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Reassertions of Class Consciousness and Tragic Vision in John Galsworthy’s Strife
Get PDFJohn Galsworthy, a contemporary playwright of G. B. Shaw, established realism in drama in the early 20th century England. Through his plays, he exposed the socio-economic, socio-political, socio-cultural, and socio-legal problems in a realistic, sincere and impartial way, providing implied solutions to those problems as an objective observer of the contemporary English life. With objective impartiality, he exposed the wrong-headedness of some traditional beliefs and advocated social reform. The objective of the present paper is to expose the metaphors of tragic vision on account of class consciousness in John Galsworthy’s Strife followed by some implied solutions. The reasons of tragic vision are pride, lack of human insight, extreme and fanatical approach, rigidity, class consciousness, uncompromising stands, warring faction, obstinacy, and desire to win and dominate, etc. Through this play the playwright wishes to establish the notion that human beings should be ruled by logic and reason and his testimony lies in portraying the futility and stupidity of quarrelling over conceptual differences, which might have been settled by compromise or arbitration
Patriarchy and Resistance in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting
Get PDFPatriarchy is systematically a set of rules in which a male dominates over a female in every aspect of life. Even children also suffer in this patriarchal system. The literal meaning of ‘Patriarchy’ is “the rule of the father.” The word 'Patriarchy' originated from a Greek word which is a combination of two words; ‘patria’ means ‘lineage, descent, family, fatherland’ and the other is ‘arkhe’ means ‘domination, authority, sovereignty’. It is a system which subordinates women in both private and public life. For the ages, men relish the supreme position and women have been subservient to them. Society assumes men as superior to women. They are considered as inferior and less intellectual and are made to follow male authorities and ideologies. The patriarchal ideologies consider women only as a housewife and men as a leader of social, political and economic authorities. They experience domination, discrimination, oppression, control, insult and violence within family as well as in society. Although in contemporary society, a number of women try to resist and revolt against dominating authorities to get equal rights yet many of them relinquish their lives silently at the hand of heinous offenses of patriarchy. This system is very common in India and across the world. Females encounter physical or verbal abuses in their family and sometimes at public place too
Narrating Marginality: Gender Crisis in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terror
Get PDFFeminine sensibilities and gender issues are based on different cultures and diasporic essence. The desire and aspirations of women of different countries are not similar. Their demands are influenced by a number of variables, including familial, societal/racial, marital, economic, cultural, and personal ones. It is considered incorrect to compare Indian feminism to western feminism, which is characterised by radical rules, in such a varied culture. In its early stages, Indian feminism was wholly liberal and addressed every facet of mankind. There hasn't been a significant political or social uprising in India against the male-dominated culture. In beginning, they seek to address the inequality and dissimilarity that existed between males and females. They desired to bridge the gaps between men and women through their social revolt and provide the psychological reason for the male violence against women. Some feminist intellectuals extended the gender issues focusing the intention on rape and other forms of sexual violence. To them, such gender issues of exploitation are because of the male dominant society. They agree with Liberal feminists that material change and patriarchy is the sole reason for women's discrimination. They argue against the existing tradition of love, marriage, and gender inequality and demand equal social rights. The women writers like Shashi Deshpande have used fiction to explore and share their experiences. The myriad conflicts, which they face in everyday lives, are woven into the fictional world of their creation. To Shashi Deshpande, traditional beliefs also play a major role in female discrimination
Nineteenth Century Domesticity and Social Contemporaneity: Exploring Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s The Poison Tree
Get PDFBankimchandra Chattopadhyay in the novel The Poison Tree has entered into the boundaries of Bengali family life from his own world of historical novels and romances. The characters described in this novel are familiar, intimately related to our lives. Different streams and shades of their happiness and sorrow, experiences and consequences of their lives touch our minds. They live on the real background in which human life takes place. However, social life is not absent there either. It is more reasonable to call the novel a domestic-social novel. This paper aims to look how Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, in the novel The Poison Tree, has ventured into the territory of the Bengali domestic life with special focus on his depiction of the conflict between individual freedom and the social life and also how the story of the novel has been narrated in terms of social life
Writing for Freedom: Exile, Marginalisation and Oppositional Militancy in Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls
Get PDFThis paper tries to investigate the genre of the exilic autobiographical memoir as a form of liminal writing that inhabits in the interstices between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive’. It offers a reading of Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiographical memoir Before Night Falls, written from exile in New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which offers a form of sustained literary resistance to the systematic discrimination against, and marginalisation of the homosexual in post-revolutionary Cuba of the Castro-regime. The paper argues that Arenas’s autobiographical memoir becomes one of the principal texts through which he advances his oppositional militancy to Cuban machismo, a patriarchal and gendered code of behaviour co-opted by the Revolution. It concludes by positing Arenas’s project as a counter-hegemonic and resistant one, which adapts certain features of the testimonio (testimonial narrative) to lay bare the state-sanctioned ostracism and penal measures adopted against the homosexual individual
The Accord of Discord: Reflections on Private Lives in Peter Shaffer’s Five Finger Exercise
Get PDFPeter Shaffer holds a place of pivotal importance in Modern British Drama. The variety and complexities of life that Shaffer presents through his works, give us a good idea that he is a playwright who intends to further the representative nature of theatre as an agency of influence. The acute fidelity with which he perceives and deliberates upon life narratives remains a preserve in which the playwright influences his proficient talent to good use. He works upon aspects of human situations with a deep sense of purpose and understanding which bespeak of his merit as a playwright. Five Finger Exercise is a play by Peter Shaffer that stands as an important work in the formative years of his career as a playwright and contributes a notable standing to his oeuvre as a writer in the making. Paralleled in the reputation of the drama of the fifties with Look Back in Anger as a profound dramatic work, it is Peter Shaffer’s Five Finger Exercise that holds its ground as a work of incredible consequence about complexities of human ordeals. The ‘family’ and its private frontier remains a compelling subject for drama and it also seeks our renewed enquiry, one that is exemplified in the action of the play, Five Finger Exercise. The paper instils a vital seeking through an academic deliberation, accentuating a vigorous argument as to why it needs to recognised as an important work in English theatre history. It is the domain of the Harringtons’ family and their trials and turmoils that puts into question a consequential deliberation on beneath the surface reality of the family/domestic space. The paper also serves to explore the psychological and emotional dimensions of human behaviour and its treatment as part of the narrative which seeks to highlight Peter Shaffer’s perspicuity and his acumen as a writer
Painting in Poetry and Poetry in Painting: Aesthetic Reflections in D.G. Rossetti
Get PDFBright eyed and bushy-tailed poems and paintings are very rare, so are their past masters who create them. The history of the world literature is often brimming with such rare authors as are the unparalleled amalgamator of paintings and writings. In this field, the names, which are counted highly with boundless esteem, are of William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Elizabeth Bishop, Leo Tolstoy, Lorraine Hansberry, Victor Hugo, Sylvia Plath, George Sand, Jack Kerouac, Herman Hesse, Gunter Grass, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, E.E. Cummings, Tennessee Williams, Carlo Levi, J.B. Priestley, and R.N. Tagore. Undisputedly, D.G. Rossetti is one such figure. When the world literature is deconstructed, two clusters of the authors appear on the literary landscape. The first cluster consists of those authors who are painters and writers as well. The painters who have painted the literary pieces of the authors fall into the second cluster. D.G. Rossetti somewhere stands in- between. He is painter (especially illustrator) as well author-poet. But the flabbergasting certitude is that his elite poetry is found in his pieces of mural, and his elite mural in his pieces of poesy. His all creations, be they paintings, or poems, fall in three categories. In the first faction fall such pieces of his poems as are only poems—without any illustration, in the second faction fall such pieces of his paintings as are without poems, while in the third faction fall such pieces of his paintings as are with poems, or with mythical illustrations, or on certain literary pieces. Nothing to say about these groups, but one thing is clear that all of them possess aesthetic reflections. Keeping this very fact in mind, the present article aims at exploring, analyzing, and presenting the three-dimensional view in Rossetti painting and poetry with the help of the textual analysis, visual methods, and descriptive and explorative approach
Samuel Beckett’s Iconoclastic Deviation in the Implications of Language
Get PDFThe goal of this research is to look into the effects of the language used in the study of silences and inexpressibility in the theatre of absurd plays especially in the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett. Consideration will be given to various aspects and qualities of this kind of drama, including things like silence, pause, repetitions, the lack of a narrative or plot, the lack of recognisable or definable decor, the unorthodox nature of the dialogue, and the focus on global and universal issues rather than current problems. There was a global sense of meaninglessness and nothingness as a result of the changing state of the world, particularly as a result of the destructive effects of the Second World War. This brought about a sense of despair and disenchantment with the values that were traditionally upheld
The Shakespearean Poetic Rosary: The ‘Sacred Numbers’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Get PDFIn human culture there are certain numbers of special importance. They are mostly used in old and modern writings as “sacred numbers” of religious and literary significance. They are present in the Greek myths, in Egyptian Pharaonic culture, in ancient Persian, in the Indian culture, and in Arab traditions; then (Islamic) culture as well as in the Biblical Western culture. These numbers are of two kinds: even and uneven or odd. The odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7and 9 play a far more important part than the even numbers. One is Deity, three the Trinity, five the chief division, seven is the sacred number, and nine is three times three. These numbers have good function and been looked at as ‘Sacred’ or ‘Perfect’ numbers either of good omen or evil. There is another forth number, which is “10”, it comes mainly in Jewish and Islamic education in very few cases having similar religious suggestion. Shakespeare has used the number Ten in Sonnet 6 Then let not winter's ragged hand deface. “Sacred Numbers” have become a part of religion and even of modern belief, and mostly represented in the popular rituals. Shakespeare has used the “Sacred Numbers” in his works either prose or poetry, and this article is restricted to deal only with three Shakespearean sonnets where I imagine Shakespeare reciting his Latin Rosary in a poetic religious tone and drawing the cross sign on his chest and on the forehead of his sonnets in order to invoke divine protection. It seems that Shakespeare’s date of birth and death (1564 -1616) carries a certain secret of his fondness for sacred numbers; thus: The sum of the date of his birth (1564=16) is doubled in the date of his death (1616)
Social Resistance in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable
Get PDFMulk Raj Anand was a revolutionary writer of the twentieth century India who changed the mode of writing and thinking in the field of Indian fiction writing. The novelists before him, who had written fiction, wrote the fictional side of life which were ideal and romantic in nature. There were a smaller number of issues of the society. Mulk Raj Anand’s writing brought revolutionary change in the field of fiction writing. He wrote the novels for the sake of untouchables and the poor. He raised the issues of casteism, capitalism, feudalism, colonialism and imperialism through his novels. In Untouchable, he has attacked one of the worst social evils of the Indian society which was ignored by the previous writers and that is blot on Indian society, culture and tradition that has colonized eighty five percent people of Indian society. This sensibility has ruined creativity of Indian people. Casteism and untouchability are the blots on the face of humanity. Anand seems fighting for the liberty, equality and justice of the untouchables and the poor. He appealed for the basic human rights and needs in the newly emerging civil structure of colonial and post-independence India. He had the opinion among all the fundamental rights that human dignity is the highest. Bakha, the leading character, had the resistance in the mind but he could not express it due to the fear of his caste. Bakha is a metaphor for all the untouchables of India