Vol. 3, Issue 10, Part D (2017)

Mythic appropriation has long been used as a contrivance by patriarchy to completely incorporate the idea of Femininity being inferior to manliness. Patriarchy has framed the idea of Femininity which attributes frailty, fickleness and frivolity to women. Female is often deemed to be a mute, passive and nonchalant spectator of male action. It is assumed that female agency does not exist. Patriarchy also shuns the idea of female identity and female consciousness. Patriarchy has long evoked the mythical thought to become the carrier of testimony to female insignificance. According to Claude Levi-Strauss in his The Savage Mind “Mythical thought for its part is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning.” (Strauss 22) Mythical thought has been used as an effectual ideological tool to sustain patriarchal control over women in Indian society. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni through her fiction not only explores the mythic appropriation of Femininity but also subverts it. She questions the practice of gender construction and attributing passivity to women in the patriarchal world. She employs literature for the ‘re-ordering’ of the mythical thought to lend agency and voice to Draupadi amidst male heroism, war and mythic appropriation of gender in the epic of Mahabharta.