Female Bildungsroman: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies

Abstract

Shashi Deshpande is one such writer whose writings hold a universal appeal that clearly emanates from her rootedness in everyday India. The present paper aims to investigate how Deshpande delimits feminism from the restrictive practice of merely proving and re-proving its findings and how she advocates its use as a proactive tool to influence repositioning of women. As all Deshpande’s novels deal with the pains and pleasures of growing up, not only in the early adulthood but also continue well into the middle age, the proposed paper attempts to study the journey of her female protagonists in her comparatively  less reviewed novel Small Remedies in the ambit of Female  Bildungsroman. Female Bildungsroman in contemporary literature explores the issues which were hitherto not dealt with like female body, sexuality, higher education etc. Deshpande explores such matters in a very realistic and comprehensive manner due to the changes in the present day cultural norms in Small Remedies.