Gender Reading of an Introduction

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APPLYING THEORY IN AN INDIAN TEXT: -applying the feminist theories to Kamala Das poem. Kamala Das was one of the first poets who developed a new form of poetry for themselves and made a new start both in theme and technique around 1960’s.To the poets of this era the spirit of modernism was almost alien. Their main concern was the essence of nationalism and the war of independence, partition of country. It was only in the sixties that things began to change, a new group of young poets took control of the Indo-Anglican poetic domain. Kamala Das is one of the most dominant voices of this post-colonial era. Kamala Das, in her poetry portrays the best expression of feminine feeling, their suppression in a male dominated society. Her poetry is confessional and auto-biographical to a large extent, but many a times she universalizes what is personal. This paper would try to identify the theories of feminism and post-colonialism in her poetry. “An Introduction”, and “The Maggot” are two of her best known poems where she is extremely conscious of herself as woman, the evils of the patriarchal society and through writing about the self she challenges the accepted notions of the female and rewrite’s general opinion of the feminine mystique. The poem, “An Introduction” by Kamala Das, has strong existentialist theory proposed by Simone de Beauvoir in Second Sex. “De Beauvoir’s primary thesis is that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them, on every level, as the “Other”, defined exclusively in opposition to men. Man occupies the role of the self, or subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness.” We can
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