Emancipation of Women in Tagore’s The Wife’s Letter

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore’s fictional oeuvre, especially the collection of his short stories, paints a vivid picture of the emancipation of women in the nineteenth-century colonial Bengal. His writings not only voice the pathos and sufferings of the female protagonists but also act as an interface to liberate them from the oppressive social bondage. His women characters’ struggle to break the barriers of patriarchal social conventions is well represented in his short stories. His women characters are intelligent, educated, and at par equal to their male counterparts. They break the conventional set of rules laid by the society and find a way to emancipate from social restrictions. Hence, this paper attempts to explore and analyse, from a feminist perspective, Tagore’s contribution to the liberation of women with reference to his women characters in his short story, The Wife’s Letter.