Analysis Of The Poem My Mother Breed By Anita Desai

Mother Nature nurtures the feminine soul in the abyssal waters that she liberates from the depravities of human civilization. The sedative spirit of the ocean and her progenies nourish the human psyche with the inspiration to pursue individuality and independence. Patriarchal contaminations of societies submerge the unifying realm of female emancipation; masculine sovereignty suffocates the woman’s voice in the silence of the sacred seas. Secular literature documents the exclusion of the female gender in a cultural mosaic that recognizes the alliance between water and women. Post-colonial fiction, including Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother breed a†¦show more content†¦The authors display the oppressions of women in post-colonial civilizations by incorporating drowning scenes in their novels. The post-colonial novelists utilize the drowning motif to r eveal the influences of patriarchal ideology on women’s cognition. Representations of female subjugation through submersion originate from classical literature, such as William Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century play â€Å"Hamlet.† The theatrical production portrays Hamlet, the dominant masculine role, arousing hysteria in Ophelia, the subordinate feminine role. Hamlet’s emotional maltreatment of Ophelia leads to her only independent action in the play; she drowns herself in a brook (Coffelt 5). Literature that depicts women committing suicide by drowning symbolically presents submersion of the female body as a self-serving decision that grants the character liberation from her societal oppressions. An alternative portrayal of the drowning motif is the depiction of sirens who drown men as an act of revenge. The Greek poet, Homer utilizes the drowning motif in his eighth-century epic â€Å"The Odyssey†. In the epic, sirens mesmerize sailors with their voices and proceed to drown them. The drowning of male sailors represents an assertion of feminine power; the subaltern enacts an independent choice to acquire the position of the tyrant. Themes of vengeance in literature that associates women and drowning convey scenes