A Character Delineation of Jaya in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence

Abstract

The paper attempts to examine the character delineation of Jaya, who is the protagonist in Shashi Deshpande’s novel That Long Silence, which won her the Sahitya Akademi Award. Through this paper, the effort is made to apply psychoanalysis for the interpretation of women protagonist’s internal and external conflict, faced by her in the search for identity and self-assertion. Shashi Deshpande’s primary concern is to depict the conflict and anguish of the modern educated Indian woman caught between patriarchy and tradition on one end, self-expression, individuality, and independence for the women on the other. Her fiction explores the women's search to fulfil herself as a human being, independent of her traditional role as a daughter, wife, and mother. She has scrutinized a variety of common domestic disasters, which trigger off the search. Through the character delineation of Jaya, this paper will focus on that women should not victimize themselves; they should try to erase the silence, and they should try to give voice to their inner conflicts. Jaya, the central character in That Long Silence, having got in the current of a woman's traditional role – wife and mother have repressed her existential self. Though she has a happy life with her well-earning life partner and two children Rati and Raghu and material comforts, she feels fed up with her life's monotony and fixed pattern.