ABSTRACT
This chapter examines post-Partition novels and short stories that deal directly with how economics and particularly, women's wage labor, impacted family dynamics. It describes the circumstances of the single working woman from the middle-class using Dibyendu Palit's "Machh" and Samaresh Basu's "Pasharini". The chapter argues that Palit's story reproduces the trauma of Partition in the protagonist's grim experience of imprisonment within the double bind of wage labor and the family – the individual fails to find either self-realization through wage labor or fulfillment within the traditional family. It considers Narendranath Mitra's novels Mahanagar and Durabhashini, to illuminate the friction within marriage caused by women's entrance into the labor market. The chapter also examines how the shift in the geometry of power within the family and the depletion in their status as the sole provider induced anxieties of emasculation in the workers' husbands, who view their wives' wage-work as deliberately transgressive.
