Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God and Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds no Terrors : A Thematic Comparison

Pages:241-243
Dipika Rani (Department of English, Govt College for Women, Hisar, Haryana)

Contemporary woman’s fiction all over the world today opts to prioritize those categories of women and aspects of female experience which the representational practices of the dominant phallocentric culture tend to marginalize or even erase. Such practice can also be envisaged in Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God and Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors. Both of the novels dramatize the plight of women, the marginalized, in a male oriented, chauvinistic society through the inner lives of their protagonists. These works focus mainly on the woman in society, her nature and ability to handle personal relationships, to control her destiny within the limitations imposed by the society and the coercive effects of the social pressure. They index a novel image of a woman who tries to resist being relegated to the margins at every step in her routine life.