Suchitra Bhattacharya’s “Good Woman, Bad Woman”: A Critique of the Patriarchal Practice of Ascribing Feminine Stereotypes

Abstract

Suchitra Bhattacharya (1950-2015), one of the most prolific and popular Bengali women writers of the contemporary literary arena, has always vividly portrayed the sufferings, exploitations, aspirations and struggles of women irrespective of their class and creed in a patriarchal sociocultural background. Suchitra Bhattacharya’s literary oeuvre, being grounded in contemporary social reality, have time and again unflinchingly depicted gender-related issues like patriarchal scheme of feminine stereotyping, male domination, gender inequality, and sexist oppression on women as primary leitmotifs. The process of feminine stereotyping by attributing pre-specified
gender traits and roles to women and by appending tags of ‘good women’ to those women who conform to traditional gender roles and ‘bad women’ to those who violate those roles is an underlying yet effective means of maintaining the status quo of male domination over women in a raditional socio-cultural backdrop. This paper aims at analyzing Suchitra Bhattacharya’s story
“Good Woman, Bad Woman” by focusing on the repressive living experiences of the two stereotyped women in the story, Urmi and Ria, with a view to unveiling the author’s distinctive way of critiquing and countering the process of feminine stereotyping as a patriarchal tool for sexism.