Patriarchy as a System of Betrayal: A Feminist Reading of
Indian English Women’s Writing
Ankita Yadav,
Independent Researcher,
University of Delhi,
Delhi, India.
Abstract: This paper aims to
deliver a feminist critique of patriarchy as a system that betrays women by
multiple ways through suppression, neglect and ignorance in Indian English
women’s writing by focusing on works like ‘My Story’ by Kamla Das, ‘That Long
Silence’ by Shashi Deshpande and ‘Fire on the Mountain’ by Anita Desai. Through
the theoretical lens of feminist and postcolonial feminist ideas, this study
argues that the flawed structure of patriarchy not just betrays a woman
emotionally or physically through marriages but also leashes her identity and
sense of self. Engaging with theoretical insights from Simone de Beauvoir,
Kumari Jayawardana, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, and psychoanalytic
reflection from Freud, the paper examines how women are reduced to ‘other’ in
personal and national narratives. It
further continues to explore how colonial legacies in a continual manner
subjugate a particular gender through class, culture, and familial duties. This
paper highlights the moments of inner resistance, silence, memory, sexual and
emotional betrayal, challenging the compartmentalized structure of wife,
motherhood, and sacrifices that are just related to a female. By critiquing
patriarchy as a form of intimate and emotional betrayal, this study also
navigates the response towards it through silence, writing, and detaching
oneself emotionally. Finally, the paper echoes that betrayals are not just
linked to patriarchy, but how the system operates and constructs a society that
makes women experience the burden of shame and guilt for just trying to exist
outside of the roles pre-decided for them.
Keywords: Betrayal, Patriarchy,
Silence, Wife
Introduction:
Patriarchy, as a societal structure and deeply rooted
practice of human existence, disorganizes the emotional, social, and political
world of women in a way that is insidious and yet serves silence and
suppression. This system not just subjugates but also betrays women through the
institution of marriage and its aftermath duties that are expected to be fulfilled
by the figure of ‘wife’. It betrays her by promising protection while imposing
control in recompense, by glorifying her sacrifices while autonomy is denied to
her, and by constructing a sexual relationship that completely marginalizes her
emotions and exists primarily for the fulfillment of male expectations.
Betrayal in the domain of marriage and intimate relationships is central to
Indian society, where women are often expected to chase a life accommodated
with sacrifice, silence, and struggle according to the standards constructed
and concealed by the phallic society, gradually and unequivocally eradicating
her individuality and subjectivity.
This research interrogates the idea of patriarchy as a
paradigm of betrayal through a feminist and postcolonial feminist reading of
three Indian English literary texts that are Kamla Das’s My Story,
Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence, and Anita Desai’s Fire on the
Mountain. These works illustrate that the connotation of the term
‘betrayal’, in English literature, doesn’t perpetually mean an act of
‘infidelity’ but carry a symbolic context of deeply institutionalized
repressions like the silence in marital life, emotional abandonment by spouse,
predetermined domestic labor, bodily desires and gradual rejection of selfhood.
The betrayal presented through this paper is not dyadic, but it is structured
through the institution of marriage, motherhood, and nationhood, which
elaborates on a woman’s selfhood and role.
Kamla Das’s My Story is an autobiographical novel,
which, with the aid of chapters, narrates a yearning for sexual and emotional
satisfaction in a confined marriage. Her bold expressions towards the need of
‘love’ and betrayal ridicule a phallic society that confirms the self-erasure
and silence of a woman. Similarly, Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence
serves as a medium through which the reader can understand the entangled
marital life, where the protagonist Jaya is forced to be silent and bury her
selfhood and identity for the fulfillment of her demonstrated roles of
housewife and mother. Anita Desai’s work, Fire on the Mountain, on the
other hand, routes itself a bit differently but encompasses potentially equal
forms of long-standing patriarchal betrayals that extract her from family life
and deposit her on the route of emotional detachment and withdrawal from
familial associations.
Theoretically, this paper draws from the works of
feminist thinkers to formulate its framework. Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of
woman as the “other”, which she specifically implies in ‘The Married Woman’
from her work The Second Sex, helps in the expression of how the woman
exists subjugated to a man, not just theoretically or socially, but
existentially. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s analysis of patriarchal
authorship in their work Madwoman in the Attic works as a tool to
portray how women’s resistance against phallic control is contemplated as
madness or moral decay. While Freud’s psychoanalysis, especially from Interpretation
of Dreams, interprets the manifestation of silencing, self-repression, and
emotional abandonment due to the patriarchal betrayal and its dimensions in the
unconsciousness of women characters.
Additionally, through postcolonial feminism, the paper
interrogates the theme of patriarchal betrayal from the perspective of Kumari
Jayawardena’s work of Women, Social Reform and Nationalism in India
which is a constituent of Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World
offers insight to the historical groundings for the betrayals faced by women,
stemming from the phallic engineered or constructed national and domestic
ideologies which exploit female figures. It analyses the structure of class,
caste, and culture from colonial legacies that continue to justify the
subjugation of women. The betrayals in these literary texts are perhaps
personal but certainly shaped by historical and political ideologies of women
as pure, traditional, and morally superior beings, limiting the freedom and
individuality they deserve.
For the significant part, this paper does not read
betrayal as an act of infidelity performed by individual men but as the
constructed design of a system that foresees a woman as a flag bearer of sacrifices,
who acknowledges silence, guilt, and neglect as normal and understandable. Lack
of empathy, suppression of voice along with expectations of sacrifices is
manifestations of emotional and psychological betrayal. They are highlighted as
personal failures by the patriarchal society, but in practice are deeply
ingrained extensions of patriarchal orders. These forms of betrayals
persistently remain unidentified and in a continual manner disguised as love,
duty, or a product of marital contract. Through the works of Das, Deshpande,
and Desai, one can identify how these forms of betrayals break a woman’s sense
of self, reducing the significance of their existence to a void.
Finally, this research paper argues that by looking into
the interior worlds of women that are marked by silence, longing, and memory,
literature also becomes a mode of both healing and critiquing. The core texts
don’t just portray patriarchal betrayals but also notify their readers of the
process of healing that is done through writing, detachment, or reclaiming a
voice. This paper believes that a feminist reading of these betrayals is
significant to expose how intimate relationships are not just personal but
political and how gendered pain is produced not by an individual but by a society
that opts to prioritize male subjectivity at the expense of female existence.
Literature Review
The feminist criticism has widely engaged with the
emotional, psychological, and sexual subjugation internalized by women by the
patriarchy. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex interrogates the
phallic structure that consumes a woman into “other”, constructing her in a
passive figure who submits to male-defined institutions like marriage and
motherhood. Her critique of the suppression of women reveals that betrayal
isn’t confined to physical infidelity but well-constructed condition under
patriarchy. Analogously, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Mad Woman in
the Attic describe the confinement of literary characters of women in the
roles of purity often leads to madness and suffering when the female agency is
silenced. These foundational feminist readings identify that betrayal comes as
a stagnant malfunction in women’s lives under phallic control.
Talking of Indian English women’s writing, Kamla Das’s My
Story has been read through the lens of bold feminist reading that has a
radical feminist expression and sexual rebellion. Scholars like Rituparna Das
in her work WRITING AS REBELLION: BREAKING THE STEREOTYPES IN MY STORY BY
KAMALA DAS have analyzed it for its intrapersonal honesty and rejection of
social expectations. However, less attention has been paid through a lens of
betrayal that came disguised as denial of desires, controlled love, and
fragmented identity. Similarly, That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande
has been interpreted as a novel of silence, but the protagonist deals with an
emotional and self-betrayal that came through the marital life. Miss. F. Maria
Selvam, in her work QUEST FOR IDENTITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDE’S THAT LONG
SILENCE, argues about Jaya’s erasure of identity, but less emphasis has
been made on the betrayal that came from her husband and herself. Anita Desai’s
Fire on the Mountain has been examined through themes of self-isolation
and trauma of Nanda Kaul, but it also deserves to be understood through the
lens of betrayal masked in retirement.
Postcolonial feminist theorists have elaborated on how
colonialism structured patriarchy. Critics like Ania Loomba critique how women
were the flag bearers of cultural purity in national discourses, betraying them
by the glorification of sacrifices and denying any autonomy. Kumari Jayawardena,
on the other hand, explores the confinement of women to domestic labor and
sexual roles in India through colonial reform movements. These analyses serve
as proof that the betrayal of women’s agency has been served since historical
reconstruction, not just interpersonal acts.
Despite these contributions, existing scholars rarely
focus on betrayal as a critical point of analysis. The literary moments during
which women feel emotionally, psychologically, and sexually betrayed are often
confined to “oppression” or perceived as isolated moments rather than a
critique of patriarchal structure that upholds the logic. By incorporating
feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories, this paper repositions
betrayal as a foundational mechanism of patriarchy in Indian English women’s
writing.
Research gap
While extensive scholarships lie across Deshpande, Das,
and Desai, there is a lack of specific area that focuses on betrayal as a
procedural ramification of patriarchy. Most feminist criticism related to the
primary texts of this paper has addressed issues related to gender roles,
silence, and subjectivity, but not specifically witnessed betrayal as a
multilayered conclusion of patriarchy that has its layers disseminated from
emotional, psychological, to political rupture, caused by marital lives and
social expectations. Adding on, while the postcolonial theories present an
insight into gendered oppression caused by colonial ideologies on women, there
is less application of those theories on domestic betrayals in Indian English
women’s writing. This paper bridges the gap by interrogating how patriarchy not
only betrays a woman’s body and labor but also snatches and crushes away her
inner self and autonomy.
Methodology
This paper adopts a qualitative approach, combining close
textual analysis with a theoretical engagement. It closely explores its three
primary texts: My Story by Kamla Das, That Long Silence by Shashi
Deshpande, and Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai, to trace how
betrayal is constructed and concealed by patriarchy as a form of acceptance and
normalcy. Secondary sources include critical papers, feminist, psychoanalytic,
and postcolonial frameworks by Indian and Western theorists. By accommodating
these perspectives and bridging the gap, this research aims to contribute to
the discourse of feminist literary studies.
Discourse
This section of the paper presents a close thematic
analysis of three core texts: Kamla Das’s My Story, Shashi Deshpande’s That
Long Silence, and Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain to examine how
patriarchy manifests betrayal in marriages and domestic life.
1. Emotional Betrayal in Marriage.
Protagonists of all three core texts experience a
heightened perception of abandonment and emotional detachment within their
respective marital life, where intimacy becomes a subject to just male desire
fulfillment. In That Long Silence, Jaya’s emotional abandonment is
intensely experienced in the treatment provided through her significant other
after the act of intimacy, Deshpande quotes, “I could time it, almost to the
second, the whole process of our lovemaking... he turned away from me, offering
me his hunched back” (Deshpande85). This betrayal and lack of emotional
interpersonal response echoes later, “It had come to me in one awful moment-
that I was alone” (Deshpande 98). Marriage for Jaya doesn’t function with
mutual emotional stability, but with structured solitude.
On the other hand, Kamla Das’s work My Story can
associate itself with similar emotional isolation through the following
quotation, “I thought then that love was flowers in the hair... soft words
whispered in the ear.” (Das 85). Her husband fails to provide support to her
emotional needs, and hence that is fulfilled by one of her lovers “outside its
legal orbit” (Das 90). She quotes, “he dressed my hair with scented white
flowers, plucking them from beneath my window” (Das 108). This reflects on how
the structure of patriarchy normalizes the unavailability of emotional needs in
marriage towards a woman, and at the precise point of time, becomes the
critique of her character if she finds it outside marriage. Moving on, Anita
Desai’s work Fire on the Mountain completes the argument through her
character Nanda Kaul and her choosing reclusive withdrawal into Carignano, to
which Desai quotes, “All she wanted was to be alone... stillness and calm were
all that she wished to entertain” (Desai18). Her detachment from familial life
sheds light on emotional exhaustion rather than peace.
Simone de Beauvoir in her work The Second Sex
configures this betrayal in the following lines, “Marriage chains her to a man
and makes her mistress of a home... she justifies her existence through them”
(Beauvoir456). Such marriages just consist of unfulfillment and disempowerment
of a woman.
2. Suppression of Self and Identity
The identities of females in these texts are fragmented
and erased under the condition of fulfilling domestic chores and roles. That
Long Silence portrays Jaya confronting this vanishment through, “And I was
Jaya. But I had been Suhasini as well... a soft, smiling, placid, motherly
woman. A woman who lovingly nurtured family. A woman who coped”
(Deshpande15-16). Suhasini was the name given to Jaya by her husband after
marriage, reflecting on the fact that her identity was altered, beginning from
her name to fit the patriarchal constructed ideas of a nurturing and docile
wife. Deshpande writes, “My own career as a wife was in jeopardy... where had
she gone?” (Deshpande 24), suggesting that a woman’s identity as a wife is
absorbed by a constructed structure of phallic society.
Kamla Das expresses this estrangement physically, “I kept
myself busy with dreary housework while my spirit protested and cried, 'Get out
of this trap, escape...'” (Das 93). This is the portrayal of her internal
conflict negotiating with disintegration, she also quotes, “I had begun to shed
my clothes, regarding them as traps” (Das 104), works as a symbolic rejection
of pre-decided feminine performance. Desai’s Nanda Kaul also reflects this
through, “She had suffered from the nimiety... she had been glad to leave it
all behind” (Desai32). Being tired of perpetual and endless responsibilities,
she chooses to reject them in her old age, regretting why she didn’t resign
earlier, through the following lines, “She has held herself religiously aloof,
jealous of this privacy achieved only at the very end of her life” (Desai 39).
Beauvoir quotes, “The housewife wears herself out running
on the spot; she does nothing; she only perpetuates the present; she never
gains a sense that she is conquering positive Good…It is a struggle that begins
again every day.” (Beauvoir487). Patriarchy demands a form of labor that is
both invincible and invisible. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar justify this with
their argument that a “life of female rebellion, of “significant action”, is a
life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story”
(Gilbert and Gubar36).
3. Systematic Betrayal, Social Expectations, and Patriarchal
Construction
As previously mentioned betrayal in these texts is not
just interpersonal but is constructed and concealed by institutions. It is fed
to a woman in her girlhood, shaping her life and decisions according to
‘acceptable’ deeds of patriarchy. Jaya declares, “But for women, the waiting
game starts early in childhood. Wait until you get married. Wait until your
husband comes... ever since I got married, I have done nothing but wait”
(Deshpande30). She was taught by Vanitamami that, “‘a husband is like a
sheltering tree’… Andso you have to keep the alive and flourishing, even if you
have to water it with deceit and lies” (Deshpande 32). This illustrates on
Beauvoir’s critique of marriage, that it defines a woman’s social existence,
through the following lines, “Marriage is the reference by which the single
woman is defined, whether… or even different to this institution”
(Beauvoir451).
Kamla Das adds an even darker vision to it through the
lines, “My relative... kissed me sloppily... crushed my breasts... I felt hurt
and humiliated” (Das 78). Phallic society provides males an authority and right
over the female body in the guise of duty and intimacy. For Desai, one may
notice that the worth of the protagonist is reduced to just performing duties,
“and bent over them with that still, ironic bow to duty that no one had noticed
or defined” (Desai 20)
Ania Loomba, in her work Colonialism/Postcolonialism,
critiques how the female figure is idealized asthe flag bearer of cultural
continuity, thus denying any amount of autonomy to them. Loomba quotes, “They
seized upon the home and the woman as emblems of their culture and nationality.
The outside world could be westernized, but not all was lost if the domestic
space retained its cultural purity.” (Loomba142). Nanda Kaul’s rejection and
withdrawal of familial role and retreat to Carignano is symbolic of her
conditions of silence, which echo postcolonial discourse of women whose
identities were shaped by their symbolic role, which was preserving culture.
Mohan’s treatment of Jaya and Das’s emotionally absent
husband is reflection of postcolonial masculinity, which emerges as an agent of
betrayal. As Loomba notes, “Colonizing as well as anti-colonial men, while
being otherwise opposed, have often shared certain attitudes to women” (Loomba
138).
Psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, through his work The
Interpretations of Dreams, takes the argument further. Freud’s Irma dream,
where he dreams about a former patient Irma, and blames Irma for her illness
that he didn’t succeed in curing. Instead of accepting the responsibility, he
shifts the blame on to her which is symbolic of a defense mechanism, serving as
the displacement of male guilt onto female suffering, through the line, “If
you still get pains, it’s your own fault” (Freud133). This logic highlights
much of the intimate betrayal in these narratives reflecting on how men in
phallic society often blame women for their failure and guilt. In the context
of the primary texts, this logic mirrors how female literary characters are made
to internalize guilt and accept betrayal as their own moral failure rather than
a structured flaw.1
Conclusion
This text not just narrates betrayal but exposes its
mechanical structure within the marriage, culture, and psyche. They reflect the
inner worlds and decision-making of literary female charactersand how it is
affected by layered effects of patriarchal ideology, wherein even the self is
taught to internalize betrayal as a duty to be fulfilled. The institution of
marriage, instead of being a safe space for mutual partner and companionship,
becomes a space for female negotiation. Through the literary female characters
of Das, Deshpande, and Desai, a reader hears the voices of suppressed selves,
unrealized or neglected desire, and yearning for solitude. In conclusion, the
betrayal in Indian English women’s writing is not only a less-debated event but
a sustained condition shaping the everyday lives of women in and outside
fiction. Women writers stepping forward to write about it boldly is not an expression
but the first act of resistance.
Works Cited
Das, Kamla. My Story. HarperCollins Publishers
India, 2020.
Deshpande, Shashi. That Long Silence.
Penguin Books India, 1989.
Desai, Anita. Fire on the Mountain.
Penguin Books, 2021
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex.
Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books,
2011.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of
Dreams. Translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2010. PDF file.
Gilbert, Sandra., and Susan Gubar. The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.
Loomba, Ania. “Colonial and Postcolonial
Identities”, “Challenging Colonialism”.
Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005,
pp. 91-153, pp. 154-213. PDF file.
Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and
Nationalism in the Third World. Verso, 2016.
Das, Rituparna. “Writing as Rebellion:
Breaking the Stereotypes in My Story by Kamla Das.” Gender and
Chauvinism in Contemporary India: A Collection of Research-Based Articles on
Gender and Chauvinism in Contemporary India, 2020, pp. 22-27.
http://mncbm.digitallibrary.co.in/bitstream/123456789/37/1/Gender%20and%20Chauvinism%20in%20Contemporary%20India%20New%20Final%202_compressed.pdf#page=22
Selvam, F. Maria, “Quest for Identity in
Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence”. Literary Endeavour,
special issue:1, 2018, pp. 17-20.