A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

husband, Dick. She represses her ideal self to lead an indepent existence of a Single Woman, in
her life with Dick. When Dick totally suppresses her rights and feelings, her ideal self fights
against Dick and she tries to assert herself, by developing friendship with Moses.
As she does not want to be separated from Dick once for all, her conflict between her
ideal self and her basic self aggravates and she is in a stress situation. Simultaneously she suffers
from a conflict between her hatred for the blacks in his irrational mind and his love for Moses, a
black in her rational mind. She represses her irrational self to enjoy the friendship with Moses,
but when a white, Tony Marston revokes her irrational self, she gets away from him once for all.
Even after his permanent dismissal, she regrets the loss of his friendship with Moses and suffers
from a conflict between her rational self and irrational self. As she seriously suffers from her
inner conflict, she is in a stress situation and mentally breaks-down.
Though Moses has never hurt Mary’s boss-attitude, he never thinks that his lower status
has been exploited. He is proud of his friendship with Mary and wants to maintain that a black
can be in equal terms with a white. He does not take the matter of his dismissal as a personal
insult but a racial humiliation and avenges it by murdering her. Thus the hatred of the blacks for
the whites for their suppression is inherent in every black man that is repressed temporarily by
Moses ultimately emerges out in his violent retaliation to murder Mary.
In Sivasankari’s Over-dose, Nirmala’s mother having died in her early young age, her
father brings up her carefully with a great anxiety that the child, who has lost the motherly care
in the young age, should not be unfit and unprepared for the traditional way of life of a normal
woman. Though she is a graduate, she is neither exposed to the external world nor is she discreet
in worldly affairs. When she gets married to Manohar, an engineer at Bangalore, she is
compelled by her husband to give herself to the new social customs and habits of men and
women:- moving freely, drinking together gambling and Merry-making either in the parties or at
the clubs. When she has to face a new society at Bangalore with her husband, she is annoyed but
determined not to accept the sophisticated way of life. But once on being compelled my
Manohar to terminate her first pregnancy she in order to convince her husband to the idea of
having a baby; she against her own will indulges herself in the club activities and into a different
kind of socialization. After the baby is born, she decides to give up her activities at the parties
and the clubs-once for all and wishes to look after the Child with the responsibility of a mother.
Once again Manohar takes her to the parties with a compulsion, leaving their daughter with the