The novelist with his critical insight projects before us the shaping influences of culture in the form of honour and shame, shame and shamelessness. Rushdie himself has stated in the novel that the country is not Pakistan and the novel is not a feminist novel but there is no denying from the fact that women occupy a very large portion of the novel. Rushdie portrays the gloomy picture of the Pakistani society in which the women have to face acute sufferings and oppression and suppression has become the talk of the town. The emphasis on the social, political & historical realities of the sub-continent is paralleled by an awareness of the world of myth, and magic which defy the logical & chronological narrative.
In the novel, Shame, the portraits of women are drawn more sympathetically than the portraits of male. The narrator in the novel …show more content…
The delineation of the three mothers makes the reader believe that women have through choice and circumstance, altered what is means to be a mother. The novelist has given them their respective identities by giving them names, Chunni, Munni and Bunny but their individual identities are confined only by the relationship first with their father and after his death by their son Omar. They deal with their unwed pregnancy by refusing to divulge the name of the actual mother “they began to weigh the same, to feel exhausted at the same moment and to awake together, each morning, as if somebody had rung a bell”(20). They had the pain at the same moment and a baby was born behind closed doors. Then it “was passed from breast to breast, and none of the six was dry”(21). They bring up Omar in seclusion without the support of any male figure, rejecting the idea of men as the centre of the world. Salman Rushdie bestows them the courage to bring into this world their illegitimate child against the cloistered of the external
In the novel, Shame, the portraits of women are drawn more sympathetically than the portraits of male. The narrator in the novel …show more content…
The delineation of the three mothers makes the reader believe that women have through choice and circumstance, altered what is means to be a mother. The novelist has given them their respective identities by giving them names, Chunni, Munni and Bunny but their individual identities are confined only by the relationship first with their father and after his death by their son Omar. They deal with their unwed pregnancy by refusing to divulge the name of the actual mother “they began to weigh the same, to feel exhausted at the same moment and to awake together, each morning, as if somebody had rung a bell”(20). They had the pain at the same moment and a baby was born behind closed doors. Then it “was passed from breast to breast, and none of the six was dry”(21). They bring up Omar in seclusion without the support of any male figure, rejecting the idea of men as the centre of the world. Salman Rushdie bestows them the courage to bring into this world their illegitimate child against the cloistered of the external