Challenging the Archetypal Figure: A Study of Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi

Pages:20-22
Raunak Rathee (Department of English and Foreign Languages, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, Haryana)

Literature is a consolidation of imagination and reality. It tries to portray the reality of human life and existence. It tries to find solutions of universal questions related with human being. Literature correlates the human experiences with one another by using the device of myth. Myth personifies the various human experiences. Myths are collective and communal by nature. They bind the tribe or a nation together in common psychological and spiritual activities. As dreams reflect the unconscious desires and anxieties of individual, myths are the symbolic projections of people’s hope, values, fears and aspirations. Mark Schorer states in William Blake: The Politics of Vision, “Myth is fundamental, the dramatic representation of our deepest instinctual life, of a primary awareness of man in the universe, capable of many configurations upon which all particular opinions and attitudes depend” (qtd. in Guerin 183).