The Desiring Widow in Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds and Rabindranath Tagore's Chokher Bali

abstract: This article offers a comparative analysis of the widow as a socially disruptive character in Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1872) and Rabindranath Tagore's Chokher Bali (1903). The young widow-protagonists of these novels, Lizzie and Binodini, have no place in family or community, in British and Indian culture; as widows, they are surplus women, and are therefore disruptive and dangerous to heteronormative society. The analysis participates in postcolonial and British feminist studies of widowhood by revealing the literary, political, and religious parallels of these distinctly different socio-cultural contexts. Although both novels sympathize with the widows' plight by revealing how they are forced to scheme and lie in order to survive in a society that categorically excludes them, they are ultimately punished for the threat they pose to nuclear-family ideology, even when it is not the widows who transgress, but the men around them.