NEW WOMAN IN SHASHI DESHPANDE’S SMALL REMEDIES: AN ANALYSIS

The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century and had a profound influence on feminism into the twentieth century. The New Woman was a result of the growing respectability of postsecondary education and employment for women who belonged to the privileged upper classes of society. To explore this contention this present paper tries to analyze the characters in Shashi Deshpande's Small Remedies (2000) as an image of new woman who rebels a new position of freedom and choice when it came to marital and sexual partners. These characters can give away everything for the things that they urge like Savitribai for instance gave away her lover and denies her own daughter for her craves for music. The characters are all educated, talented and intelligent. It is evident that they don't really bother about what the society thinks.