The Mind Beyond Fears - Sanghita Sanyal

Women in Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore and Virginia Woolf

One who has married ever, has no uncertainty about marriage. Just as a tiger becomes, after tasting human flesh, so becomes a husband towards his wife, after marriage. One, who has visualised the reality of man-woman relationship as that of the killer and the killed, will easily catch the hollowness in the concept of chastity and goodness. Marriage might become a social tool where gender inequity leads to an unpremeditated result: suppression of the ‘wife’s’ intellectual capabilities, marginalising her in everyday life, synonymous with the word ‘entrapment’; with the shattering of the many dreams, desires and expectations marriages can become a catastrophe.

The book explores a few short stories of Rabindranath Tagore and Virginia Woolf and analyses them in the light of this idea, thereby attempting a comparative study of their works and opinions, and bringing together, the history of the first steps of gender-equity taken in the nineteenth century.