Literature is a rather specific topic for writing. To be competent in this sphere, one must possess profound knowledge of literary devices, knowledge of the language in which a certain book is written, knowledge of the culture of the nation this or that book belongs to, and the ability of a person to think in an analytical way and find hidden meanings in a certain literary creation. Sometimes literature reflects the sides of human life that are usually thought of as tabooed ones, such as sex and violence.
In order to consider these phenomena, this essay is written. The essay aims to see how these things are interconnected in the book by Arundhati Roy. For a better understanding of the things, we are going to take a look at the author’s biography and consider her literary ideals. Further on, the essay will be focused on the development of the connection between sex and violence. It all begins between two people who can not stand each other, but then more and more people become involved in it. Thus, little children who were innocent and kind become victims of the violence that results from the actions of grown-up people.
In order to understand better the essence of the book under consideration, it is necessary to take a brief look at the author because in her life and values a lot of helpful information may be found. So, Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961, in an Indian state of Kerala, where her mother, a Syrian Christian woman, and father, a Bengali Hindu man, lived and worked. The girl took up studying at Corpus Christi in Kerala, but at the age of sixteen, she had to move to Delhi looking for a better future. She experienced poor life, homelessness and finally pulled through it and became a well-known writer. Her husband always supported her and helped.
Consequently, the literary ideals of Arundhati Roy are close to her ideals of life. To be more exact they coincide in almost all the points and reflect the philosophy of her existence. The literature of Arundhati Roy is rather political and in its essence, it touches upon the most important but, at the same time, the most ordinary problems of the human society such as poverty, war and peace, life and death, the good and the evil.
Books by Arundhati Roy are filled with the profound knowledge that she brought in them from real life and with her personal experiences. Her pain for the nation, for the people of the whole world, and for every human being, in particular, is reflected in her work as a writer. And the book under the title “The God of Small Things” is her first novel and it presents a bright example of Roy’s manner of writing and expressing her thoughts.
It took the author about for years to complete the book which is being analyzed in this essay. It was started in 1992 and finished at the end of 1996. After the publishing of the book, the author Arundhati Roy became well-known around the literary world and soon got the Bookers Prize in 1997. Her book arose a lot of controversies but the supporters and critics agreed that the new author of Indian origin was a kind of the new genius in the sphere of psychological and political literature. Since that time Arundhati Roy has written three more books all of which are concerned with the same fundamental issues of human existence, but the first novel is still considered to be the best work of hers.
Like other stories, this one starts with certain peaceful descriptions of nature and of the town in which it takes place:” May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dust green trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.” (39)
Nothing indicates that the whole story will deal with the problem of violence, and sexual violence and abuse will be the main topic of it. As every person at the beginning of life is full of hopes and plans, the story was full of hopes and started as a depiction of the peaceful life of a family of Christian people who lived in India. But with every next page of the book, the reader begins to realize that violence is the leitmotif of it. Things get worse and worse as the characters of the story grow up and face the problems of real adult life. The same happened to the main characters of the book, fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, as well as other members of their family. For example, when Pappachi used violence in the relationships with his wife, this was the first time violence came into play in the story.
Furthermore, Pappachi resorted to violence towards other members of his family, like the example when he forbade his Ammu to continue her studying in College and she had to come back to Ayemenem. But still, at these examples, the reader can not think that the concepts of sex and violence are interconnected. They seem to be only single cases of violence that have nothing in common with each other. Even vice versa, the events in the book seem to develop in the right direction for its characters.
Ammu, although divorced from her husband, had two children and returned with them to Ayemenem. These children brought peace in the family as everyone thought and it was impossible to imagine how much violence, especially the sexual one, they were to face in their lives. The children, Estha and Rahel were living their lives and hoping for the better:” In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us.
As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.” (68) But with the time spent the phenomena of sex and violence start being more and more connected, they appear in the book more and more often, and then the reader understands what the book is really about. Children did not even think that their life will be a chain of violent events that can be ended only with another act of violence that is unacceptable in society. Little twins lived their innocent lives, loving this world and the people around them. They did not even know about such things that they will have to face when they become a little older. Violence became an integral part of their lives, as well as it often happens in real life. Some people are acting violently, others are victims of their violence.
Moreover, as the twins grow up they have faced the concept of violence themselves. What added to the misfortunes of the family was the sexual abuse of their son Estha by a Candy Bar Worker in the theatre when they attended a play:” She remembers, for instance (though she hadn’t been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches–Estha’s sandwiches, that Estha ate–on the Madras Mail to Madras. And these are only the small things.” (134)
In this episode the reader can observe that sex and violence manifest their connection in the picture of the world of Arundhati Roy and which is expressed through her book. It seems to the reader of the novel that these two notions are necessarily connected and do not exist separately, being a kind of integral parts of each other. The author calls these small things but they are not so small in their importance in her book. The sexual abuse that Estha experienced changed his life in an irreversible way.
He became silent and could not perceive the surrounding world from its positive sides. Estha started thinking that the world was hostile to him and that sex and violence are notions of the same kind. Such a thing often happens in real life, not only in books. When people believe somebody or something it is always painful to understand that the thing or person one believed in turned out to be fake and resorted to betrayal. The same thing is with violence. When people do not know what it is because they have never faced it, everything seems to be perfect in their lives, but when they experience some kind of violence, their outlook of the world changes and it is hard for them to return to normal life again. But no one knows exactly why violence occurs.
Needless to say, some people conclude that the main reason for violence of any kind is envy and anger towards the people who are more successful than others. This means that a person can resort to violence if something is going in his or her life not the way that he or she has planned it. Some people enjoy the state when others feel bad due to their actions. On the whole, such an approach to the problem of violence looks like revenge for the people who were offended by their fate.
For example, if they did not have success in love they try to destroy any relationships of their close people in order to make them suffer to the same extent as they did. And in the majority of cases, the victims of these revengeful actions are not the people at whom they were directed. Usually, some innocent people suffer because of the anger and frustration of others. This was the case in the book by Arundhati Roy, when Baby Kochamma, who did not succeed in love in her own life, tried to destroy the happiness of others. Ammu loved Velutha, an outcast working on her family enterprise: “She unbuttoned her shirt. They stood their skin to skin. Her brownness against his blackness.
Her softness against his hardness. Her nut-brown breasts (that wouldn’t support a toothbrush) against his smooth ebony chest. She smelled the river on him. His particular Paravan smell so disgusted Baby Kochamma. Ammu put out her tongue and tasted it, in the hollow of his throat. On the lobe of his ear…” (69) But for Baby Kochamma their relationships were reduced to sexual ones, so she wanted to stop them with violence, and as it often happens, she destroyed much more than she planned to.
Baby Kochamma’s violence resulted in the death of a child. No one could predict that her action will amount to this, although the interrelation between sex and violence was becoming more and more evident. Moreover, it is widely known that a chain of acts of violence could never be stopped by another manifestation of violence. In this case, it also proved to be impossible. People who loved each other had to hide their feelings instead of being happy, but when another person came to know about their happiness, she wanted at once to destroy it, because she never had her own.
Drawing from this, the chain of events that led to the tragic case was very long but it was started by the violence of Baby Kochamma. She locked Ammu up so that she could not meet Velutha, Ammu accused her children of all her misfortunes, the children ran away from the house and when they tried to cross the river, Sophie Mol, Chako’s daughter drowned:” The Government never paid for Sophie Mol’s funeral because she wasn’t killed on a zebra crossing. She had hers in Ayemenem in the old church with the new paint. She was Estha and Rahel’s cousin, their uncle Chacko’s daughter. She was visiting from England. Estha and Rahel were seven years old when she died.
Sophie Mol was almost nine. She had a special child-sized coffin. Satin lined. Brass handle shined.” (234)Therefore, an innocent child paid for the things she did not commit. Sophie Mol became the victim of the dirty games that grown-up people played when the violence and cruelty of others killed the child who was not to blame. This is a bright example of the typical case in a society where sex and violence are so interconnected that they form people’s outlook of the world and change their roles in life. Children have to pay for what grown-ups do, only because grown-ups do some things and can not control their consequences.
Thus, becomes a result of sexual relationships, or sexual relationships result from the violence that people had to face in their childhood. And the examples of such things are numerous in real life, as well as in the book by Roy.
Moreover, as many people say, violence always brings violence, and this saying turned out to be true in respect of the events that took place in the life of the twins, Estha and Rahel, and their family. Their mother, Ammu, had to pay for her love, and in her case sex led to violence and resulted in her own early death. She was accused of the death of Sophie Mol and had to leave her homemade to do so by her own brother Chako. Unable to feed her children, she sent Estha to his father, Rahel left at home, and Ammu died in a cheap hotel.
She committed another kind of violence before she died – the violence over a personality, as the twins thought of themselves as of a single whole, she separated the twins and broke their lives: “Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.” (256)
On the day of their first meeting after 23 years of separate living, brother and sister spent the whole day together and committed incest the same night. In this case, the reader can think that sex was not connected with violence at least at the end of the book. The reader is waiting for the happy ending which is typical of many kinds of books, but not in this very vase. The reader can think that the sufferings of the twins, Estha and Rahel are over, but it will be a delusion.
Brother and sister violated moral norms of the society in which incest is forbidden and proved once again that the notions of sex and violence can not exist without each other. This point of view is true concerning the outlook of the world that is expressed in the book. But, what is more important, it is in many cases true in the real life. Many people have to suffer throughout all their lives and try to break the chain of sex and violence that are interconnected.
But, as a rule, they do not succeed in their attempts and fall the victims of some other people who live on this Earth, as it seems, only for one purpose – to bring violence and unhappiness in the lives of others. And the reason for this, in most cases, is simple envy towards those people who are happy, or anger at life in which they did not succeed. Correspondently, these events create the outlook of the world as of some kind of a place where everyone is an enemy of another, and everyone wants to offend another. Such outlook breaks the lives of many people but, nevertheless, it exists and such cases are very often.
After the work is done, it will not be out of place to mention that the necessary goal of it was the analysis of the book by Arundhati Roy “The God of Small Things” in order to find out the extent of the connection between such notions as sex and violence in this novel. Numerous examples from the primary source, i. e. from the novel by Arundhati Roy helped in achieving this goal, as well as secondary sources that provided the needed information on the background of the author and Indian literature on the whole.
The essay reached the set goal and found out that the two above-mentioned phenomena, namely sex, and violence, are really interconnected in the book and can not exist without each other according to the examples that can be found in the book. It allows us to presume that the author’s outlook of the world is also based on this point of view. It is impossible to argue that it is somewhat cruel but, nevertheless, proves to be true in many cases in the real life.
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