The Masculinity Versus Femininity in Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence

The quest for identity and freedom has become a very dominant theme in literature since the rise and development of feminism, which studies various problems of women and creates awareness among them. Feminism is a criticism of the prevailing social conditions, which have excluded women from the dominant male culture, social, sexual, political and intellectual pursuits. Virginia Woolf is the mother of the feminist movement who first started to think and analyze clearly the plight of women from various angles. Her book A Room of One's Own (1929) challenged the existing patriarchal norms. Other important books such as Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), John Stuart Mills' The Subjection of Women (1869) and the American Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) also contributed to this movement. Karen often has given two different arguments related to feminism: "Relational" and "Individualist". Relational feminism stresses on women's rights as women in relation to men, whereas individualist feminism insists on abstract concepts of 'individual human rights' and 'the quest for personal independence'. In the West the notion of 'self' is relational to 'individualism', on the contrary in India the individual is considered to be just one part of the society. The modern feminist novel gives much stress on "Individualist feminism".