Monali Bhattacharya1& Ekta Srivastava2
1Associate Professor in English, Humanities & Social Sciences, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida. ORCID: 0000-0003-0534-0007. Email: monali.bhattacharya@jiit.ac.in
2Assistant Professor in English, Humanities & Social Sciences, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida. ORCID 0000-0002-0745-3083. Email: ekta.srivastava@jiit.ac.in
Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.15
Received December 23, 2017; Revised January 30, 2018; Accepted February 4, 2018; Published February 14, 2018.
Abstract
Females have always been the silent, voiceless and the subaltern sex, but when it comes to assigning some place to these poor, inferior sexes, then they are at the receiving end of the blame-game of the society in history, if at all they are to be given a place. Two such females spoken of, in history likewise are Draupadi in East and Penelope in West, the wives of the greatest heroes of mankind. This paper attempts to study the lives of these two representative ladies of east-west through analysis of their universal femalehood in characterization as done by writers Margaret Atwood and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in The Penelopiad and The Palace of Illusions respectively. This paper further tries to assess how the experiences of these at different times and places still remain the cup of tea for today’s women everywhere. Finally this paper seeks to establish the contemporary relevance of these two characters through the fact that these two heroines of history were not the ‘second sex’, rather were very compassionate, loving, intelligent human beings and very able statesmen with all the qualities of good leadership, team coordination and strategic competencies for being successful in life, who could be seen as our torchbearers in twenty first century life as well.
Keywords: Female, Paanchali, Penelopiad, 21st century woman.