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Betrayal and Guilt in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons
-- Deepak Chaswal
Arthur Miller is America’s leading playwright. He was deeply influenced by the Greek drama, Ibsen and Odets. His works reflect the same quest for order in human relations as depicted in the Greek drama. His success as a playwright begins with one of his most widely known plays All My Sons (1947). Arthur Miller’s plays depict the human tendency of betrayal and guilt which leads to the decay, and degeneration of human values. The intensity of these two elements of betrayal and guilt may vary in his plays, but it runs through all his plays as a motif. Joe, a selfish businessman, in order to save his business from ruin, supplies defective cylinder heads to the American Air Force which results in the death of 21 fighter plane pilots. The theme of betrayal and guilt pervades the action of the play from its very beginning. The person who has committed the crime tries to justify his betrayal and guilt on the grounds which are not acceptable to the just social system. The jail motif runs throughout the play. It testifies to the fact that jail is a place where wrongdoers have to go ultimately. Joe Keller betrays his business partner, Steve Deever, too. It is true that Miller exposes man’s cruel nature in All My Sons, but it is also true that he condemns traits of treachery, betrayal and selfishness in man’s nature. Miller seems to suggest that one must remain faithful and responsible to the interests of society, failing which one must bear the consequences as we notice in All My Sons. Towards the end of the play Joe Keller atones for his crime and sin by committing suicide.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Never at Home: The ‘Strange’ Case of Sasthi Brata
-- Amitendu Bhattacharya and Sudarshan Kumar Rayala
Sasthi Brata, the enfant terrible of Indian letters, shot to fame with the publication of his extraordinary autobiography My God Died Young. His unequivocal denunciation of Brahminic Hinduism, his detestation of Indian cultural tradition, and his violent revulsion to anything Indian, which were to become a regular feature of his literary works, are the highlights of his attempts at self-portrayal and earned him the dubious distinction of being called “a latter-day Nirad Chaudhuri.” To rid himself of the ensnaring and “degrading” effects of “Indian-ness” he escaped from his native country and sought asylum in the West, for he admired the “free, liberal and non-intrusive” nature of society and life there. It may safely be argued that all his literary creations are a result of his conflicts with both the Western and Eastern worlds. By underscoring the various themes and concerns in his books, such as Man-Woman relationship, the East-West encounter—the colonial subject’s dilemma of belonging or not belonging, a search for home and identity, the dynamics of multiculturalism in the West, commentaries on Indian social and cultural life and many other matters which have now become sites of vigorous literary and critical investigation, especially with the emergence of concepts like diaspora and post-colonialism and with a paradigm shift in our understanding of sexuality, our paper aims to provide a holistic assessment of his (splintered) self and to account for what it might mean to be torn between two cultures. Sasthi Brata makes for an interesting reading because of the rich ground he covers in his writings and an analysis of his works is particularly relevant because of the simple reason that he belongs to the first generation of non-resident Indian English writers.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
G U Pope’s Metrical Translation of The Tirukkural:
An Evaluation of the Translation of a Classic
-- R Margaret Joy Priscilla and James R Daniel
Tirukkural, the Veda of the World and the crown of Tamil literature, was made available to the Western world by G U Pope, an Englishman, who first translated it into English in full. This rendering of the Tirukkural shows G U Pope’s deep involvement in Tamil literature and his ability in writing in English. In the place of classical Tamil meter and rhyme, the translator has substituted a suitable TL (Target Language) meter and rhyme. The use of inversions and end rhymes helps to preserve the dignity of the original and the dignity expected of moral epigrams. This paper also shows that G U Pope resorted to metrical translation in keeping with the Victorian trend of adopting the style of the poetry of the previous age to suggest the greatness of high Tamil poetry.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Negotiating Cultural Change: Githa Hariharan’s
The Thousand Faces of Night
-- S Lavanya
Literature has always been a means of reinforcing cultural and social values. Juxtaposing the multifaceted Indian women and their lives of three generations, Githa Hariharan has portrayed the changing scenario in the Indian society. Her concern is to bring out the irrationalities and injustices of domestic and social life. Women were ready to accept their archetypal female role in the past. Modern women have started to rebel against the age-old social conventions. The Thousand Faces of Night deals with the sanction of space for woman in the Indian society and her struggle to emerge as an individual expressing her existential anguish. The novel presents the effects of patriarchy on women of different social classes and ages and particularly the varied responses to the restrictive institution of marriage. Women were confined to their homes, they were oppressed and opportunities for self-fulfillment were bleak. Even in the modern changed ambience their position is still debatable as they stand on the threshold of social change.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Exploring Criminological Perspectives in Anita Desai’s
Cry, The Peacock
-- Sresha Yadav and Smita Jha
The present paper seeks to explore the criminological perspectives of the central character, Maya, in Anita Desai’s Cry, The Peacock. The character of Maya, who is a neurotic woman and a victim of loneliness during her four-year long marital relationship and who ultimately chooses the option of killing her husband, Gautama, is analyzed in the light of criminological theories pertaining to crime and motivation, such as Eysenck’s Biosocial Theory of Crime, Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory, and occasionally Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The present paper aims to unveil the hidden criminal tendencies and the cause and extent of psychological consequences of Maya’s oppressed state of mind.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Norma Khouri’s Forbidden Love:
A Case of ‘Textual’ Violence Against Women
-- S Asha
Violence against women is characteristic of misogynistic societies and cultures. Incidence of honor killing—killing of women, who transgress accepted social/moral codes, in the name of safeguarding the honor of the family—is reported from western as well as eastern societies. While on the one hand, well-intentioned social movements engage in struggles and campaigns against this heinous practice, on the other, we notice popular textual representations of incidents of violence against women which conceal a sinister design to malign oriental cultures. This paper reads Norma Khouri’s bestselling “true story,” Forbidden Love, as an attack on the Muslim society and culture rather than a spirited defense of the hapless Muslim women, as the book is touted to be. The accounts of sociologists, the timing of the book, i.e., between September 11, 2001, and the war on Iraq, as well as the scurrilous attacks the book makes on the Islamic creed expose the true color of the author’s espousal of the cause of the victimized women.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Not a Vanquished Rebel but a Successful Explorer of Newer Realms:
A Study of Edna Pontellier in Chopin’s The Awakening
-- Sharmita Lahiri
Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost make us feel that the first man and the first woman are similar, and yet they are different for they are unequal. The first woman is for the first man, for “God in him.” Her identity is thus determined by her relationship with and subordination to him. The element of inequality also characterizes marital relationships and gender dynamics in the Creole world of The Awakening. A sense of inequality and subordination precipitate the crisis in the life of Edna Pontellier. Edna refuses to be “for him” (her husband); she quests for a feminine identity that defies the prevalent social norms and expectations. Edna finally opts for the vast expanse of the sea rejecting the constraints imposed by society. Her swimming out into the sea is not a desperate act of self-destruction of a vanquished rebel. It is an exploration of newer spaces and of a new alternative for women—the alternative of noncompliance, non-subjugation, and bold defiance.
© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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