A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Introduction:

Virginia Woolf, the English author, feminist, essayist, publisher and critic,was one of the founders
of modernist movement. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 th January 1882 in London, as the
daughter of Leslie Stephen, a man of letters and Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of Duckworth
publishing family. Her youth was a traumatic one shadowed by a series of emotional shocks,with
the early deaths of her mother and brother, a history of sexual abuse and the beginnings of a
depressive mental illness that plagued her intermittently throughout her life. Following the death of
her father in 1904, Woolf, along with her sister and two brothers moved to the house in Bloomsbury
where they befriended Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes. This was
the nucleus of Bloomsbury group. Later in 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, the political theorist,
writer and critic. Woolfs books were published by Hogarth Press, which she founded with her
husband. During the Nazi invasion, Woolf and Leonard made provisions to kill themselves. After
the final attack of mental illness, Woolf loaded her pockets full of stones and drowned herself in the
river Ouse on March 28, 1941. On her note to her husband she wrote I have a feeling I shall go
mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work.
I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on
and spoil your life.
The Voyage Out (1915) was Woolfs first book. Her other works include Jacobs Room (1922), Mrs.
Dalloway (1925) To the Light House (1927), The Waves (1931) Orlando: A Biography (1928), A
Room of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)

A ROOM OF ONES OWN: AN OVERVIEW

A Room of Ones Own was first published on 24th October 1929 by the Hogarth Press in England. In
October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered a lecture on Women and Fiction at Newnham (the college
established especially for women), and Girton (the first British college which accepted women
students) colleges under Cambridge University. These talks on the topic Women and Fiction were
later revised and devised into a full length book titled 'A Room of Ones Own'. 'A Room of Ones
Own' is considered the first major work in feminist criticism. Woolf analyses womens struggle as
artists, their position in literary history and their need for independence citing Bronte sisters and
Jane Austen as examples. By incorporating real and fictional people into the essay, Woolf tries to
find answer to the historical and contemporary questions regarding womens art and social position.
Woolf says that it is the gender consciousness of both women and men that cripple their creative
genius. Men derogate women to safeguard their dominance in the society whereas women become
angry and insecure about
their inferior status. According to Woolf, a real genius should possess an androgynous (borrowing
Coleridges term) mind so that their writings will reflect both male and female feelings. The mantra
which runs throughout the essay is that a woman must possess 500 pounds and a room of her own if
she is to write creatively.

Summary
The dramatic setting of A Room of One's Own is that Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic
of Women and Fiction. She advances the thesis that "a woman must have money and a room of her
own if she is to write fiction." Her essay is constructed as a partly-fictionalized narrative of the
thinking that led her to adopt this thesis. She dramatizes that mental process in the character of an
imaginary narrator ("call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please
it is not a matter of any importance") who is in her same position, wrestling with the same topic.

The narrator begins her investigation at Oxbridge College, where she reflects on the different
educational experiences available to men and women as well as on more material differences in
their lives. She then spends a day in the British Library perusing the scholarship on women, all of
which has written by men and all of which has been written in anger. Turning to history, she finds so
little data about the everyday lives of women that she decides to reconstruct their existence
imaginatively. The figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an example of the tragic fate a
highly intelligent woman would have met with under those circumstances. In light of this
background, she considers the achievements of the major women novelists of the nineteenth century
and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. A survey of the current state of
literature follows, conducted through a reading the first novel of one of the narrator's
contemporaries. Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up the
tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to increase the endowment for their own
daughters.

The Narrator
The unnamed female narrator is the only major character in A Room of Ones Own. She refers to
herself only as I; in chapter one of the text, she tells the reader to call her Mary Beton, Mary
Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please . . . The narrator assumes each of these
names at various points throughout the text. The constantly shifting nature of her identity
complicates her narrative even more, since we must consider carefully who she is at any given
moment. However, her shifting identity also gives her a more universal voice: by taking on different
names and identities, the narrator emphasizes that her words apply to all women, not just herself.
The dramatic setting for A Room of Ones Own is Woolfs thought process in preparation for giving
a lecture on the topic women and fiction. But the fictionalized narrator is distinct from the author
Woolf. The narrator lends a storylike quality to the text, and she often blends fact and fiction to
prove her points. Her liberty with factuality suggests that no irrefutable truth exists in the worldall
truth is relative and subjective.
The narrator is an erudite and engaging storyteller, and she uses the book to explore the multifaceted
and rather complicated history of literary achievement. Her provocative inquiries into the status quo
of literature force readers to question the widely held assumption that women are inferior writers,
compared to men, and this is why there is a dearth of memorable literary works by women. This
literary journey is highlighted by numerous actual journeys, such as the journey around Oxbridge
College and her tour of the British library. She interweaves her journeys with her own theories about
the worldincluding the principle of incandescence. Woolf defines incandescence as the state in
which everything is personal burns away and what is left is the nugget of pure truth in the art.
This is the ideal state in which everything is consumed in the intensity and truth of ones art. The
narrator skillfully leads the reader through one of the most important works of feminist literary
history to date.
Themes

The Importance of Money

For the narrator of A Room of Ones Own, money is the primary element that prevents women from
having a room of their own, and thus, having money is of the utmost importance. Because women
do not have power, their creativity has been systematically stifled throughout the ages. The narrator
writes, Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual
freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the
beginning of time . . . She uses this quotation to explain why so few women have written
successful poetry. She believes that the writing of novels lends itself more easily to frequent starts
and stops, so women are more likely to write novels than poetry: women must contend with
frequent interruptions because they are so often deprived of a room of their own in which to write.
Without money, the narrator implies, women will remain in second place to their creative male
counterparts. The financial discrepancy between men and women at the time of Woolfs writing
perpetuated the myth that women were less successful writers.

The Subjectivity of Truth

In A Room of Ones Own, the narrator argues that even history is subjective. What she seeks is
nothing less than the essential oil of truth, but this eludes her, and she eventually concludes that
no such thing exists. The narrator later writes, When a subject is highly controversial, one cannot
hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
To demonstrate the idea that opinion is the only thing that a person can actually prove, she
fictionalizes her lecture, claiming, Fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact. Reality is not
objective: rather, it is contingent upon the circumstances of ones world. This argument complicates
her narrative: Woolf forces her reader to question the veracity of everything she has presented as
truth so far, and yet she also tells them that the fictional parts of any story contain more essential
truth than the factual parts. With this observation she recasts the accepted truths and opinions of
countless literary works.

Gender Inequality
Throughout A Room of Ones Own, the narrator emphasizes the fact that women are treated
unequally in her society and that this is why they have produced less impressive works of writing
than men. To illustrate her point, the narrator creates a woman named Judith Shakespeare, the
imaginary twin sister of William Shakespeare. The narrator uses Judith to show how society
systematically discriminates against women. Judith is just as talented as her brother William, but
while his talents are recognized and encouraged by their family and the rest of their society, Judiths
are underestimated and explicitly deemphasized. Judith writes, but she is secretive and ashamed of
it. She is engaged at a fairly young age; when she begs not to have to marry, her beloved father beats
her. She eventually commits suicide. The narrator invents the tragic figure of Judith to prove that a
woman as talented as Shakespeare could never have achieved such success. Talent is an essential
component of Shakespeares success, but because women are treated so differently, a female
Shakespeare would have fared quite differently even if shed had as much talent as Shakespeare did.

A Room of Ones Own

The central point of A Room of Ones Own is that every woman needs a room of her own
something men are able to enjoy without question. A room of her own would provide a woman with
the time and the space to engage in uninterrupted writing time. During Woolfs time, women rarely
enjoyed these luxuries. They remained elusive to women, and, as a result, their art suffered. But
Woolf is concerned with more than just the room itself. She uses the room as a symbol for many
larger issues, such as privacy, leisure time, and financial independence, each of which is an essential
component of the countless inequalities between men and women. Woolf predicts that until these
inequalities are rectified, women will remain second-class citizens and their literary achievements
will also be branded as such.

Analysis
Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own is a landmark of twentieth-century feminist thought. It
explores the history of women in literature through an unconventional and highly provocative
investigation of the social and material conditions required for the writing of literature. These
conditionsleisure time, privacy, and financial independence underwrite all literary production,
but they are particularly relevant to understanding the situation of women in the literary tradition
because women, historically, have been uniformly deprived of those basic prerequisites.

In her exploration of this idea, Woolf launches a number of provocative sociological and aesthetic
critiques. She reviews not only the state of women's own literature, but also the state of scholarship,
both theoretical and historical, concerning women. She also elaborates an aesthetics based on the
principle of "incandescence," the ideal state in which everything that is merely personal is consumed
in the intensity and truth of one's art.

Just as Woolf speaks out against traditional hierarchies in the content of her essay, so, too, does she
reject standard logical argumentation in her essay's form. Woolf innovatively draws on the resources
of fiction to compensate for gaps in the factual record about women and to counter the biases that
infect more conventional scholarship. She writes a history of a woman's thinking about the history
of thinking women: her essay is a reconstruction and a reenactment as well as an argument.

Custody by Manju Kapur

Manju Kapur taught English literature in Miranda House College, Delhi University for over 25
years. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters published in 1998, won the Commonwealth Prize for
best first novel,Eurasia region. Her second novel, A Married Woman published in 2002 was
shortlisted for the Encore Award, her third, Home in 2006, was shortlisted for the Hutch-Crossword
prize, and the fourth The Immigrant , 2008 was short listed for the India Plaza Golden Quill Award,
and the DSC Prize of South Asian Literature in 2010. Her fifth novel Custody, published in 2011
has been the basis of Yeh Hai Mohabbatein, a serial by Balaji Telefilms. She has also edited
Shaping the World : Women Writers on Themselves, 2014.

The plot of Custody revolves around the legal tussle for custody once the marriage of Raman and
Shagun falls apart following Shaguns affair with Ramans boss Ashok. The children- Arjun and
Roohi- become mere pawns in their parents divorce. The book basically looks closely at the end of
a marriage its after effects.

Characters: There is the family at the centre of the drama. Raman and Shagun, a seeminly well-
adjusted and happy couple and their two children Arjun, 10, and Roohi, 2, at the time of the divorce.

Raman- is an all-round good guy, he loves his wife and he loves his kids. Bright, with a promising
future in a famous multinational company he is a good catch for Shagun. He loves his wife and
clearly smitten and taken in by her good looks. He is a regular, guy-next-door sort of man, the kind
of man who has a nice arranged marriage to a good-looking woman. Raman was a fairly likeable
character and I did feel bad for him once his marriage ends. He loved Shagun and didnt deserve her
cheating on him.

Shagun- the cheating spouse/ the spouse with the looks is at best a one-dimensional character. She is
a negative-ish character, the one who stepped out on her husband and her marriage. To make matters
worse its her husbands boss that she steps out with. Shagun came across as a brash, spoilt and
selfish person. Someone who puts her own happiness over anything else in her life, and this is not
just in regard to her affair but later in the book, she doesnt even really care about her kids. I didnt
like her very much and wished her character was a little more fleshed out.

Ashok Khanna- the other man! He is present quite a bit in the beginning of the book. He is suave,
worldly and brilliant. Went to Ivy League schools and is a bit of a star in a corporate world- which
basically translates toof course, Shagun would fall for him. He was committed to Shagun and is
really supportive of her divorce and helps out with the legal hassles. As the story progresses, he gets
a little tired of Shaguns constant worrying about her custody disputes, he wants Shagun to focus on
her new life and not on her old family. So I guess Shagun does end up someone just as selfish as
her!

Arjun and Roohi- the pawns in the great divorce drama. Arjun is 10 when his parents split up and is
affected deeply by the change in his family life. He stops going to school, because everyone in his
school knows about the impending divorce. His grades begin to slip and he really misses his father,
whom he is being kept away from. Eventually, Arjun is sent-off to boarding school, Ashoks alma
materin fact after Ashok uses his connections to get Arjun a seat. This marks the end of Arjuns
relationship with his father and was heart breaking to read. Roohi, young at the time of her parents
divorce, grows up not remembering a time when her family was whole. Roohi is raised by Raman
and his new wife Ishita and grows to love Ishita as one would a real mother.

Ishita- Ramans new wife, she is everything Shagun wasnt. Kind and compassionate, she has a
broken marriage behind her and that makes her the person she is. With her tragic past behind her,
Ishita reinvents herself and her life and becomes a strong woman. One likes Ishitas part of the
story, from her early marriage to her struggles within the marriage and her eventual divorce. Once
she marries Raman, is when one had some problems with her character. She got too clingy with
Roohi and caused a lot of strive in the already frail equation between Raman and Shagun.

In Manju Kapur, theme of a marriage preceded or fragmented by a socially unacceptable romance

has emerged again and again in her novels. It is also discernible in her novel, Custody (2011). The
novel deals with marriages that collapse, social hypocrisies and battles for children that intertwine
with anguish and conflict depicting a worldwide reality of the politics of possessiveness and
unequal power relations in patriarchal families. Here the common myth that conceives the family as
a unit for emotional and economic security, sense of community, identity and social status, is belied
and exposes the family as a site for constraint, oppression, violence, possessiveness and
disintegration.
The story unfolds the subject of matrimony is at its most intolerable followed by the emotional fall-
out of the break-up of one wealthy extended Delhi family. The protagonist couple is introduced just
as their troubles come to fore. Their relationship comes to a juddering end when Shagun, the
beautiful wife of Raman, falls in love of his far more charismatic boss and hot-shot sales executive,
Ashok Khanna. The affair ignites the book's ferocious momentum as it follows them through
separation, divorce, re-marriage and a crescendo of a custody battle in all its legal chicanery and
psychological ugliness. The two children, Arjun and Roohi, become the pawns through which their
parents unleash their fury on each other. It is a relationship where the husband is egoist and stoic;
who wishes to treat her like a doormat, and the wife, a woman less than docile and subservient,
aspires for a life that soars to the zenith of romanticism. She does not want to accept the treatment
as her fate which seems to be lifeless in totality. She has almost created or finds herself in a situation
which fails to be benefitting any member of the family. The worst hit, are the children, whose
childhood is stunted in a stifling atmosphere of the house. Such a relationship is nothing but a
chaos, and leads to either a disaster or a miserable and pathetic end. The collapse of this marriage is
explored from multiple angles making for a nuanced rendition of the situation. From the beginning
of the story one perceives that a marriage like this is bound to fail.
The novel starts at the point where both Raman and Shagun have nothing in common, nor do they
seem to possess any hope of promising future which can guarantee a happy life ahead. Though their
marriage had been arranged along standard lines, she the beauty, he the one with the brilliant
prospects (2) but these prospects make Raman rather practical, and put the marriage on stake. He
spends long hours working for a successful company that manufactures soft drinks. It is the
beginning of globalization, and rising Indian enterprises are projecting their business round the
country and abroad. Raman is the stereotypical depiction of the hard-working man and a kind of
trophy in this family-arranged alliance for his perseverance and dexterity. At the beginning of the
story we see him in his traditional role of father and husband; of the head of the family who goes
out to the world to fight and make money of one who has to be looked after when he comes back
home, but also who does not care much for his own wife or children. His professional career seems
to have screened his familial life in the clouds of uncertainty. It made Shagun realize within no time
that there was nothing promising in this married life. As a result of it the marriage fell into
unanswerable questions.
The dissatisfaction that occurs in most marriages was not allowed dissipation; instead, she clung to
reasons to justify her unfaithfulness. (3)
Daily both of them started their life disinterestedly having some complains that did not mean to be
heard, and sensing the seeds of dissolution of their nuptial tie. In the very starting of the novel the
marriage has been revealed to be devoid of any zeal. Only an inconspicuous tinge of guilt was there
in their minds.
The woman left first; she believed that the spirits of the universe at the service of betrayed partners
were tracking her movements, keeping of note of incriminating times and places. (4)
It looked as if Raman had already considered this impending separation as their destiny, a kind of
fate that he did not even wish to evade. Perhaps the kind of work that Raman did demanded his
attention more than in anything, and as such drained him of his interest in his wife. The lack of
enthusiasm Shagun suggested in him was also because of this only. Both of them expected each
other to initiate and understand their plight but both failed. As a result of which the breach kept on
widening.
Raman thought of his wife and the distance he had begun to feel between them. May be it was the
baby she hadnt really wanted, may be it was all the travelling he had to do, had always had to do.
(5)
With the passage of time this ingrained a sense of aloofness in her, and with the same pace it
became a matter of feminine assertions which Shagun did not fail to discern. She starts considering
her life in her own terms which should not acknowledge the male chauvinism. A sense of liberty in
the terms of decision of her life began to manifest itself more forcefully. Even child bearing and
child rearing seemed to have put shackles in her feet confining her life to mere the boundary of a
typical household. A desire to cherish the prime time of her life dawned on her, and took the shape
of clash with Raman when the latter asserted that she should devote herself to their son. Its not
that. Ill be thirty, Arjun is just becoming independent, I dont want to start all over again. Always
tied to a child. (6) Her feminism expects her to lead her life in her own direction without any other
consideration. She even asserts this to Raman making him realize how lonely and monotonous life
she has to endure. I want something else in my life, cant you understand that? We always meet the
same people, talk about the same things over and over. Its boring. (7)
She urges that he does not wish her to have a life of her own.
When she turned inwards where her life was waiting to be examined, she blamed Raman for her
predicament, thinking of the years she had been satisfied with his lovemaking, tender, attentive, as
so much wasted time. (8)
Ashoks (Ramans boss) looming large before her and her falling in his love clearly suggests that
even fate also wills her life in this way only. A curtain is drawn between her normal life and another
secret one, more charged than anything she knew previously. She stops using Ramans name. It
seems too intrusive. By now she has understood that he is a man of narrow and intense passions;
one who lives, sleeps and eats only business.
The complication aggravates when Shagun does not show any deep regard for Ramans parents.
This irritates him, and kills all the feelingshe could spare for her for the sake of his parental family.
The common link between them seems to be snapped. Ramans rage and bewilderment are both
understandable, but it is equally clear why any woman might not wish to stay married to him.
Ramans tedious self-righteousness grates, and is only occasionally relieved by a flash of
personality. He fails to understand what his wife wants, and how she feels. His traditional mind like
his parents would never question this. They would automatically assume that a womans selfhood,
status, respectability and realization lie in wifehood and motherhood. He knew, His mother
expected respect, deference and love from her daughter-in-law plus an undisputed supremacy in her
little grandsons heart, all she was never going to get. (9)
Actually the kind of atmosphere she received from her mother ingrained in her a revolting instinct
from the very beginning. She was deprived of what she wanted to be in her life. Her spirit, like that
of so many other women, was different. She could never be able to guide her life in her own way;
everything was decided by parents, family, cultural customs. She wanted to be a model, but her
mother strongly opposed to a career that would allow all kinds of lechery near her lovely daughter.
Her mother suggested that whatever she wanted to be she could be after marriage but then there had
been a child quite early. Then the claims of husband, family and friends made a career hard to
justify, especially since money was not an issue. Shagun mother found the tinge of the evil
consequences of her violating the family norms in leading her life on her own. Even she warned her
when she revealed her feminine assertions, You think all wives love their husbands? But they stay
married. You are idealistic, you dont think about the long term. What about the society, what about
the children?
Raman could not realize this simple thing that he did not own the whole of Shagun; her desires, her
longings and her expectations from her life had to be realized and respected. He did not try to come
to the terms with the fact that in this world where each sex requires space to co-exist and flourish,
he had to break out of the age-old shell, and accept, and recognize the importance of woman, not
only in his life and house but also in the society. The main trouble with Raman was that he
swallowed her up, leaving no space to breathe. He began to suspect her, and even got her tracked.
Raman didnt trust the world when it came to his wife. He discovers the faithlessness of his wife
with the help of a detective, and is so enraged that he is determines to take his revenge at whatever
cost. In this situation of the house one can hardly conceive the idea of ease in the household when
its head has been offended; his honour has been insulted, and his powerful male chauvinist instincts
cannot allow this public affront. But the result suggests something else as at the detectives it
sounded so horribly intimate. He sat in shamed gloominess as he felt the sanctity of his family
violated. The horrifying aftermaths of his getting his wife tracked vanquished him even more than
anything else ever in his entire life. He could not help ruminating that-
No protest, however strong, could get back the security he had lost. He remained bent over his
desk simulating work, as the office slowly emptied.
Bitterness filled him, and he could not help chiding himself as to how stupid he was to be betrayed
by the two most important people at work and at home.
The breach between Raman and Shagun even gulfed rather widely when Shagun became aware of
her being chased by her husband. The disclosure that he had had her followed all of a sudden made
her hate him. She felt like challenging the male dominated and patriarchal mechanisms of
surveillance and control. When her mother advised her to be faithful to her husband, she pondered
over this matter expecting to make amends. In the absence of Raman she- Made a thousand
resolutions; be wife-like, be good, docile, compliant, but the mere sight of him sent these decisions
out of the window.
The doubts in her mind about her being faithless to her husband, society, children and her mothers
fears, and her being schizophrenic were repelled by Ashok (her lover) when he suggested that,
Traditional versus modern values, individual versus society this narrow social set-up is all you
know thats why you are afraid. But it will be all fine, fine. Trust me, darling. Here at this point
the dilemma of an educated and professional woman who encounters competing ideologies of
traditional femininity and empowered femininity has also been depicted. Shaguns act of sexual
violation celebrates female sexual self-assertion embodied in a new feministic assumption that
woman is a desiring subject with an intense longing for sexual expression, satisfaction and
fulfillment. Shagun follows her heart, and seeks a divorce from Raman, and embarks on a new life
with Ashok. So, the institution of marriage which in our country is much more than sex and children
is thwarted of its sacredness through divorce. The battle lines are drawn, and both parties are ready
to fight to its end. Battle for custody is initiated from Shaguns side, you know I hated all this hole-
in-corner stuff. If you have to get a divorce, fight for the custody, lets start now. Deciding to be
separated she roused herself to bid farewell to her intense secret world, with its perilous edge of
desire and its hours devoted to subterfuge. The cycle of rage between them not only fuels itself but
is complicated by the new stepmothers and fathers acquired through second marriages. Perhaps this
lack of social judgment stems from the period of an India of the 1990s which is entering the world
economy on a more ambitious footing, and in which the idea of family duty has been overridden by
individualism. As Shagun says in her critique of the old world, It was part of the Indian disease.
Ashok was always going on about stultifying tradition. The great Indian family, which rested on the
sacrifices of its women.
Result was Ramans undergoing a severe heart attack. But this also failed to bring Shagun close to
him. It did not matter to her even an ounce. In order to reveal his anguish he decides instantaneously
to reject Shaguns request of divorce and any amiable negotiation or dialogue to solve matters.
Owing to his childish attitude and his wounded-male ego he lacks goodwill to solve things
rationally, and avoid the suffering of the children, even if he insists that he loves them a lot. One
wonders what kind of love this is, but selfish and self-seeking. Rather he treats his children as his
instrumental weapons to battle Shagun, restore his good name, and subtly let it be called love.
After all she is the one who has abandoned her home for another man. On the other hand Shagun
herself does not want to sacrifice her own life and happiness. She wills to be a satisfied career
woman, and to build her own space in the world. She also determines not to repent and come back
to him.
Bereaved from Shagun and in sheer dismay he remained sobbing in the night cursing his marriage
that turned out to be more than a dismal nightmare. Now he felt the only respite in his life in the
form of separation. Divorce was certain but the custody of the children was to be decided, and one
evening adding the fuel to fire Shagun took the children stealthily. The children became just
plaything. Whosoever willed, took them. They became the most unfortunate ones. The legal fight
began but neither of them knew that, the law was a cut-and-dried business, once you got swamped
in outrage, indignation, grief and anger, you are nowhere.
Though she took the children with her but with Ashok it was not certain that they could find
conducive living conditions as Ashok came off worst of all the possessors. A business school degree
rendered him incapable of thinking in non-business terms, and his marketing job filled his head with
clich. The children become the familys material stakes. Within no time the sign of this
estrangement, and its consequence erupted in the form of Roohis, the daughter, becoming victim of
slight nerves disorder, and as such she seemed to be quite withdrawn. Similar was the condition of
Arjun, the son. His performance in studies suffered quite evidently. As he remained with his mother,
he also underwent brainwash on the part of his mother. Consequently he became almost indifferent
to Raman. The worse happened in the form of his admission in a boarding school which left Raman
at the back seat. The court also did not do much favour to Raman other than the right of visitation
every weekend. Finally both of them divorced, and for Raman his obsession about his life with
Shagun ended. For him- It would be prudent to forget her existence as quickly as possible. From
now he would devote himself to his children.
A new chapter in Ramans life began with the advent of an unfortunate divorcee who was thrown
into Ramans path by his parents. Ramans marriage is not the only one that failed. Dissolution of
Ishitas marriage also gives new implications which became her misfortune. Her marriage collapsed
because she could not have children of her own. In this connection it is said that,
Marriage continues to have material, social and symbolic meanings and consequences which are
asymmetrical in terms of their implications for females and males in at least three significant ways.
Firstly, selfhood, respectability and status are tied to wifehood and motherhood in more exacting
ways than they are to being a husband and/or father. A single man or a man without children is seen
as unfortunate, but a woman in a similar situation is inauspicious, possibly dangerous.
Ishita had an arranged marriage but as soon as her husband and in-laws discovered that she could
not conceive, despite the many painful and tedious medical treatments she had undergone, she felt
small and psychologically distorted and- Smaller than the ants on the ground, smaller than the
motes of the dust in the sunlit air, smaller than drops of dew caught between blades of grass in the
morning.
Ishita thought as she sat in the gynecologists office that she could not conceive, whereupon SK had
decided he could not love her. So asymmetrical are the negotiations and terms of marriage in her
family based on material acquisitions (or possessions) that even her mother said- For us money is
not as important as family. But beta, it is essential that Suryakanta have a child. As the only son, he
has to make sure that the bloodline of his forefathers continues.
Life gave her a second opportunity as a social worker in Mrs. Hingoranis NGO, and she considered
adoption even, but her psychological feebleness and her constant exposition to the subtle ideology
that regards women as procreators and guardians of the family, community honour and purity made
her hate herself and her own sexuality:
If only she could tear out her whole reproductive system and throw it on the road. She hated her
body, hated it. Everybody in the building must know why she had come back. Return to sender.
She was a victim of spineless husband, pressurized into divorcing a wife just because she had a
womb that did not function. As Reber comments:
Child bearing has been viewed as a valuable gender-specific role to married women. Therefore,
women who are unable to bear children, experience a pervasive sense of personal failure.
In her fiction Kapur treats the gendered body as both empowered and disempowered, subject and
object, a source of rejection and celebration in socio-political culture. In her new life she tried to
find some satisfaction and a sense of identity in social work but she abandoned it when she met the
divorced Raman. Since she was drawn to him she believed she could be happy as a stepmother to
Roohi. Perhaps this was an only option to render some meaning to her fragmented life.
In Ishita,Roohi got a new caring mother but this could not be tolerable to Shagun who still kept her
fight for the custody of the children which Raman determined not to make quite easy for her to
claim. He himself was victimized by the separation from his children. In fact both of them were
troubled owing to the custody of both the children which they were denied. The divorce failed to
render them the tranquility they sought to cherish. Raman had Roohi which Shagun missed, and
Shagun had her dominance over Arjun who still was not in complete fascination of Raman. In this
awkward fight it was Ishita who even after getting married with Raman had neither Raman as a
whole nor could create a place in the heart of Arjun because of whom Raman did not devote himself
to her completely. Though Ishita left no stone unturned in order to be a replica mother to Roohibut
the nagging doubt of her being snatched away tormented her immensely. She revealed her
desperation when she said,
I think my heart will break. I cannot bear this half-here-half-there. I have given her everything not
because of you, but because of her I feel this constant tension in my head with the fear of losing
her.
Both Raman and Shagun could not realize the simple fact that solving family problems in court was
not a justified and approved commonly. Adult should behave like adults, not like the children they
were fighting over. Really, why did people have babies if they were going to the messes of their own
desires?
In the novel Ramans family turned out to be a site for constraint, oppression, violence,
possessiveness and disintegration which was conceived as a unit for emotional and economic
security, sense of community, identity and social status.
Marriage without quibbles is incomplete. With accordance to Shobha Des views, where there is
love there is disagreement. Without annoyance and pamper as a consequence, love cannot thrive. No
marriage is only romance and romance all over. It has its demerits, troubles and turmoil too. One
has to balance the carriage of marriage on the wheels of romance and logic. However in the absence
of which the dissolution of Ramans family, which was followed by the ruthless process of formal
divorce and guardianship/ possession of the children, have asserted to the frivolity and hollowness
of modern life and modern marriage with its burden of individualism.