Reconceiving Womanhood: Choices in the Changing World Abstract: "Identity" is a prime concept for much contemporary cultural and literary criticism, which, along with its even abstract terminological twin, the "self," has become a cliché without becoming clear. The word "identity" is paradoxical in itself, meaning both sameness and distinctiveness, and its contradictions proliferate when it is applied to women. Carolyn Heilbrun's brave book, “Reinventing Womanhood”, inadvertently exemplifies some current confusions about female identity and literature. For example, she claims that successful women are "male-identified" but that it is a "failure" for a "woman…show more content… The female body parts in relation to Sati of the Shakti cult are representated hierarchically in a bid to deify her as a new expression of womanhood. In the Vedic culture women stood as the decisive force of spiritual development and strong morality. Women participated with men in a similar vein as far as religion and education were concerned. In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House , Helmer says to Nora, “Before everything else you’re a wife and a mother.” Nora retorts back, “I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that before everything else I am a human being just as much as you are. At any rate I shall try to become one.” For ages together women have been striving hard to become a human, an identity which would locate them specifically in the world map and render them both space and voice to question their own position. In this regard I would like to throw light on two women protagonists from two contemporary novels, Gauri of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Maria of Paulo Coelho’s Eleven Minutes. My choice regarding these two women is based upon their own confidences in chalking out the course of their own lives by themselves. The Lowland is the tragic story of two brothers whose lives are torn apart by a single woman who reaches to both
