Feminist Analysis of Tagore’s Selected Short Stories: A Subaltern Study

Abstract

This study investigates the role of patriarchy in the marginalization of women and as a result turning them into subalterns who can’t speak for themselves and have no voice of their own. Tagore as an Indian writer is one of the strongest voices for women as his writings depict that he wants to emancipate women and to make them aware of who they are and also that education is important for both genders either male or female. For this purpose in this paper three stories have been selected from the short story collection of Rabindaranath Tagore; Subha, The living and the dead and the Exercise-book to depict the plight of the suppressed and weak women in the patriarchal Indian society and how they got manipulated by their husbands and also by their society. This study is qualitative in nature and it employs the Subaltern Theory by Spivak (1988) for the analysis of selected data. Through the analysis it has been concluded that the three protagonists of the selected stories are subalterns as the society they are living in exploits their rights of being a human being because they are women and weak. Their silence depicts their miserable lives in a patriarchal society. For the further studies, it is suggested that the analysis of male and female subalterns can be done and also the comparative study of subalterns in the male and female writers would further help in the understanding of the theory.