Download representing extra-marital relations of women as reaction to sexual

International Journal of English and
Literature (IJEL)
ISSN 2249-6912
Vol. 3, Issue 1, Mar 2013, 75-82
© TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.,
REPRESENTING EXTRA-MARITAL RELATIONS OF WOMEN AS REACTION TO
SEXUAL SUBALTERNITY IN SHOBHA DE’S NOVELS
RICHA
Lecturer in English, GSSS Rohtak, Haryana, India
ABSTRACT
The changing marital relationship in today’s world has been given a new perspective by Shobha De through her
fictions. The marital relationship is presented as mechanical, loveless, almost hollow, ineffectual and compromising, in
most of her fictions, resulting into the shattered man-woman image. The women in De’s fiction suffer as an oppressed
wife. These wives do not act but are acted upon, an object of passivity, of self-surrender in sex without any participation in
it. Such oppressed wives unwilling body symbolizes protest and rage and they apparently conform to the norms of the
society but secretly break them as they find them unjust and unacceptable. They understand that they are becoming victims
of culturally and socially imposed sexual subalternity. The present article highlights extra-marital relations of De’s women
in order to get rid of their rigid and orthodox marital frame work. The extra-marital affairs seem to work as ventilators
providing fresh air to such relationship which are suffocated in unhappy surroundings caused by wrong choice or
mismatched. Thus they come out of this sexual subalternity which has been imposed on them through ages.
KEYWORDS: Marriage, Extra-Marital Relationship, Sexual Subalternity
INTRODUCTION
From ancient time’s women regard marriage as a sacred bond which they strive to uphold in the face of all odds
and sufferings. In a marriage sexuality is an integrate part of martial life; sexual intercourse would mean the combination
of both body and soul as D. H. Lawrence puts it. But in case of the majority, sexual intercourse in marriage is a scheduled
thing to be done and always dominated by the male figure. Women also have passionate feelings, and desires which in
most cases are suppressed. A woman sleeping with her husband, doing things according to the will of her husband is often
called the perfect wife; on the other hand women seeking their own passionate pleasures, sexual freedom are called whores
by the society. According to feminist, such heterosexuality in which women’s passion, emotions and feelings are
suppressed, is a kind of rape. Conventionally, women ought not to seek sexual freedom and independent passionate desires
having the fear of being called whore they remain silent in a marriage.
Once married, a woman is expected to be loyal to her husband, while for the husband it is his pleasure whether to
honor the marriage or break it or play with it. If a woman happens to have a secret relationship after marriage, she will be
socially and within the family ostracized as a woman of no character. Such limitations imposed upon women to places her
at the subaltern position. Simone de Beauvoir also observes the culturally imposed subalternity on women and comments:
She has no right to any sexual activity apart from marriage; sexual intercourse thus becoming an institution,
desire, and gratification are subordinated to the interest of the society for both sexes; but man, being transcended
towards the universal as worker and citizen, can enjoy contingent pleasures before marriage and extramaritally
(Beauvoir, 1988).
Beauvoir comment shows that a man can loiter around with a number of mistresses while the woman has to sulk
silently at home with all the hurt and humiliation. Thus marriage is not the same thing to a man as to a woman. The two
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sexes are different from each other, though one has the necessity of the other. Beauvoir observes “this necessity has never
brought about a condition of reciprocity between them; women have never constituted a caste making exchanges and
contrasts with the male caste upon a footing of equality” (Beauvoir, 1988).
Analyzing from this angle of women’s freedom and society’s restrictions further portrays that contemporary and
historical times ‘marriage’ has been considered as one of the most important social institutions. The benefits of marriage
are undeniable, yet in most of the cases the restrictions and bindings imposed on married women are also inevitable.
Because of these limitations women has a subaltern position in a marriage or it can be said that marriage is a site for female
subordination, which curtails women’s freedom.
A woman in Indian society marries not just the man but also his family and subsequently loses her identity in
marriage, relinquishes her freedom and sets about pleasing everybody. Women’s experience is primarily defined through
interpersonal, usually domestic, and filial relationships: serving the needs of others. Her identity exists “largely as being –
for – others (needing to please; narcissist vanity and deriving security from her intimacy with others) rather than being –
for – itself” (Waugh, 1989). Traditionally marriage subjugates and enslaves woman. It leads her to “aimless days
indefinitely repeated, life that slips away gently toward death without questioning its purpose” (Beauvoir, 1988).
Women pay for their happiness at the cost of their freedom. Tragedy of the traditional marriage is that it is just the
monotony of meet, mate, and reproduce. Beauvoir emphasize that such a sacrifice on the part of a woman is too high for
anyone since the kind of self contentment and security that marriage offers woman drains her soul of its capacity for
greatness. In her novel The Second Sex she comments, “She shuts behind the doors of her new home. When she was a girl,
the whole countryside was her homeland; the forests were hers. Now she is confined to a restricted space” (Millet, 1970).
DISCUSSIONS
In Shobha De’s novels most of her female characters constitute a new woman. The image of this new women in
De’s novels turns the table upside down. Women belonging to this new clan do not take marriage as holy union: it happens
because it is convenient to them. Her women launch a rebellion against the conservative tradition of moral values. Even
marriage does not curtail sexual freedom in her women. Educated and attractive, confident and assertive, this new class of
women has given marriage a new meaning because of the absence of mutual faithfulness between husband and wife. Due
to the husband’s betrayal the woman claims her right to enjoy unlimited sexual freedom.
In Socialite Evenings the protagonist Anjali’s husband Abe was, “an experienced rake with a wild reputation” (De
Shobha, 1989) Anjali tells Karuna that Abe once asked from her about Karuna. He said, “Would you mind very much if I
went to bed with her?” (De Shobha, 1989) But like traditional women Anjali does not sulk silently at home with all the hurt
and humiliation. Thus Anjali of Socialite Evening throws off the traditional conventions of moral values and had frequent
sex encounters. Be he the die-hard rake Abe or the French teacher or the innocent Karan, she is after the desire of body, the
itchings of the sensations. Thus marital fidelity is now not considered essential. Constancy and faithfulness in their marital
lives seem to be bygone values and no longer relevant. In Socialite Evening, Shobha De displays the absolute freedom of
womankind from all forms of patriarchal inhibitions. Women have their own fantasies, own ways of looking at sexuality,
which often take them beyond the boundary of marriage. A housewife Karuna encapsulates the plight of the Indian woman:
“I felt like an indifferent boarder in the house, going through the motions of housekeeping and playing wife but the
resentment and rebellion remained just under the surface, ready to break out at the smallest provocation” (De Shobha,
1989). Karuna in Socialite Evenings finds that she had made a mistake in choosing her husband because the man turns out
to be just an average Indian, unexciting, and uninspiring. Compared with the outgoing and fun-loving Karuna, her husband
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proves a dull partner. Karuna is sexually unsatisfied, her passions assume a possessive form which manifest in her illicit
carnal love for Krish. Extra-marital sex is clearly and unforgivably bad but staying within the confines of a dead marriage
considered decidedly the right thing to do. Biologically speaking, marital unfaithfulness could be a viable cure for the
ailment. However, such a thing entails perhaps the most severe indictment in the rigidly organized Indian society.
Society while imposing barriers and restrictions on women’s behaviour forgets that sexuality and marriage are
intermingled and sexuality is a common instinct present in all human beings. Sexual surrender to a man without any
emotional participation is a kind of domestic work that the wife discharges as a part of her obligation towards her husband.
Such type sexual relation with wife is nothing but a literal rape for in such a copulation there is no acquiescence of feelings
or the intellect. It is just a surrender of the body before the male for he happens to be a husband to whose sexual advances;
the wife is bound to condescend as a part of her conjugal duty. It is because of this sort of ignorance of feelings and
emotions that women are often raped under the label of marital sexuality.
The protagonist Karuna of Socialite Evenings also faces such sort of marital rape but she is not that type of
women who silently undergoes assaults insisted she has adopted a new method to come out of this humiliating situation.
Impelled by her sexual needs and desire for fun and excitement, Karuna cheats her husband and plans for a holiday with
her lover Krish. She comments: “While he was innocently instructing me, I was already planning, when and how I would
meet Krish. At the airport? Hotel? What we’d do together- how liberated and free we’d feel without any pressure on us”
(De Shobha, 1989). Karuna, the protagonist, shares a passionate relationship with her husband’s friend Krish. Instead of
keeping it a secret she is open about it. She tells her husband:
There’s no point in post mortems. I don’t believe in them. Let’s get on with the story. I love this friend of yours,
and I want to be with him in Venice. There is a good chance that I will feel thoroughly disillusioned after that (De
Shobha, 1989).
But Karuna’s husband is an egoist. When he discovers that Karuna is having an affair with his friend Krish he
comments:
I’ve thought over the whole thing carefully. I would’ve thrown you right now-but I’m prepared to give you one
more chance. I’m not a mean man. You’ve been a good wife-I’m prepared to cancel this one black mark on your
performance record (De Shobha, 1989).
This seems that the act of forgiveness on the part of her husband could be called as an act of his male ego, his
assertion of superiority. He himself has denied his wife the conjugal bliss of a marital life by often keeping himself at a
distance from her so he has no right to say that he is not a mean man. He is unable to look deep into the biological need of
Karuna’s female self thus he is not fair in his treatment towards his wife. Karuna’s affair with Krish seems only a means to
fulfill her physical, psychological, and emotional need. It appears her attempt to attend wholeness of personality for
without a man, a woman is a fragment, a partial self.
Shobha De’s modern urban women have transformed themselves from commodities into individuals. Marriage
which is considered “a patriarchal enclosure” (Praat, 1981) by Annis Pratt, in The Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction,
can no longer hold woman down. The sanctity of marriage prescribed especially for woman is conveniently diluted by
Shobha De’s women. Snapshots is a good example of this. The novel gets its title from the snapshots of the shared past of
six women – Aparna, Rashmi, Swati, Reema, Surekha and Noor, who get together to share intimate experiences. In the
course of their heart to heart confessional talk, candid revelations of this drama of life are presented. Swati and Aparna are
divorcees who are self-assertive enough to reject the sexuality of men. Aparna is not mentally prepare to marry again and
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to her, the term “husband” is “an awful word” (De Shobha, 1995). Here Rashmi is an unwed mother with a responsibility
of a bastard son; she treats sex as “mutual need, mutual dependency” (De Shobha, 1995).
In Snapshots Reema and Surekha presents characteristic of modern women who are against subalternity on sexual
ground. They are married housewives, who have arranged marriages as “a prize catch” in “the highly competitive marriage
market” (De Shobha, 1995). Reema uses her husband to provide herself with material comfort. But due to dissatisfaction in
sexual matters, emptiness and lack of communication marriage seems to have lost its sanctity and significance for her.
Reema recalls about her marriage:
Their own (sexual relationship) was as listless and uninspiring as it had been since the early days of their
marriage. She’d lie obediently beneath him, her mind on the following day’s lunch party or some petty gossip
she’d heard over the phone (De Shobha, 1995).
To overcome her problems, Reema deviates in search of enjoyment, identity, communication, and belonginess.
Therefore, she enjoys illicit relationship with her brother-in-law.
To attain the equality on sexual bases Shobha De’s women bring a radical change in the value-system and
morality; consequently the hierarchy of males is threatened and they are no longer in a position to exercise their power
over the female world. Now- a -days man’s loss has been woman’s gain. Karuna as well as the other women in Socialite
Evenings feels:
We treated marriage like a skin allergy-an irritant all right, but not something that would incapacitate us. We had
our own secret lives-and by that I do not mean clandestine affairs (De Shobha, 1989).
This is the new morality which constantly emerges and becomes visible in Shobha De’s image of the new woman.
Along with treating marriage like skin-allergy, De’s women also knew how to control their husbands by rewarding and
punishing through sex. In Socialite Evening, Ritu exploits her sexual breakthrough, her female potentiality to keep her
husband within her reach, within her control. She tells Karuna about her strategy: “Make them feel you have done them a
favor by marrying them…. Make them feel insecure. Let them think that you will walk out on them if they don’t toe the
line. That’s what keeps them in their place” (De Shobha, 1989).
Shobha De believes in sexual rights. She doesn’t hesitate to talk about sex freely. There is a great deal of sexual
freedom in her women if not sexual promiscuity. In Snapshots Swati still enjoyed with her former husband in London, they
led “separate but friendly lives… we loved each other dearly but we led strictly individual lives” (De Shobha, 1995). For
Swati, sex is “a hobby” and regarding her affairs, she feels that “there is nothing to be ashamed of” (De Shobha, 1995). As
Swati sneers at “the outdated ideas of purity, morality, chastity” (De Shobha, 1995). For her it’s pathetic to suppress one’s
sexuality and says:
Sex isn’t filthy… our minds make it so. Look at Khajuraho, Konark… have any of you studied Kamasutra?
Fascinating. It’s a pity we got brainwashed by some frustrated, repressed idiots. I think sex is a celebration—the
highest form of religion (De Shobha, 1995).
While presenting the sharp contrast between the sex-maniacs like Rashmi (Snapshots) and the neglected and cold
wives like Maya (Second Thoughts) Karuna (Socialite Evenings), and Aparna (Snapshots) De tries to show that the modern
women of today is not a doormat to be used as and when required by men. Despite facing subalternity and marginalization,
these modern women have actualized themselves and attained their identity, their real self and in this way move against
subalternity. They are no aberrations as patriarchal world considers them. Shobha De’s women believe in new humanism
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and new morality according to which woman is not to be taken as a “sex object and a glamour doll, fed on fake dreams of
perpetual youth, lulled into a passive role that requires no individual identity” (Asnani, Shyam, 1991). In her novels De
pleads for new marital morality based on mutual trust, consideration, generosity, and absence of pretence, selfishness, and
self-centeredness. This is what Aparna in Snapshots declares:
Did women ‘need’ sex? Aparna had always scoffed at the notion. No, she’d say, women need love. And caring.
And tenderness. Prem had stood all these ideas on their head the day he made love to her for the first time, in an
empty office, on the dusty floor, with carpenters working just a thin partition away (De Shobha, 1995).
The new morality based on freedom from fear, frank communication and mutual love which can, according to
Asnani Shyam, “create the oxygen of understanding which can save the present generation from the explosive psychic
trauma of marital conflict” (Asnani, Shyam, 1991). She seems to be emphasizing the value of what is most conspicuously
missing namely, communication, full-blooded interpersonal normal relations. Shobha De women who believe in the new
morality cause a serious threat to the social system based on male-domination. As shown by De such women can have a
string of extra-marital affairs to counter the misconduct of their husbands. They may change their boyfriends as frequently
as they change their designer dresses.
Here De shows the similarity in her opinion with Kate Chopin, who is one of the first female writers to address
female issues especially sexuality. She declares that women are capable of overt sexuality in which they explore and enjoy
their sexuality. She further shows that her women are capable of loving more than one man at a time. Her protagonist
“Edna had once told that Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice herself for her children or for any one”
(Chopin, 1899).
The idea of liberated woman in De’s fiction is not confined to privileged upper class glamorous women only, it
includes middle class working mothers also who are represented by Taarini, Mikki’s old school friend in De’s novel
Sisters. She betrays her husband and children leaving aside the tradition and moral considerations. Patriarchal society may
find her action outrageous but feministic aspect of Taarini’s action can’t be ignored. Taarini opens her heart to Mikki in
order to justify her affair:
But you see, Mikki, it isn’t only glamorous, beautiful women who have affairs. Even an ordinary woman like me
sometimes finds someone who loves her, cares for her, and wants to spend his life with her. I just thank God for
Shashi. For allowing me to experience what love is. What sex is … with the right person (De Shobha, 1992).
Shobha De’s another novel Second Thoughts is the story of another young middle class Bengali girl Maya who
goes to Mumbai after an arranged marriage to a foreign return Bengali boy Ranjan. Ranjan turns out to be a cold Indian
male who believes that by marrying the girl he had bestowed a favour upon her.
As a result Maya’s yearning for Ranjan’s love could not find the fulfillment she needed. Maya experiences first
such shock during their four day clumsy sex honeymoon at a depressing hotel in Mahabaleshwar, a hill resort near
Bombay. There she learns from him on enquiry that he slept with other women, he tried, but “it didn’t work” (De Shobha,
1996). As he articulate: “But the love making that followed was always a letdown” or “I have tried to make friends with
them…but it has never worked” (De Shobha, 1996). In another situation she is in a love-making mood, but then he asks her
to wait and says: “I am not ready yet Maya….You will have to be patient. It is going to take time. I can’t. I just can’t” (De
Shobha, 1996). This puzzles her beyond measure. Once Ranjan returns from Calcutta after ten days, Maya shyly snuggles
up to him and caresses him but to her shame and horror Ranjan jumps back and scolds her:
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Jumping back as though he had received an electric shock. He had lain trembling in bed for a long time, his
breathing heavy, his eyes screwed shut. ‘Stop behaving like a cheap woman. A prostitute,’ he had muttered before
turning around and going to sleep (De Shobha, 1996).
Ranjan considers such a love-making mood is “a very negative attitude,” a subject of “big laugh,” a sort of
“nonsense” (De Shobha, 1996). It seems for Ranjan eating, sleeping, doing office duties, and attending social obligations,
are enough for a successful life. As for sex, he did not regard it important to anybody. According to him if one’s mind is
busy and one keeps oneself active, there cannot be time “to worry about sex” (De Shobha, 1996). He wants Maya to be
busy with other things and forget sex. This shocks Maya greatly. A continuous frustration of the body’s sexual needs can
be disastrous to anybody. Freud attributes neurosis of women to sexual dissatisfaction resulting from the rigours of
civilized sexual morality. Freud comment in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
The more strictly a woman has been brought up and the more sternly she has submitted to the demands of
civilization, the more she is afraid of taking this way out; and in the conflict between her desires and her sense of
duty, she once more seeks refuge in a neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue as securely as illness (Freud, 1960).
This is what happens to Maya. She begins to wither like her indoor plants. But there is no one who can bring out
her life from withered frame and understand her redefined requirements. She strongly feels “missing something” without
exactly knowing “what that something was” (De Shobha, 1996). However, the fact remains that this something is the fact
that she had “no sex life at all,” “had never experienced an orgasm,” and had realized that she would “never bear children”
(De Shobha, 1996).
A distressed woman like Maya is thus, liable to seek out comfort from some other source. Her friendship with
Nikhil helps her to overcome her depression and the corroding feeling of emptiness in her married life. Their sexual union
heals the wounds of Maya’s loveless marriage. The act itself is a natural corollary to an inner urge to satisfy her long
suppressed desire to discover love and passions for life. Even though Maya leads a much suppressed existence, her
marriage finally breaks down all moral codes. She goes out with Nikhil to explore Mumbai in her husband’s absence. Her
extra-sexual act proves to be the final blow to the marital bond with Ranjan in her quest for freedom.
In fact, it seems that the consummation of Maya’s simmering love for Nikhil doesn’t come unexpectedly. The
incubation period being over, the subaltern woman steps out against subalternity, bold, fearless, and uncaring and looking
ahead. Maya has broken once those norms, which Ranjan has ignored from ages. This seems a ray of hope for her: a new
way to live, a new promise of life.
Thus the second thoughts that arise in Maya’s mind could very well be the harbinger of the first thoughts that
could come to the mind of the new woman of the future who has to take decisions to assert her individuality and establish
her identity by moving against subalternity. It seems from the character of Maya Shobha De is presenting such women who
apparently conform to the norms of the society but secretly breaks them when they find them unjust and unacceptable.
Maya’s ability to satisfy her urge with Nikhil places her among those subaltern women who are able to break free from the
shackles of social morality even if the experience of freedom is of a short duration.
Thus we can see that if Shobha De’s women find themselves
much to the Freud
observed situation in
Civilization and Its Discontent “forced into the background by the claims of culture” they adopt “an inimical attitude
towards it” (Freud, 1939). They understand that they are becoming victims of culturally and socially imposed subalternity
and they struggles to come out from this cocooned subalternity.
Representing Extra-Marital Relations of Women as Reactiont to Sexual Subalternity in Shobha De’s Novels
81
Therefore one can ascertain that the extra-marital affairs are regarded with more understanding and flexibility in
De’s works. Pangs of the conscience give way to sublime urges of the soul. There is no blind condemnation of the act. One
can locate the factors that may be responsible for an unconventional act by an otherwise responsible husband or wife. The
main factor is that due to the feeling of disgust and indifference between the husband and the wife, erotic attractions
disappear, and the couple feels that the sexual act is no longer an inter subjective experience in which each goes beyond
self, “but rather a kind of joint masturbation” (Beauvoir, 1988) such brutish satisfying of the husband’s sexual need is not
enough to satisfy the wife’s sexuality.
Though legally and morally extra-marital affairs are crime, it still remains a leveler, seeking to level down the
tensions that occurred in the course of everyday life. The character Balbir of Snapshots in spite of being a man understands
the woman’s need of sexual relations at the time of tensions. He comments on women’s sexual habit: “women are always
suggesting crazy things. Maybe fear and tension are the ultimate turn-on. The best screws I’ve had are with depressed
women. They want it so badly; it’s great therapy for them. A roller-coaster ride for me” (De Shobha, 1995).
In this era of the globalization fever, an increasing number of people regard occasional extra-marital affairs as
ventilators providing fresh air of sustenance to a soul being suffocated in unhappy surroundings caused by wrong choice or
mismatched sense and sensibility. The character Mohan of Khushwant Singh’s The Company of Women has also utters the
idea:
Occasional adultery, Mohan was convinced did not destroy a marriage; quite often it proved to be a cementing
factor as in cases where the husband could not give his wife as much sex as she needed, or, where the wife was
frigid. It was silly to condemn adultery as sinful; it often saved marriages from collapsing (Singh, 1998).
One can argue that male-female relations in such marriage where women’s emotions and feelings are considered
subalternate are as exploitative as the relation of a prostitute to a customer. Such marriages thus become a kind of
prostitution where the wife who has sex with her husband feels almost alienated from her own self. To this Marxists call a
women’s sex-specific oppression. The female here suffer as an oppressed wife. Karuna, Anjali, Maya, Reema, Aparna,
Surekha are wife- prostitute who does not act but is acted upon, an object of passivity, of self-surrender in sex without any
participation in it. There unwilling body symbolizes protest and rage. This is what Patricia Waugh utters in Feminine
Fictions “Traditionally, women have always used their bodies as instruments of their protest against their feminine
positioning and identification” (Waugh, 1989).
CONCLUSIONS
Men, because of their sexual dominance, have always felt like conquerors and their sexual exploits have been
their conquests but woman’s subalternate role in the power game has been radically altered by Shobha De. It appears that
her women do not remain silent in marriage where they have been put in a sexual subalternate position. Instead they very
wisely use extra marital relationship to fight their battle against sexual subalternity. De very skillfully demolishes the
archetypal image of man as the dominant gender and uncovers his Achilles’ heel. Through her novels, De seeks to establish
the fact that a woman has the same feelings, passions, aspirations, and values as a man has and she is determined to fight it
out for realizing her dreams.
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