Indian Women Novelists and Psychoanalysis

Book excerpt: Neurosis Reminds Us Of The Fact That There Is A Seamy Side To Our Civilization. Society Compels Every Individual To Repress Instinctual Urges And The Desire For The Free Exercise Of Will, All In The Name Of Upholding Its Ideals And Expectations Which Are Very Often Oppressive And Anti-Human. If The Individual Is Too Ill-Equipped To Oppose The Societal Sanctions Openly He Or She Will Find An Alternative In Neurosis Because It Is A Form Of Protest Among Other Things. Neurosis Is Thus Invested With Profound Psychological And Social Significance. It Is Basically Subversive.Indian Society Continues To Be Rigid And Conservative And The Repression One Has To Put Up With Is Often Very Severe. Women Especially Bear The Brunt Of It As The Social Norms And Moral Codes Are Heavily Loaded Against Them.It Is Against This Background That Some Of The Indian Women Novelists In English Have Fictionally Treated The Neurotic Suffering Of Susceptible Characters. Through This Fictional Endeavour They Seem To Underscore The Need For Subverting The Present Oppressive Value System In Order To Make Way For A Humane Social Order.This Book Proposes To Discuss The Neurotic Characters Of The Indian Women Novelists In The Light Of Freudian And Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis Which Has Equipped The Modern Literary Critic With Remarkable Knowledge Of The Inner Struggles Of Literary Characters And Other Aspects Of The Literary Product. The Novels Studied Here Are: Anita Desai S Cry, The Peacock And Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Bharati Mukherjee S Wife, Kamala Markandaya S A Silence Of Desire, Shashi Deshpande S That Long Silence, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala S Get Ready For Battle, Nergis Dalal S The Inner Door And Nayantara Sahgal S The Day In Shadow. Apart From This, The Book Contains A Chapter And An Appendix Which Prespectivise And Discuss In Detail Freudian Psychoanalysis, Characters And Neurosis, And Indian Women Novelists In English.Psychoanalytic Critical Study Of Literary Works Is Limited To A Few Stray Articles In India. This Book Is, In Fact, The First Full-Length Psychoanalytic Critical Study Of Indian Fiction In English.