im done with my assignment for my World Literature subject on this topic..
just wanna share with you guys :)
The
Guide is Narayan’s most famous novel in which he portrays the character of a
woman who defies almost all traditional codes for women and comes out full way
to establish herself as a human being. Rosie in The Guide is successful in her
mission. She obtains her freedom and moves all over India alone doing her own
work. Rosie, an M.A. in economics, challenges the orthodox Hindu concept of
what a woman should be. She leaves her husband who shows his apathy and
indifference towards her feelings and moves out of the walls of his family on a
path usually unchartered for women in an Indian society.
The
author portrays her character with all his sympathy, exposing the hypocrisy of
the patriarchal society and showing how miserable the condition of even a
highly educated woman was in that society and at the same time showing women
gradually getting conscious of their personalities and demands. Rosie gives
more importance to the gratification of her personal interest than to the
observation of social codes for women. She ignores the taboos and other social
practices that thwart her independence and moves on in her own way with her
back to the society’s reaction and criticism. When her husband appears to her
wanting passion and love and time for her, she enjoys the company of Raju,
walking with him all over Malgudi and its surrounding sites, sitting with him
beside the river Sarayu in the evenings and even indulging him in her closed
room.
Rosie
first walks over India’s time honoured tradition by ignoring the established
custom of matching horoscopes and caste for marriage where it is a practice
held to be sacred in Hinduism. But Rosie marriages one archaeologist husband
with no matching of horoscopes and no consideration of caste. Rosie said in
this novel “I had myself photographed
clutching the scroll of the university citation in one hand, and sent it to the
advertisement. Well we met, he examined me and my certificate, we went to a
registrar and got married”.
Next
is the author’s portrayal of the character of Rosie further questions the
position of women and exposes the cruelty and inhumanity of the male dominated
Indian society. Rosie is an educated woman but her education fails to promote
her status and gives her a better position in the society. As she said in the
novel “We are viewed as public women. We are not considered respectable; we are
not considered as civilized”. Even Marco wants to raise her as a puppet as if
she were an illiterate woman unable to understand anything. Thus the society
was blind and could not see any difference between an M. A. passed Rosie and an
illiterate woman. Rosie finally comes out of this society that treats women as
dolls and tries to stand on her own feet.
By
throwing both Marco and Raju away from her life, Rosie strongly defies the
well-defined place of women in Malgudi where a woman is never allowed to go on
her own way, but is made to remain a puppet. An inner strength, until unseen
and undiscovered by herself, leads her to soar so far out of Marco’s and even
Raju’s reach that neither Raju nor Marco can control her. Raju at last
comprehends that “she would never stop dancing … whether I was inside the bars
or outside, whether her husband approved of it or not. Neither Marco nor I had
any place in her life, which had its own sustaining vitality and which she
herself had underestimated all along.”
