Notes
3
Writing Woman / Woman Writing
Shashi Deshpande and the Aesthetics of the Female Body
Introduction
Current scholarly discourses on female body image critique the notion of Woman, especially the beautiful Woman, as a construct and seek to highlight the everyday manifestations of body oppressions experienced by women.1 The patriarchally constructed philosophical ideal of the former is often at loggerheads with the quotidian, feminist reality of the latter. Through dismantling the beauty ideals of Western patriarchy, such critical debates aim to uncover women as not an abstract category but rather an identity based on everyday practices and experiences of the body and its image. It is assumed within body image scholarship—and rightly so—that women’s appearances are diverse and that the dictates of body image dissatisfaction are patriarchal constructs meant to place women at war with their own bodies. For instance, the terminology of “the fashion beauty complex”2 is influenced by the coinage of the “military industrial complex”3 and aims to subjugate women through a commercially defined beauty imperative. Within these discourses, however, the critique of patriarchy’s dictates of women’s appearance is centered largely on Western scholarly discourses.
One therefore notes how body image debates geared toward women of color, queer women, and women from the global South tend to place them in the same bracket since all such bodies are viewed by a globally dominant Eurocentric culture as a deviance from the norm of the body beautiful. In other words, it is assumed that beauty standards impact women in a homogenous manner and that studying the impact of body image compulsions on white Western women is enough because it appears as a universal, uniform issue. The assumption that women are uniformly impacted and attain similar kinds of body image dissatisfaction, for instance, squarely places white Western body image dissatisfaction as the norm and beauty standards or beauty oppressions faced by women of color as deviating from it in various capacities. In short, existing body image scholarship often misses out on the particularities of how patriarchies construct beauty standards variously (with or without similarities to each other). Beauty norms governing a black woman in the United States, for example, have very different preoccupations than those regulating an Indian woman “coming out as Dalit.” This is true even as the racism embedded in the lives of the former can be examined through similar instances of systemic violence as those faced by the latter category of women.4
It is clear that “appearance in general and body image in particular have become very important constructs in contemporary Western societies,” as Marika Tiggeman, an Australian body image scholar, states.5 Body image and beauty ideals, however, have not yet been examined with Indian culture in mind. There exists a gap in scholarship on how appearance and body image take shape within the Indian context, even as the incidence of eating disorders and complaints about body image dissatisfaction seems to be on the rise.6 Existing scholarship, however scant, places the issue of unattainable beauty and body image dissatisfaction in a theoretical framework and critiques cultural discourses that ask Indian women to “replicate” Western standards of body image, leading, in turn, to body dissatisfaction.7 Further, critical body image theorists studying the influence of media and infotainment on body image locate “television, magazines, video games, cinema, and the Internet” as channels that deeply impact body image formation,8 and this is true for many Indian women. Significantly, however, examining body image issues in the Indian context in the absence of any previous research on the subject involves a broadening the horizon of what culture and media entail. In particular, there is a need to examine the literary sphere along with television, cinema, advertising, and the Internet, among others, as domains for both establishing and resisting coercions of the body beautiful. While the literary sphere as such is elitist in that it assumes literacy, it is also a popular avenue for the discussion of the body, which in turn is influenced by forces of both media and culture. Therefore, especially in the Indian context, literary narratives addressing issues of body image deserve special attention given their influence on young and impressionable readers.
The study of a writer like Shashi Deshpande provides fertile ground for themes and preoccupations with the constructed demands of patriarchy, especially the norms of beauty and body image for Indian women. Notably, Deshpande’s literary works have often been read as domestic fiction of the middle-class woman.9 It has also been labeled by Western publishers as work of a Third World woman writing “under western eyes.”10 In this chapter I highlight how a bourgeois feminine subjectivity and body identity, one that is in the process of becoming, is textually produced in Deshpande’s writing. I engage with her short stories and examine the trope of the female body in them to inquire about the textual production of body image. My chapter argues that a patriarchal norm of what constitutes womanly beauty informs a script by which the female body is read aesthetically in society. And I demonstrate how this script is unraveled ontologically in Deshpande’s fiction. Further, I examine the relation between the aesthetics of the literary text—in this case, the short story—and the aesthetics of the body. In sum, the issues I problematize in this chapter are as follows: How is the body aestheticized and written in an already aesthetic literary space? What notions of beauty and desirability emerge in the process? And finally, what textual space is afforded to the (un)desirable body? In trying to answer these questions, I bring to the forefront the relationship among writing, female subjectivity, and body image in the short stories of Shashi Deshpande.
Discourses on Female Body Image in Neoliberal India
Female body image has been discussed within Western academia as a universal concern that transcends different sociocultural distinctions.11 While the universality of the beauty norm is suspect—each cultural context has its specific codification of what counts as beautiful—the notion that women are oppressed by unattainable standards of beauty is a thread that is common in all discussions of female body image. In the Indian context, issues of beauty and body appearance have been considered a problem of the privileged while issues such as violence on women, for example, have been viewed as pressing concerns. Yet issues of beauty and appearance affect not just rich and middle-class women and their social image but can also be linked to violence on women across almost all classes and communities in India. And this is especially true in the context of neoliberal India, where body identities are hugely influenced by transnational ideals and images.
Rupal Oza notes how the economic changes in the early 1990s brought on by political will “began to materially and discursively construct a new India.”12 In fact, many scholars have noted how, with the advent of neoliberalism, there has been a move to “Macdonald-ize” and therefore globalize every aspect of Indian life.13 This neoliberal agenda of westernization is not merely limited to commerce and industry but also affects the deeper cultural and psychological aspects of life. It has involved a thrust to privatization and a burgeoning media industry that, in turn, is governed by norms of bodily appearance and feeds into the beauty-fashion industry. This industrial/technically modulated creation of female body image of the normative and simultaneously perfect body has had a deep impact on India’s cultural consciousness over the last three decades. Such influences are particularly felt in media coverage, in film and television, and in the fashion industry, all of which emphasize the visual frame. While the visual impact of an ideal body may have been felt most strongly within the infotainment industry, this problematic has been appropriated by the literary media as well. Hence, a scholarly analysis of female body image in contemporary Indian literature appears both necessary and relevant. Significantly, this task has been carried out partially through sociological and psychological analysis of India’s neoliberal culture, particularly through a gendered lens.14 And such research reveals that women have been impacted and recast time and again given the demands of an appearance-conscious culture.15 Surprisingly, however, a scrutiny of how beauty norms impact body image through literary production remains underresearched. Hence, as stated prior, my study examines at Shashi Deshpande and her fiction for multiple reasons,16 including those of female body image.
While critically reading Deshpande’s works, in the present chapter I highlight how bourgeois feminine subjectivity, one that is in the process of becoming bourgeois given the nascent neoliberal economic context, is textually produced. I specifically seek to understand how a distinctly bourgeois subjectivity is embedded in Deshpande’s textual narratives and how these become narratives by and about women. In this context, I take into account Rupal Oza’s analysis of how economic discourses are themselves sexed.17 Oza claims that “as liberalization of the economy came to be realized as liberalization of sexual codes, debates by the state, women’s organizations, and secular groups over the new ‘liberal’ Indian woman demarcated the boundaries of her subjectivity.”18 Informed by such postulations, I highlight how the textual embeddedness of feminine subjectivity is not complete but one that is in the process of being textually produced. I argue that this is a material practice, one encoded in the various literary as well as nonliterary media in neoliberal India. With this understanding, I engage with selected short stories by Deshpande and examine them through the literary use of the body to inquire about the textual production of body image. My reading draws upon the fact that body image—and, in particular, the emphasis on appearance—is closely linked with the contestations of modernity and with increasingly westernized models of economy and polity. Body image discourse therefore needs to be highlighted as embedded in and through an aesthetics of gender, and my chapter attempts this confluence. I deliberately chose the short-story form for this analysis because of its ability to create a quick sketch of the narrating subject. This quickness in literary contouring becomes an act of chipping away the unnecessary to produce a literary economy of the text. This textual space is one that incorporates, in Deshpande’s case, the body as a primary site of cultural and ideological markings. This is a notion of the body that is bourgeois and neoliberal, but female, and one caught in the process of coming into being.
Mother, Daughter, and the Beauty Conundrum in “Why a Robin?”
In Deshpande’s short story titled “Why a Robin?,” a textual moment of maternal envy is produced.19 In this story, while endeavoring to develop a rapport with her child, the narrator-mother tries to help her daughter with homework. In parenting so, however, the narrator-mother finds herself enveloped in envy. This moment of maternal envy produces an interior emotional crisis in her since her own sense of lack of beauty is contrasted with that of her normatively beautiful daughter. This realization of the contrast between the mother and her offspring is also a somatic reaction. The mother states, “How did I, so plain, so common, get a daughter like her? Her beauty always gives me a physical wrench.”20 The mother appears envious of her daughter’s physical beauty and is amazed at the connection between her own lack of conventional beauty and the overwhelming presence of beauty in her daughter. Further, her own sense of plainness is used to create a contrast as well as a bodily reaction to issues of body image.
This incident in the short story becomes a key moment to symbolize several aspects of interest. The narrator-mother creates a textual space for herself. Later in the story, she forges an emotional bond with her daughter. However, the story is rife with “the beauty myth”21 and its repercussions on woman-to-woman bonds. Aspects of beauty and human appearance along with patriarchal dictates about what counts as beautiful are deployed to show an older generation of women who are affected by the diktats of “beauty and the norm.”22 Women of the younger generation, brought up with tools of beauty grooming, are shown as getting closer to ideals of normative beauty. Through this intergenerational disconnect, Deshpande’s text produces an anxiety of aging that women from preliberalized India would have experienced when contrasted with the supposedly desirable postliberal concept of youth and beauty. In this short story, the narratorial voice is both sharing her feelings in confidence with the readers and creating the notion that conventional norms of beauty seem to matter even as they disempower.23 The notion that beauty practices are not just abstract but are real and discursively constructed material practices is highlighted here. The space in the text, the voice of the narrator, and the feeling of inadequacy in terms of body image seem to go together.
The middle-class ethos that Deshpande creates in short stories like “Why a Robin?” has been commented upon several times. Rashmi Sahi, for instance, describes Deshpande’s characterization as concerned with a “middle class Indian woman who is educated,” which brings to mind that Deshpande herself is both educated and middle-class.24 Sahi also comments on how the female protagonists in Deshpande’s works are “fit to show the clash between idealism and pragmatism and tradition and modernity.”25 One may add to this that these clashes of modernity with tradition, manifest in the mother-daughter relation in “Why a Robin?,” in turn are produced by the cultural forces emanating from a neoliberal state.26 Further, Sahi also connects this middle-class existence of female characters to their submission to gender-defined roles and tradition, particularly through marriage. The mother’s submission to motherhood in “Why a Robin?” becomes neoliberal India’s way of making rigid previously loosely defined gender roles. It is as if the middle-class, in the moment of its emergence, is also creating the “new woman” (to use Oza’s term) who is put under the diktat of patriarchy to counter cultural anxieties that the “new woman” brings. Deshpande’s longer works also recount similar discourses; Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, while examining That Long Silence, describes the character Jaya’s writing “as an act of self-expression and liberation in so far as it leads to self-knowledge, truth-telling and catharsis, but it never becomes the communication, the entry into community, the contribution to a public discourse that its publication has resulted in its actually being.”27 For Rajan, forms of expression in the text and its relation to a community appear antithetical. My contention, however, lies elsewhere: the textual expression of isolation is also one that is born out of Deshpande’s context in neoliberal India. The act of self-expression in the stories I examine is embedded in a profound experience of isolation. This isolation is both existential and social, and it engages with the mind and body of Deshpande’s characters. Narratives like “Why a Robin?” highlight the crisis that a textual production of social isolation engenders.
I claim that the lack of community that is often stated as Deshpande’s failure is actually an aesthetic. It is an aesthetic that writes the woman, that combines the existential despair of the modern Indian woman, particularly the beauty insecurities of this Indian woman that isolate her body. It can therefore be argued that the existential crisis in Deshpande’s oeuvre is somatically produced through the body and its body image. The following discussions only cement this claim further.
Anxieties of the Aging Body in “The First Lady”
Deshpande’s short stories render themselves to a material production of body image in several ways. Foremost, the familiar is presented as an existential moment of bodily crisis—for example, in the aging body. The First Lady in the story of the same name embodies this crisis perfectly. The First Lady is a nomenclature borrowed from American ideas of polity and carries with it ideas of the power, grace, and femininity the president’s wife is supposed to symbolize. Within Deshpande’s narrative, however, the eponymous character ironically bemoans this role instead. She thinks bitterly, “Why don’t they tell me frankly that I am old and ugly and fat . . .” This is followed by the reader’s comprehension that: “Ugly . . . the word gave her a pang even as she thought of it. But then, she consoled herself, what can you expect when you’re nearly seventy?”28 Predictably, in “The First Lady,” notions of the desirable body, the ugly, and the beautiful prefigure as thematic concerns. This is presented along with the concepts of beauty and clothing, which in turn become womanly performances on display. That these beauty norms powerfully impact the seventy years of the First Lady’s life is testament to their long-lasting and strong hegemonic roots—they have been internalized by many women, including Deshpande’s protagonist. Ageist pejoratives with regard to feminine beauty are brought into the picture: perfect beauty is young, while the First Lady is not. Yet, her elegance is described in the language of the performative. And to her, liberty is the antithesis of such bodily performance. One learns this as the First Lady expresses her wish to be “sitting in my own room, with my feet tucked under me, and my bra, that is constricting me so, off, my petticoat strings loosened, my false teeth out.”29 Clearly, the narrator here is critiquing the beauty restrictions placed on her through her desire to cast them off. And later, the performance for normative beauty is played out in the language of a “pose” as she ruminates how ‘“the first lady’ the magazines called her.” She subsequently exclaims, “God! If only they knew what an effort it was to keep up the pose all the time!”30
At times in the narrative, this patriarchal diktat of performing prettified femininity is put forth as a cause of anxiety. Once such episode is when the protagonist examines her reflection in the mirror at the commencement of the short story. This reflection—thought and image—becomes a symbol of both a reflection of the self and a crisis of the community. The First Lady ruminates about not just her existential crisis but also the crises of the society at large. She laments, “It’s not that I am old and fat; it’s what I have become, what we have all become.”31 This moment coincides with her foray into politics and comments upon the condition of the country after independence. The husband politician and the difference in the political milieu are presented as a cause for crisis: the fiery speech he presents on the eve of the country’s independence in an unnamed neighborhood resonates with Nehruvian trysts with destiny. This impromptu, passionate speech before a sparse crowd is juxtaposed with the subsequent parties and socializing and the fake performances encoded therein. These performances reek of patriarchal and conservative supremacy where the woman is reduced to an object of beauty, grace, and a particular brand of passive femininity. And she becomes entirely disposable if she lacks feminine charms, specifically beauty.
The rejection of the beauty norm in this short story is linked to the rejection of the socialite pose, where dictates of conventional beauty govern disposability. The protagonist’s rejection of such a pose, linked to body image, also acts as a rejection of the socialite political imaginary that India appears to be in the story. The First Lady states outright:
Gracious and dignified! No, I’m only a tired, old woman, whose feet swell up to grotesque proportions after an evening like this. . . . When they know, and I know, that the real trouble is I’m too fat. And I’m fat because I eat too much. And I eat too much because I’m bored. And I’m bored because there’s no truth in anything we do or say.32
The protagonist’s boredom here can also be read as a reflection of the political ennui surrounding her. It is one that tries to reject the patriarchal construction of the feminine through a foregrounding of the veneer behind the performance of the political. The feminine becomes another such performance.
Stories like “The First Lady” demonstrate that norms of beauty and propriety dictate body image by negating the visceral aspect of the body. In Deshpande’s short stories, however, the visceral materiality of the body is written as a distinct marker of textual and literary spaces. Spaces, words, and narratives about the body become important. The body is, so to say, narrated into being. Aspects of childbirth, menstruation, and other literary encounters with the female body seem important to Deshpande and are described by her in detail. In fact, the impulse toward visceral femininity is also evident in Deshpande’s own memoir. The episode of the game of dice in The Mahabharata, where a menstruating Draupadi is dragged by the hair and humiliated and then responds with a very logical argument, is put forth with provocative empathy in the writer’s memoir. One finds in it the impact it has had on a young Deshpande. She writes:
There was something about that passage that fired all of us, something about Draupadi’s arguments filled us with excitement. We loved it. I remember one of the girls asking for the meaning of “rajasvala.” In the passage, Draupadi says, “Aham rajasvala asmi.” What did she mean? Our teacher, a man who did not even raise his eyes to look at us, hemmed and hawed, and finally said, using a euphemism, that it meant “I am menstruating.” What an instant connection this made between us and that heroine of ancient times!33
Here the beauty norm and the realm of the Derridean propre are rejected in favor of a more carnivalesque viscerality, one that has with it the subversive potential to craft a healthier body image. In the light of these debates, it may be claimed that Deshpande does not “astutely avoi[d] politics and its games,”34 but by narrating the body, the female body, and body image in psychosocial terms, she profoundly engages with them.
Furthermore, the materiality of the body in Deshpande’s oeuvre is presented in the aesthetic zone through the violence it is vulnerable to. The female body and the violent encounters it can possibly witness are a ritual of power that needs to be shown as significant. Women’s bodies are otherwise understood as representable in clean, glamorous, and “proper” images—such as the images in beauty magazines—without underlining the pain and suffering they can possibly experience. The violence made possible on the female body is narrated in Deshpande through the figurative. This narrativization helps in creating a distinct literary space for female body image to emerge. Deshpande’s writing, it is aptly claimed, uses a “language of silence” and carves a story out of the things communicated through silence or not communicated at all.35 And it is this silence that speaks louder than words in her characters. In the subsequent analysis of marital rape in “The Intrusion,” for instance, it is this aesthetic of silence—underlined with responses of the body—that plays a crucial role.
Dreams of Beauty and Realities of Violence in “The Intrusion”
“The Intrusion” is another short story by Deshpande where female frustrations involving a woman’s bodily experiences owing to her husband’s intrusions are addressed. “I was conscious of an unreasonable pang of irritation against him,” the narrator discloses in the very beginning.36 She follows this with a desire to protest but is unable to articulate her emotions. The narrator protagonist instead writes, “I wanted to protest, to release my arm from his constricting grip.”37 This silence (about the husband’s grip in particular and husband in general) is figured in the novel as ominous and as a lack of agency on the part of the narrator. When the narrator describes how she felt revulsion, it is in the form of a visceral aesthetic as well. The narrator-wife writes, “and I felt suddenly, completely sickened.”38 Even later in the narrative, she describes a bodily response and reveals how she “was conscious of a slight headache, a faint nausea” in her husband’s presence.39 In “The Intrusion,” therefore, the violence on the body and the literary aesthetic of violence are shown as merged through the representation of rape. Marital rape here is described in terms of the movement of the sea, with the observation that while the violence of which the sea is capable can be borne, the violence on the body cannot. The narrator describes how her husband’s “movements had the same rhythm, the same violence as the movements of the sea” and later states that she “could have borne the battering of the sea better, for that would hurt but not humiliate like this.”40 In the plot of “The Intrusion,” the sexual violation that the protagonist’s body undergoes is linked to the imagery of violence in the literary space created. Yet the aspect that rape is not just violence on the body but also a form of torturous humiliation and a specific ritual of power gets highlighted.
In addition, “The Intrusion” appears to be narrating one’s personal truth: the narrator survivor wishes to elaborate on the events as if to speak truth to power. More importantly, the linking of the text with the body prefigures, in this short story, the incident when the woman narrator of the story reads a book of erotica. The images of erotic beauty born out of male fantasies that the newly married narrator reads about are presented as the ideal she must emulate and thus feels tortured by. She confesses, “Quietly I went to my bed and lay down, trying to sleep, while countless erotic images came out of the pages of the book I had read and tortured my distracted mind.”41 The narrator internalizes norms of beauty through such patriarchal images of beauty, in this case through the book of erotica, and is traumatized by it.
The sexual violence encountered by Deshpande’s woman narrator in “The Intrusion” may hereafter be read as a critique of the beauty myth, which as an ideal unleashes enormous violence on women across the world.42 The images of beauty or sexual desirability that are used against women, according to Naomi Wolf, make them internalize body dissatisfaction. The erotic book Deshpande’s narrator protagonist reads seems to portray patriarchal notions of sexuality, which she then internalizes. As a result, she labels herself frigid. One knows that representation of women in heteropatriarchy is posited as a binary, and since the narrator does not deem herself to be one of those sexually glamorized other women, she concludes that she must be frigid. The narrator-protagonist writes, “There was something furtive about the place, . . . which made me feel that the men who came here did so with ‘other women’—girls, perhaps, bold-faced and experienced, who would laugh and chat with the men.”43 This ideological internalization of frigidity, and of body image dissatisfaction, acts as a powerful tool for patriarchy to justify men’s domination over their wives and even marital rape.
Be that as it may, Deshpande’s book of short stories becomes a different book, one where the aesthetics vary from the patriarchal erotica that the woman narrator of “The Intrusion” reads. Notably, the violence of the rape itself is not aestheticized to the point of sensationalism in Deshpande’s story, however. Instead, bodily encounters with sexual violence are implicitly embodied in a textual space to articulate the truth hidden behind (patriarchal) power and women’s internalized self-denigration. Significantly, Deshpande creates an aesthetic, understated yet strong textual space in which she narrates violence as a material reality, making it a compelling aspect of literary writing of the female body.
Shashi Deshpande and the Literary Aesthetic of the Female Body
Female body image in literary spaces as an image of the body and as the literary representation of the body is effectuated powerfully by Deshpande. Thus, her narratives contain a strong impulse to narrate the female body into being. This is a process of becoming whereby the body is narrated and therefore a space is carved out for the body. No doubt this space of the female body that gets written is distinctly bourgeois, domestic, and interiorized and responds to the sociocultural forces governing neoliberal India. Yet, in each of Deshpande’s stories discussed here are narratives of middle-class Indian women and their domestic and private lives, as well as the psychic depths of the interior mind. Those outside these depths and spaces—the nonbourgeois, the nondomestic, the non-Savarna (those opposing caste hierarchies)—by implication are perhaps absent in this schema. Arguably, these social groups are conspicuously absent in order for the text to carve out a textual space for the middle-class woman. This, it is true, might have to do with the formulaic feminist writing carried out “under western eyes,”44 as well as because of the politics of worldwide publishing, all of which apply to Deshpande’s position as a neoliberal Indian writer.
Simran Chadha examines how, in Deshpande’s oeuvre, the text introduces and carves out “a homogenised species called the Bharatiya Nari made popular by Indian cinema to a more nuanced and specific urban middle-class Indian educated woman.”45 Chadha here is correct that regional specificities, for instance, are not acknowledged. A universalization of bourgeois concerns also takes place in Deshpande’s writing. However, it is my opinion that this aspect of homogenization also needs to be contextualized. The bourgeois feminism of Deshpande can be attributed to the neoliberalist impulse to privatize India during the 1990s. While neoliberalism has already been discussed, the notion that it brought with it a particular brand of neoliberal feminism remains unexplored. Here, literary history (through Deshpande’s oeuvre) and economic history (the liberalization, privatization, and globalization regime of the 1990s) seem fused together. In this context, Maitreyi Chaudhuri remarks how gender and economics have always gone hand in hand. As a Marxist feminist, Chaudhuri explains how gendered images of modernity, through advertising, for instance, rely “on the argument that they can be fruitfully understood as the rhetoric of India’s project of globalization.”46 For Chaudhuri, it is the economic realization of policy that impacts gender and affects notions of femininity, masculinity, and beyond. This argument, I insist, can be extended further to suggest that literary production is part of the economic discourse that impacts gender in a certain way that Chaudhuri insists. Implications of this dynamic appear powerfully in the literary narratives of Deshpande—and, as demonstrated here, in her crafting of the female body.
In fact, the impact of economics on gender identity and female body image is found in Deshpande’s own memoir as well. In Listen to Me, Deshpande’s own associations of modernity and sophistication with a commodity culture that creates particular notions of gender are clearly articulated. The author writes, “I can remember taking a step from this towards sophistication, when we made our first acquaintance with nail polish, which was then known as Cutex.”47 It is thus clear how the advent of neoliberalism and economics leaves its trace on literature and literary musings. Since literature is impacted by the politics of the publishing market, and since norms of beauty also follow the standards of this market, one finds its profound impact on a writer like Deshpande and her bourgeois female characters.
Much has been written on India’s recast culture, tradition, and women in the colonial period and how the woman question became a site for redefining what constituted India’s tradition and culture.48 Following this, India’s neoliberal culture is in a process of flux and has directly impacted its women, “real and imagined,” actual as well as literary.49 In addition, there has been a move to interiority and a domestication of the neoliberal project wherein its commercial forces have made a powerful entry within domestic spaces. Not surprisingly, then, neoliberalism becomes both privatized and domesticized in its literary avatar. However, instead of looking at this moment of interiority and privatization as failure, as Rajan does,50 the effort in this chapter has been to recognize the intertwined existentialist crisis that such interiority exercises on the body. This intertwining creates a textual space for the body as a crisis of bourgeois subjectivity. It is as if this textual space, such as in Deshpande’s case, is contesting the impact and the glamour of the neoliberal norms of body image and therefore the neoliberal production of femininity by incorporating it as a crisis. This complex admixture of forces greatly shaped the imaginative trajectories of Deshpande’s literary corpus where the female body appears as a poignant site of cultural engraving.
Appropriately, the neoliberal recasting of femininity is substantiated in the textual space of Deshpande’s works as a crisis. For example, in “The First Lady,” this crisis is depicted as the female character gazes at the mirror. The female gaze (mirrored by the woman author) of the First Lady is shown to be caught up in a moment of anxiety. Deshpande recounts how the First Lady “moved heavily towards the dressing-table and sat before it, staring anxiously at her reflection.”51 Here not only is the woman looking at her reflection, she is anxious about her mirrored self. The trope of the woman gazing at her reflection, though old, is replete with symbolism that is both patriarchal and antipatriarchal. If one considers the line quoted previous, the woman is looking not only at the image of her body but also at her body image. In the given lines, she is also staring anxiously at what is reflected in the mirror. The anxiety that the woman’s reflection creates gives truth to the feminist claim that women’s bodies are policed and regulated in patriarchy through the beauty myth that causes negative body perceptions among women.52 However, this line contours another concern as well. The image of the woman anxious about her reflection also figuratively creates a sense of anxiety about women’s representation, both in life and in literature. The woman anxiously gazing at the mirror symbolizes the anxiety of what women as subjects under a neoliberal regime are in the process of becoming.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I argue that a patriarchal norm of beauty informs a script for reading the female body. Deshpande’s short stories, especially the ones examined here, render themselves to a material production of body image in four ways. First, the familiar is presented as an existential moment of bodily crisis—for example, in the aging body. Notions of the desirable body, the ugly, and the beautiful prefigure here as thematic concerns. Second, the visceral materiality of the body is written as a distinct marker of textual and literary space. Spaces, words, and narratives about the body become important. The body is, so to speak, narrated into being. Third, violence on the body is narrated through the figurative, creating a distinct literary space for female body image to emerge. This is what occurs in the narration of the marital rape in “The Intrusion,” for instance. Rape and its representation are shown to break away from a patriarchal display of sensationalism.53 Fourth, this space of the feminine body within the literary imagination is distinctly bourgeois, domestic, and interiorized. Deshpande’s bourgeois feminism here can be attributed to the neoliberal impulse to privatize that began with the 1990s in India. Yet, instead of looking at this moment of interiority and privatization entirely as a failure or an oppressive project, the effort in this chapter has been to recognize the intertwined existentialist crisis that neoliberal tendencies create on the female body. This intertwining creates a textual space for the body as a crisis of bourgeois subjectivity that Shashi Deshpande’s fiction provocatively captures.
NOTES
1. Body image issues among women have been recurrently highlighted by many contemporary scholars. See Cash, Encyclopaedia of Body Image; Cash and Smolak, Body Image; and Grogan, Body Image.
2. See Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 39.
3. See Eisenhower, “Farewell Address.”
4. See more about caste and gendered violence in India in Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit.
5. See Tiggeman, “Sociocultural Perspectives,” 12–20, emphasis added.
6. See the take of psychologists on this issue in Shroff and Thompson, “Body Image.”
7. Shroff and Thompson, 198.
8. What Western theorists have established on this issue is also largely true for the Indian context. See Levine and Chapman, “Media Influences on Body Image,” 101.
9. See discussions by Gopal, The Indian English Novel, and Mehrotra, A History of Indian Literature.
10. This is Mohanty’s central argument and also Sunder Rajan’s take on Deshpande. See Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”; Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes’ Revisited”; and Rajan, “The Heroine’s Progress.”
11. Cash and Smolak, Body Image; Bartky, Femininity and Domination; Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Grogan, Body Image; Orbach, Hunger Strike; and Brownmiller, Femininity.
12. Oza, The Making, 11.
13. Dutta, “MacDonaldization of Gender.”
14. See Chaudhuri, “Gender and Advertisements.”
15. See Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women.
16. These include, but are not limited to, the writer’s thematic preoccupations with ideal femininity and its challenges, the textual production of writing in a global language like English, and her contextual placement in nascent neoliberal India.
17. Oza, The Making.
18. Oza, 18.
19. Deshpande, The Intrusion and Other Stories, “Why a Robin.”
20. Deshpande.
21. Here I refer to Wolf’s famous and in many ways universal take on the cruel injunctions of the body beautiful on women’s lives and minds. Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
22. Recent theorists have added to the debate on female beauty and body image started by third-wave feminists like Naomi Wolf and Susan Bordo. See Liebelt, Böllinger, and Vierke, Beauty and the Norm.
23. To understand how appearance and identity are intertwined for social acceptability, see Butler, Bodies That Matter.
24. Sahi, “Human Relationship,” 167.
25. Sahi, 186.
26. It must be remembered that the publication of these stories was in 1993, and the neoliberalization of India in the 1990s was not a mere coincidence.
27. Rajan, “The Heroine’s Progress,” 227.
28. Deshpande, The Intrusion, “The First Lady.”
29. Deshpande.
30. Deshpande, emphasis added.
31. Deshpande, emphasis added.
32. Deshpande.
33. Deshpande, Listen to Me, 37–38.
34. Some of the charges leveled against Deshpande include these. See Bande, “A Woman’s Dilemmas.”
35. Chakravarty, Indian Literature, 188.
36. Deshpande, The Intrusion, “The Intrusion.”
37. Deshpande.
38. Deshpande.
39. Deshpande.
40. Deshpande.
41. Deshpande, emphasis added.
42. Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
43. Deshpande, The Intrusion, “The Intrusion.”
44. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 61.
45. Chadha, “IE Fiction,” 241.
46. Chaudhuri, “Gender and Advertisements,” 373.
47. Deshpande, Listen to Me, 16.
48. Sangari and Vaid, “Recasting Women”; Chaudhuri, “Gender and Advertisements.”
49. Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, 123.
50. Rajan.
51. Deshpande, The Intrusion, “The First Lady.”
52. Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
53. Higgins and Silver, Rape and Representation. Higgins and Silver present a feminist analysis of the patriarchal uses of the aestheticization of rape and the erasure of the feminine voice within artistic representation.
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