Women amidst Duets and Duels of Binaries

Each of the dual aspects in the woman characters in Salman Rushdie's fictional world namely, boldness-submissiveness, good-evil, love-hatred, the monstrous and the angelic, motherliness-unmotherliness, etc., like a membrane, divides inside from outside. This division, passing through ‘a hymeneal bond’ and ‘an osmotic mixing’ (Miller 443), results in formation of a ‘new woman’ (Weikgenannt 67), who is a source of life and death, a devilish angel, an angelic devil, a motherly mother, an unmotherly mother, a joyful sorrow, a sorrowful joy, a pleasurable suffering, a suffering pleasure, a destroying nurturer, a nurturing destroyer, an epitome of refuge, shelter and escape, destroying one’s identity, a tuner / toner of destiny being also the controller / capturer of one’s destiny, a Snake in the form of a Ladder, a Ladder in the form of a Snake, lovingly constructive, lovingly destructive, lovingly revengeful, revengefully lovable, shamelessly shameful, shamefully shameless, powerlessly powerful, powerfully powerless, lovingly humiliating, humiliating lovingly, lovable but violent, harmlessly harmful, harmfully harmless, and so on.