Family Structure In Manju Kapur's Home Analysis

921 Words4 Pages

Her endeavor against odds proves to be the major cause of her suffering and alienation from her own family and the society. In her article “Crossing the Patriarchal Threshold: Glimpses of the Incipient New Women in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters” Seema Malik comments regarding the portrayal of Virmati:
Thus in Virmati we see the incipient new woman who is conscious, introspective, educated and wants to carve a life for her. To some extent she even conveys a personal vision of womanhood by violating current social odds yet she lacks the confidence, self-control, for sigh tends and is physically imprisoned with an underlying need to be emotionally and intellectually dependent on superior force – Professor Harish and it is precisely this …show more content…

As Virmati does, her daughter too hates her mother, she too do not want to become like her mother. Though Virmati loves her too much, her daughter Ida never understands her mother while she was alive just like Virmati. In her “Family Structure in Manju Kapur’s Home” Maneeta Kahlon has rightly observed:
Ida becomes the typical daughter of a ‘difficult daughter’ Virmati. She could not develop an understanding with her mother in her lifetime and after Virmati’s death; this realization engulfs her with guilt. (Kahlon 3) The strained relationship and frustrations about life expressed in the following assertion of Ida, she asserts:
“My mother tightened her reins on me, as I grew older; she said it was for my own good. As a result, I am constantly looking for escape routes. Of course, I made a disastrous marriage. My mother spent the period after my divorce coating the air I breathed with sadness and disapproval. What will happen to you after I am gone?’ was her favorite lament. I was nothing, husbandless, childless. I felt myself hovering like a pencil notation on the margins of society. For long periods, I was engulfed by melancholy, depression and despair. I would lie in bed for hours, unable to sleep, pitying myself for all I didn’t have, blaming my mother, myself.” (Kapur