Trauma Caused Through Gender Specific Functional Stratification In Jahnavi Barua’s ‘Rebirth’

Abstract

Women torment through the gender specific stratified roles in the contemporary patriarchal social and familial setup, that loads her with immense obligations, however with a denial of dignity and recognition. Therefore, she is wretched at the crossroad between career and family. The women, who aspire to transcendent their life, seeking existential individuality, are forced into the realm of perennial negation of arbitrary positions that destabilizes them with a denial and misrecognition for having debunked the set arrangement of the existing phallogocentric structures. The men, being kernel of existing patriarchal structure, discern a threat to their socially perpetuated domination, when women plan to widen their existential horizon beyond their traditional mantle. Such an insecurity towards men’s prestige, position and control ahead of their female counterpart perpetuate them into a stance that alarms them of losing their subordinate partner, who they feel are inferior, and suit for the labor and tasks which men perceive mean and inferior to their gender. The men resist women’s new aspiration beyond the existing stratified duties and the identity. The phallogocentric structure within which women are supposed to exist hinders their every attempt to seek and fit the new roles and pursuits of independent recognition, contrary such structure even punishes them for the insurgence against the set social plexus. Jahnavi Barua’s narrative Rebirth: A Novel provide an adequate analogy, a replica of real-life shared experience of women in their gender specific functional stratification. The paper aims at exposing the patriarchal structure sustained for the benefit of male gender.