narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

experiences and practical wisdom and a retrospective realization of the importance of
material comforts in a relationship where ‘love alone cannot last long’.
The reader is made to think if this is a generational story of intimacy or a story of every
generation; a story of different time frames or different ages of all times. Rather than
privilege one narrative over another, what is important to appreciate through a poststructuralist
lens is the influence of multiple and contradictory discourses that engender
multiple and contradictory subjectivities (Leahy. 1884: 49) and through which ‘then’/past
and ‘now’/present are continually discursively mutually constructed. What can be
appreciated from the reading of Shanta’s narratives is an appropriation of specific
discourses at specific situations that calls for recognizing situational multiplicities and
contingencies of the ideals of coupling.
Multiple Time Frames, Multiple Eyes, Multiple Perceptions and Multiple
Subjectivities:
It is interesting to analyze in Shanta’s narrative, multiple perceptions, multiple meanings
and multiple contexts. For instance, Shanta narrativizes, ‘the girls and boys of these
days’ through more than one perceptual frame:
• She imagines how these boys and girls imagine themselves and their time: ‘they
think they are modern....and hardly care’.
• She imagines these boys and girls and their time: ‘they think they are modern
and can take their own decisions but these are more of the negative effects of
Westernization’
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