Professor Tanya Carrell
ESL 5: Advanced Composition and Reading
27 July 2015
Arranged Marriage
In the Arranged Marriage book, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni describes all the aspects of marriage. The book is a collection of eleven stories. The stories are diverse in the themes such as starting over again, surviving an adversity, transformation of a strong woman, domestic violence. Not only women but also their family members have to cope with the realism, relationship, and the contrast between the cultures when the women have an arranged marriage.
Divakaruni paints the lives of the women in detail in the arranged marriage and points out the realities of life after marriage. The vast majority of these women became dislocated both emotionally …show more content…
In the story “The Word Love”, the woman starts living with a man. Affection is a mystical word, and it is hard to characterize it effectively. She accepted westernization in totality that she started to live with her boyfriend outside the institution of marriage, but her culture thwarts her. She recollects how her mother had taken pains to bring her up after her father’s death. The mother-daughter relationship is quite different in Indian culture. She regrets hiding the relationship with her mother. However, she finally faces the wrath of losing her mother on confessing the truth. Her boyfriend on knowing her relationship says “it was never me, was it, never love. It was always you and her, her and you ”(70). Thus, parental love makes her take a decision to live alone. The writer poignantly present the realism in Indian culture where the society is a closed one, and it is very different to accept relationship outside the institution of marriage any such relationship. It often results in conventional violence and even abandonment by parents and relatives.
The arranged marriage is an accumulation of realism stories managing the individual and social troubles of Indian women living in the USA and Calcutta. Besides, cultural differences are also evident in this book. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni depicts the aspects of the arranged marriage successfully.
Work Cited
Divakaruni, Chitra Bannerjee. Arranged Marriage. Black Swan, Great