Feminine Sensibility and Self-Affirmation of Woman in Shashi Deshpande’s “The Dark Holds No Terrors”

Abstract

Shashi Deshpande’s novel “The Dark Holds No Terrors” explores themes related to feminine sensibility and self-affirmation in the context of a woman’s life.Fictional works by Shashi Deshpande depict the struggles of Indian women and build a world from the perspective of feminists. Her story presentations in That Long Silence are very real, thanks to the emotional identification and validation of self-anguishing via their difficulties. She stands in for the feminist longing for India’s rich cultural heritage and traditional practices that these women feel. She admits her fictitious art world was lacking strength and significance due to a lack of understanding of Indian women’s inner lives. Deshpande disrupts the typical matrix of ‘home and homelessness’ in the galaxy of feminist fiction by creating different narrative patterns that give her feminist protagonists adequate freedom to show their repressed sense for their motherland. Aside from the characters’ sentimentality, she promotes local sensibility via poetry, performances, ethics, and ethnic arts. In her narrative work, she has come to terms with the paradigms and commitments.