Desai, Anita (Vol. 175) - Shirley Chew (review date 28 May 1999)
Shirley Chew (review date 28 May 1999)
SOURCE: Chew, Shirley. “Acting as Sita Did.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5017 (28 May 1999): 23.
[In the following review, Chew assesses the familial subject matter of Fasting, Feasting, implicating the text in the perpetuation of patriarchal society.]
In an article in the TLS of September 14, 1990, entitled “A Secret Connivance,”; commenting on the general oppressiveness of women's lives in India, Anita Desai noted that “Even if in reality [a woman] is nothing but a common drudge, first in her father's house and then her husband's,” she must, bearing in mind accepted role models, conduct herself “as Sita did, as Draupadi did.” While this is a situation created by men to serve their own purposes, it is, Desai recognizes, a form of imprisonment at which women have connived. Believing that one of the purposes of literature is to show us “the plain face of truth,”...
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