is another possession, which he is proud of, as he is of his business ventures. He often refers to her as ‘My Radha’ (90) as if to affirm his ownership.

Simone de Beauvoir speaks about this masculine trait in The Second Sex:

…Subordinated economically and socially to her husband, the good wife is the man’s most precious treasure. She belongs to him so profoundly that she partakes the same essence as he; she has his name, his gods, and he is responsible for her. He calls her his ‘better – half’. He takes pride in his wife as he does in his house, his lands, his flocks, and his wealth and sometimes even more; through her he displays his power before the world; she is his measure and his earthly portion. (207)

Shyam’s idea of marriage is to keep a pretty wife, indulge in her wishful fancies and make her dependent on him. He does not want an assertive woman as a wife. Radha and Shyam are incompatible in many ways and Radha feels suffocated by her marriage. She compares herself to the butterfly which can be taken as a good example of repression.

His arms pins me to the bed. His bed. I think that for Shyam, I am a possession. A much cherished possession. That is my role in his life. He doesn’t want an equal; what he wants is a mistress. Someone to indulge and someone to indulge him with feminine wiles… I think of the butterfly I caught and pinned to a board when it was still alive, its wings spread so as to display the markings, oblivious that somewhere within, a little heart beat, yearning to fly. I am that butterfly now. (Mistress 87)

Feminism voices the new woman’s demand to be treated as an equal human being, rather than a piece of furniture meant for the convenience of man. The repression of woman is expressed well in the novels of women writers in all its intensity. Shyam wanted to prove that he is the husband and he has complete right over his wife’s body whether she welcomes the intrusion or not. Shyam’s perpetrate acts of sexual violence leaves a deep scar on Radha, where as, he is quite satisfied with what he has done without any remorse. He is blind in his pursuit and does not care for Radha’s feelings. His only aim is to bring her under control by suppressing her desires and emotions.

The key to happiness in marriage is the ability to endure and go on. But there are many marriages where women are dominated by their husbands and do not find freedom and space in their marital life. There is a new breed of women who is questioning the very institution of marriage and the double standards of judgment applied to women and men. Panduranga Rao rightly admires that,

Given the limitations of tradition and its inhibitive influence one cannot but admire the guts of these women who have taken it upon themselves to question and question logically what comes to be accepted as a divine fiat in matters of man-woman relationship and related areas. (Ra0 75)

For Shyam, Radha is his proud possession and the marriage between Shyam and Radha fails to be a marriage of minds or hearts. In place of an understanding and meaningful relationship that marriage can be, Shyam wants an unequal relationship that would make Radha his proud possession so the marriage between Shyam and Radha is not a marriage of minds or hearts. Radha has no expectations from the institutions of marriage. Shyam always does things to maintain his prestige. He says “I am a survivor everyday and in every way. I’m getting better and better” (160). This attitude makes Radha uneasy. She is escorted everywhere and has little freedom to do anything on her own. All her desires and emotions were totally repressed. In her relationship with Shyam she feels,

I think that for Shyam, I am a possession. A much cherished possession. That is my role in his life. He doesn’t want an equal; what he wants is a mistress. Someone to indulge and someone to indulge him with feminine wiles. (Mistress 153)

She is blamed always for being disorderly. She never arranged books in the shelf properly. There is a lack of meaningful communication between them which leads to a rift in their relationship. However, Shyam admires Radha in every way and loves her very much. Radha says “Shyam likes to think of me prettying myself for him. He prefers a glossy, silly wife to a homely, practical one. Glossy, silly wives are malleable” (Mistress 61).

She is kept at home like a bird in the cage unable to exhibit her talents. When he prevents her from going to the match factory, a clash occurs again between them. Radha is also thwarted from taking tuitions in a primary school. Shyam’s domination over her prevents her from making a choice of her own. This kind of domination makes her feel suffocated and she asks him,

Don’t I have a right to an opinion? I am your wife. Your wife, do you hear me? But you treat me as if I am a kept woman. A bloody mistress to fulfill your sexual needs and with no rights… What is right? Visits to beauty parlor and the tailor’s? Washing the leaves of the house plants and dusting the curios? This is not how I expected to live my life. This is not what I want from life… (Mistress 73)

According to Radha’s father, marriage is just a convenient contract to lead a comfortable life. It was on this basis that they were married. Radha is honest and confess her previous relationship to Shyam on the very day of their marriage. Though Radha does not know it, her father has given all his property to Shyam in the name of marriage as compensation. Her father offered money to Shyam to marry her. In the name of authority and love Shyam makes Radha his slave and subordinate.

Even Shyam uses rape as a tool to repress her. The pain is so immense that she goes to a quite corner where she warps her arms around herself and cries loudly. Radha is overcome by a sense of helplessness and frustration with the physical repressive force of marital life.

I felt sore and bruised invaded and robbed. Is this rape, I asked myself again and again. Then I knew I couldn’t lie there any more. So I rose and went seeking a quiet corner where I could wrap my arms around myself and cry loudly. (Mistress 89)

Shyam is satisfied with his manly behavior. He believes that women should be made to feel like women and they should be controlled and put in their place. He says ‘My Radha’ (65) whenever he talks about her. But Radha tells him that he is wrong in his thinking when he has forces her into submission. She confesses that she can never be his possession and bow to his repressive attitude or his dominating behavior.

When Radha meets Chris, she finds her match because he shares her sensitivity and her taste for art and literature. As Shyam suspects Radha’s affair with Chris, he is consumed with jealousy. Shyam knows that he cannot reign over Radha’s mind and hence decides to reign over her body. Overcome by frustration and blinding anger, he forces himself on Radha, and offers an explanation himself.

The resentment I felt for being tolerated rather than loved, the yearning I had suffered, the loneliness of these years, all fused to become a consuming desire to posses her. To make her mine; To reach within and tear down that film of indifference that coated her eyes each time I took her in my arms (Mistress 163)

James Baker Miller says that the people won’t give up power. They will give up else first money, house, wife, children but not the repressive power. Patriarchy takes different forms, tries out many ways to repress, debase and humiliate women. Shyam’s indecent, brutal behavior towards Radha is one such form. He has made marriage an unpleasant experience for Radha. Several types of oppression that women are subjected are portrayed in the novel.

In Mistress, the character of Saadhiya is very important. She belongs to an orthodox Islamic community that takes pride in its pure Arabic stock and jealousy pressures its strain through inbreeding with in the walled settlement of Arabipatnam in coastal Tamilnadu. She is trapped in religio-cultural structures that circumscribe her life and limiting her physical as well as mental movements to a miniscule area. The women are further walled in by the dark, narrow passages interlacing their homes through which they are allowed to move. They live closed, unhealthy lives, shut out from air, light and world outside.

All men in Arabipatnam went to the beach every day, like they went to the mosque. It was the part of their routine. We were allowed out perhaps once a year. At other times, we knew the sea existd only when the breeze set in at early noon, bringing into our homes a whiff of salt and on hot days a brackish odour, part fish, part decay, part mystery.(Mistress 138)

Saadiya’s life with Sethu, who is a Hindu exposes her to another form of repression, that of enforced domesticity. Driven by loneliness and boredom, she seeks refuge in religion and seeks to re enter the structures she had fled from. Unable to find a resolution within her divided self, she ends her life.

In Mistress, Lalitha is portrayed as a young servant girl raped by her master’s son and thus subjected to a form of oppression based on class and loss of respectability. She is forced to take prostitution when Koman, who has a long-standing relationship with her, offers himself marriage, she refuses.

In eco feminist terms, Shyam sees nature or woman as a resource for the benefit of man. Both nature and women represent the generative powers of futility and birth. To Shyam, Radha is feminine but he views her as a passive resource, a decorative asset in addition to being a material asset. Shyam thinks of her mentally as “soiled goods” yet she retains considerable value for him in terms of the wealth she owns. He does not credit her with any ‘knowledge’ and enforces idle domesticity upon her, wherein she begins to suffer from what Betty Friedan called “the problem without man”.

Feminists link rape to male aggression, patriarchy and the construction of masculinity in our society. It is not about biology or a momentary loss of control but is a tool of domination in the eroticization of dominance and repression. In the case of Radha and Shyam, the institution of marriage becomes the platform upon which the game of sexuality and power are played out.

The image of marriage as a tool of patriarchal control and domination is repeated in the case of both Saadiya as well as Radha. Saadiya’s resistance to oppression ends in death. Radha however doesn’t seek to escape. She confronts and struggles.

Nair discusses the act of marital rape in one instance when the protagonist Radha’s husband forces himself upon her in order to assert his position as her husband, when she is drawn to other men. Rape is a sexual act that is seen as a potent tool to over power, control and repress woman. Men have been using sexual violence and rape as a means to wield control over women from time immemorial and across cultures.

In Lessons in Forgetting, Nair has portrayed the poor status of women in the male dominated society. Meera, who is a ‘cook book writer'(2), manages to suppress her feelings thinking that it is more important to be a good wife than a good writer. Meera is a representative of the urban, middle class woman exposed to liberal western ideas. Meera’s husband cares only for money, status and material comfort.

Giri had made careful plans about where he would be by the time he was thirty, forty, and forty – five… Meera would make this possible, he knew with certainty. Meera, who exuded upper class – Dom like the L’air du temps she wore. Discreet, elegant and old money. (Lessons in Forgetting 37)

Giri gave importance only to money. In fact, he married Meera for her ancestral property (home). He forces her to sell the house and he wants to invest the money in business.

Then there is the house. I asked you, begged and pleaded with you to sell the house. With the money, I would never have had to work for someone else. I would have pursued my dream, my chance at happiness… but you wouldn’t listen… (Lessons in Forgetting 59)

He never gives importance to her feelings, ideas and thought. At last Giri leaves her for younger woman. She is left with the responsibility of sustaining her family, she takes up a job as JAK’s research assistant. Meera is suppressed at every stage of her life, compromises to conform the role of an ideal Indian woman. He repressed Meera in all the ways he can.

Meera comes out of the bond as a rebel and her response is rejection – the rejection of social standards, values and the traditional life pattern. Her stoic endurance and perseverance supported her in all matters. Living in such a condition, she had nothing to fall back upon, no shoulder to lean on, and out of her total vacuum she had to re – create herself and meet the challenges of life.

Smriti, a young girl who is subjected to a form of repression based on patriarchal attitude and sexual violence. Smriti is the loving daughter of JAK who is a cyclone expert. Nina says “When Smriti was born; you spent all of that first night gazing down at the sleeping child… Mine. My daughter. My life” (69). When he comes to know that his daughter has met with a fatal accident, he cannot stop himself from coming to India for his daughter.

When Smriti went to Minjikapuram, she met a woman in the hospital who wanted to abort her pregnancy because the foetus is a girl. In a tradition bound Indian society, rearing a girl child is more expensive and risky than a male child so people dreaded the very birth of girls. According to Smriti, revealing the sex of the foetus is illegal. Women are repressed, forced and even threatened by their male counter parts to bring them under control.

Do you know what a burden a girl child is? My daughter already has two. Her marriage is at stake here. If she delivers yet another girl child, her husband might even leave her. He has already threatened her. (Lessons in Forgetting 90)

Smriti is against female infanticide. She wanted to stop this illegal activity and wanted to take action against it. She probes into the case of Chinnathayi’s daughter who died at the nursing home after an abortion. She has been threatened by two men not to poke her nose into things that don’t concern her. “You know nothing of our ways. I suggest you to go back. We don’t want to cause any trouble. Go home. Go wherever you want. But get out of here” (Lessons 294). Smriti is least bothered about their threatening and probes into the death of Chinnathayi’s daughter. She has discovered the existence of a visiting scan doctor who sat in a room with a board outside that read ‘Sex of the child will not be revealed here’.

Chinnathayi reported about the death of her daughter and how she was forced into abortion. “My daughter died. She was almost five months pregnant when her doctor asked that she get a scan done… It was he who wanted to know the sex of the baby” (309). Her husband threatened that if she doesn’t undergo an abortion, she would be his mid wife. “On our way home, my daughter, my daughter asked me if I would be her midwife. Her husband arranged for the baby to be aborted. They didn’t tell me. I know when they brought my daughter’s corpse home” (309).

Smriti suffered repression in the form of sexual violence. Chinnathayi refers men as cruel animals and says,

At the mutton shop as they eyed a carcass strung on a hook, the line of goats’ heads on a block with their dead, unseeing eyes. Should it be chops or the brain? One thing was certain. They wouldn’t leave without meat. (Lessons in Forgetting 316)

Chinnathayi couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “They were animals, these men. They tore at the girl and it seemed the more she screamed, the more excited they became” (317). Even from where she stood she could feel the girl’s fear. “It was the smell of blood” (317) and “Chinnathayi knew that no matter how much the girl pleaded or sought for reprieve, they wouldn’t leave her alone. She was their kill” (317).

Smriti struggled a lot to escape the sexual violence but she couldn’t come out of the trap. Chinnathayi thought that “…nothing had prepared her for this, the pleasure they derived from the girl’s fear. She would not forget till the moment she died, the laugh that echoed along the shore as the girl tried to flee and they rounded her in, knowing there was nothing she could do to escape them, their vile minds and bodies” (317).

Smriti is the victim of repression and the victim of men. Women are physically weak and men are using the physical power to repress woman. Smriti couldn’t escape from the wild animals. “…the girl tried to shake him off, sought to pull away, finding the strength to crawl on her hands and feet through the sand. Panting. Heaving. Sobbing. Seeking to escape” (318).

Rape is a sexual act that is seen as a potent tool of men to overpower woman. Fran Hasken says that violence against women is perpetrated “with an astonishing consensus among the men in the world” (qtd. in Mohanty 178). Male supremacy, like other political creeds, does not finally reside in physical strength but in the acceptance of a value system which is not biological (millet 27).

In the novel, The Dark Holds No Terror, Shashi Deshpande voices the repression of women characters like Anita Nair. The repression faced by the characters of Nair and Deshpande are more or less similar. In The Dark Holds No Terror, Deshpande tells the story of Sarita who is a successful pediatrician quietly grappling with the horrifying truth about her husband who turns a rapist every night. His sexual sadism is attributed to his inability to rise to the level of his wife professionally. In Mistress, Nair discusses the act of marital rape in one instance when the protagonist Radha’s husband forces himself upon her in order to assert his position as her husband, when she is drawn to another man. The characters, namely Manu in The Dark Holds No Terror and Shyam in Mistress, are involved in sexual violence within marital relationships.

The control and abuse of women, creates and maintains women’s repression all over the world. Men hold the important decision making positions in all social, political and religious institutions that organize and control society. Through this institutional power, men construct culture, pass laws, and enact policies that serve their interests and give themselves the power to control women in public and private spheres. Voluntary, as well as involuntary, violations of society’s man-made rules mark women as tainted and immoral, and bring dishonor to the family.

Patriarchal religions, which mould most of the cultures of the world, subordinate women to men. Fundamentalist movements, whether Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Islamic, advocate the repression of women. Womens’ interaction with men and boys is closely monitored and restricted and their bodies and hair covered in a way deemed to be modest. For example, under the influence of Islamic fundamentalism, women are required to wear full body coverings, such as chadors and burqas. Punishment for sexual misconduct can be severe, as in Iran, where women can be legally stoned to death. The other form of repression and abuse of women’s sexuality is exploitation, in which women and girls are used for men’s sexual gratification or profit. Women are sexually exploited when they are subjected to incest, rape, sexual harassment, battering, bride trafficking, pornography, and prostitution.

Nair has brought to the fore the issue of marital rape, a tool of repression which is often not discussed in public and which does not necessarily amount to violence under the law because it is the husband who is the perpetrator. Women have been living in pain and silence for ages as victims of repression, humiliation, torture, male dominance, sexual violence and exploitation. The idea that rape can be used as a tool to repress women reaffirms the fact that the male sexuality has a great influence on the creation of masculine identity. Through these characters, Nair has epitomized the realities of the lives of the Indian women and registered a vociferous protest against the chauvinistic patriarchal society.