V. Conclusion: (Re)drawing the Boundaries of the Human
The interplay of gender, race, and physical handicaps in Behen's The Dumb
Virgin and The Unfortunate Bride, though re-enacting male dominance in literature,
offers some fresh food for thought, slackens and queries the fixed categories of gender
and race, making them less identifiable and more difficult to locate. More noticeably,
the emergence of female "autonomy," through the fulfillment and representation of
her narrative "desire," has quietly infiltrated the misogynistic camp of
male-monopolized literary discourse.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson drives home her argument that "without the
monstrous body to demarcate the border to the generic, without the female body to
distinguish the shape of the male, and without the pathological to give form to the
normal, the taxonomies of bodily value that underline political, social, and economic
arrangements would collapse."