The two-sided nature of women has been pedagogically stated to understand the paradigms that women construct around herself either to show her resistance or to imagine herself as being imaged by men.

We can analyze this statement in this way that on one hand women subjectively assess herself as a female figure according to her own presumptions and assumptions while at the same time she objectively stands to enigmatic image or to valid existence in relation to male concepts and precepts of gender identity. how they perceive their femaleness, feminist and feminine aspects in point of view of men’s gaze. Inspite of delivering weird truths, natural facts, and false coherences in context of the material interests of the gender-biased patriarchal society, the author has taken to task women’s own psychological phenomena i.e. At the end of 'Summer Days,' for instance, she speaks to the reader directly: 'and the moral of the story? There isn't.Suniti Namjoshi’s ideas as regards the women’s existence get into such assumptions that unconsciously, invisibly, irrevocably and unknowingly accept the cultural construct of their image in a society or in a family. Namjoshi consciously plays with this didacticism, sometimes concluding by challenging the idea that there is a moral to be found at all. The fables are short and simple, often only a few paragraphs long, and have a strong ethical sensibility. 'If something didn't make sense, I wrote a fable about it' (1), she writes in the Introduction to this section, and indeed, many of feminism's primary concerns can be spotted in each text. The first set, simply entitled 'Feminist Fables,' represents the author's own strategies for negotiating a confusing patriarchal world as a new feminist.

While the form of the book lends itself well to collecting Namjoshi's fables and poetry, it does less justice to her longer works, the extracts from which are intellectually interesting, but emotionally unfulfilling.Ī significant part of The Fabulous Feminist is made up of fables, a form to which Namjoshi is particularly drawn. There is certainly a sense of thematic unity to the collection, produced substantially through the author's exploration of morality and immorality, and her almost ubiquitous use of allegory and of animals as characters. Even from its title, The Fabulous Feminist is clear in its philosophy, and takes the reader on a journey through Namjoshi's own experiences with feminism, as told through fables, poetry and several longer works of fiction.Īs a reader that selects material from Namjoshi's body of work, The Fabulous Feminist throws together a range of different books and collections.

It is not often that a book falls into my hands that calls itself - consciously and unashamedly - a feminist book.

Feminist Fables by Suniti Namjoshi