Complexity of Womanhood: Portrayal of Women in Vandana Singh’s The Women Who thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories

Prithiga G; T. Marx

Prithiga G Ph.D., scholar, Department of English, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India
T. Marx Professor, Department of English, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India

Keywords: Speculative Fiction, Womanhood, Feminism, Alienation, Resistance, Resurgence

Abstract

In recent years, Indian Speculative Fiction emerged remarkably with many notable changes and improvements through cultural and social reestablishment and building a world with possibilities through peculiar narratives. Also, it is used as a platform to voice out humanity with the essence of supernatural elements. The Narratives of Vandana Singh broke the grounds of Speculative Fiction in the twenty-first century with their unique plots and relevant storylines that can resonate with the existing social upheavals in Indian society, especially her collection of short stories titled The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, marking an illuminating space in Indian English Literature by addressing the prevalent issues like class, caste, and gender discrimination. The paper determined to employ the Feminist approach to methodologically extrapolate the power of resistance and resurgence in Vandana Singh’s The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, a collection of ten short stories with great plots. Using the qualitative approach, the study explores themes like alienation and stages of complexity in womanhood as an outreach tool to develop agency to build the world for women. By contextually analysing the narratives and the characterisation of women in the selected short stories Hunger, The Women Who Thought She Was a Plant, Thirst, The Tetrahedron, The Wife, and The Room on the Roof, to solicit the need to construct possible realities for women to resist and resurge from the oppressions in the form of revolution. Confining the study to explicate those six stories mentioned above, profoundly to decode each character’s struggle and resilience in a thematical way. The paper proposes to contribute to society by bringing out the essence of resistance through gaining autonomy, agency, and self-revelation, which eventually pave the path to resonating with the self and rejuvenating gender equality.