Female Body: Site of Domination and Resistance in Shashi Deshpande's In the Country of Deceit

Abstract

This research is a study of the Indian novelist Shashi Deshpande's In the Country of Deceit which presents the female characters in the continual struggle for their identity and freedom in the patriarchal Indian society. Devayani, a young spinster of Indian society, is the protagonist of the novel. The continual coaxing of her relatives for her marriage shows how female body becomes a contested site of power structures of the society and shows how patriarchal norms and values control and dominate the female body by means of the institution of marriage. The discourses that spinsterhood is immoral and shameful for a family, or female should remain sexually chaste before marriage or the only way for an Indian woman to fulfill her sexual desire is marriage and so on operate in the society to stabilize the patriarchal power center as they help assert the male domination upon the female body. Devayani subverts those discourses, the stereotype of the Third World woman and the restriction imposed on her sexuality by refusing to marry the men her relatives arrange for her and having physical relation to a married police officer named Ashok. She confesses the sexual pleasure in the relation full of love and devoid of control and domination which shows that the love without affection and proper cooperation is no more than the marital rape. Devayani manifests the heterogeneity in the female experiences, with the assertion of her different stance regarding marriage and fulfillment of the desire, rejects the homogeneity of female domination and the notion of global sisterhood as assumed by Western feminism.