Reconstructing Woman’s Image: A Study of Krishna Sobti’s Listen Girl!

Pages:10-13
Ritu (Department of English, Indira Gandhi University, Meerpur, Rewari, Haryana)

“In India we treat women strangely. We either worship them or we burn them.”(Shooting from the Hip 110) In these words Shobha De aptly describes the position of Indian women and the injustice meted out to them. Since ages women have been defined and modeled as per their appropriateness to male world. We have acknowledged a wide gap between the socially accepted role of man and woman. They both have some social responsibilities attached to them by birth, and these responsibilities set forth the discriminatory attitude of society. Man is believed to be the superior species, dominating other creations of God. Beauvoir perceives man-woman relationship as, “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the absolute she is the other.” (22) Women play a passive role at home, dominated by father, brother and husband. Women are always attached to home, domesticity and submissiveness.