How Literature Shaped Me?

How Literature shaped me?

Have you ever got bored from your day to day life? Would you like to live another fantastic life? If your answer is yes, I am sure you would like to be a student of Literature, you would like to live, to be with fictional characters. Literature is an ocean, it depends on you how well you diving in it. I am a student of literature, since the five years I am diving up in the ocean of literature, through these years I came across many novels, short stories, plays, poems and so on. Now finally at the end of MA, having a sense of an ending I am going to share my views on how literature helps me in shaping myself, in shaping my thoughts, in shaping my vision.

Literature, the word itself says a lot, it is mirror of the society, it is an ex-ray image and so on. But for me literature seems honey coated pill (here I am using honey coated instead sugar coated), it may cure all mental pains, sugar may have harmful effect on one’s body but honey may haven’t as it has antiseptic and antibacterial properties. Ocean of literature is full of theories, it makes you aware with brutality of life and followed by providing a solution of it. Each and every character comes with their problems, their vision and they grow with their faultiness to be perfect or better one. Indeed, it’s upon you how you relate yourself  with them or how you digest literary theories that later on helps you in finding your solutions. Everything which we found in and around us and which seems problematic to us, the solution of it may lay in vastness of literature.

Back then I am the one who was not able to explain what literature is for me, though I learnt it in my UG, the real knowledge and nuances of it I have been gaining in the years of PG at the department of English under the immense guidance of Dr.Dilip Barad sir.

During three years of my B.A,  Robert Stevenson’s  “Dr.Jekyall and Mr.Hyde”  as well as Tonny Morrison’s “The Bluest Eyes” remained the favourite of mine.  The simple though complicated fable of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde made me aware with good and evil existence within an individual, it taught me on what extend psychological damage could be done. Though at that time I was not much aware about African literature and African movements, I read “The Bluest Eye” only for the aesthetic delight, only by being curious from novel’s title. Pecola, the protagonist character suffers a lot because of having black skin and at the end her desire for bluest eyes leads her to become mad. Who give you the right to judge anyone by their look or appearance?  Though Bluest eyes is about racism, recently the same is going on, on the name of casticism. It taught me not to judge other by their cast and look, after all ,everyone has  own abilities, own uniqueness. Why should anyone have to be reason to instil inferiority in any other?  Don’t judge any one in this way, we haven’t any idea to what extend it can affect the person or victim of it. Oh, How can I forget about greedy man Ghashiram Kotwal, a Brahmin from Kanuj? It taught me not to become blind behind knowledge and power in order to take revenge.

Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” is no longer lighthouse for me, it proves a “Powerhouse” to me. It helps me in finding my vision so as Lily Briscoe had.

“I have had my vision”

The more I connect myself with Mrs.Ramsay and Lily Briscoe , the more I witnessed my mental growth with having such a confusion what to be. Finally I decided to be an independent though not in term of throwing away all the relations but what I learnt  is to throw away the constructed stereotypical rigidity of my mind, shackles of my mind.  I would like to be as Lily Briscoe rather than to be Mrs.Ramsay.  I want to be and do something with my own abilities rather than to merely rely on others. 

Feminism, a very much renowed term.Being a student of literature, specially a female, I am the one who always curious to read everything from feminist perspective. But what I learnt is that the term has loopholes and that is the reason why it is always subjected to be debated. Really the term doesn't mean that men are your enemies, it seems ridicoules that on one side we are talking about gender equality, while on the other side we are doing the same without understanding the real meaning of feminism. What Alice Walker said is true to the point,

"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender"
(Alice Walker coined the term womanism as he thought that feminism was largely used for middle class white women)


Though womanist is called as subset of black feminism, it teaches us to fight equally for everyone without being partial towards race or cast. 

Nonetheless this learning of literature must have been gone to so far in my life but what I can say with surety is that after learning these many literary texts and theories what I have gained, I achieved, I understood from literary ocean that became my own memory, my personal literature. In every dimensions literature helps me in shaping me, in changing me, in finding better me, in craving better me.  Indeed it brings the real dawning of knowledge to me that teaches me to be differ not only for the sack of to be rather than to do so with having such logic with my own ideas.