Gender, sex and discrimination in the god of small things: theories and approaches

Abstract

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things unfolds with the marvelous interplay of gender, sex and discrimination. Roy's conscious use of language produces new narrative strategies, discloses unheard stories of women, and transforms traditional concepts of gender roles. The manipulation of language empowers the speaker, while failure in voicing causes silence and a lack of control. Roy's employment of Indian English manifests her concern about the female cultural heritage and her challenge to the superiority of male's superiority. Her experiments with the epistolary novel make the silenced women heard in a double-voiced narrative. Roy also voices concern over the polarity between gender roles, an arbitrary division resulting from language construction. For her characters, the hierarchal gender structure is further complicated by skin color and skin tone. Drawing upon theories on language and gender, this paper addresses three major topics in The God of Small Things and proposes pertinent classroom activities: (1) Rahel's language: features and implications, (2) language and voice, and (3) gender and discrimination.