You may exhaust the literature of the world that is past, and ... future, before finding another Sita. Sita is unique; that character was depicted once and for all. There may have been several Ramas, perhaps, but never more than one Sita! She is the very type of the true Indian woman, for all the Indian ideals of a perfected woman have grown out of that one life of Sita.( The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 vols (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1–8, 1989; 9, 1997), 3.255.
‘Sita, purer than purity itself, all patience, and all
suffering. She who suffered ... without a murmur, she the ever-chaste and ever-pure
wife, she the ideal of the people, the ideal of the gods. ... Sita has gone
into the very vitals of our race. She is there in the blood of every Hindu man
and woman; we are all the children of Sita. ... The women of India must grow
and develop in the footprints of Sita, and that is the only way.’ (Complete
Works, 3.256)
Apart from scholarly analyses, the character of Sita is
often expressed in creative and symbolic
terms. One such is Swami Vivekananda’s explication of the soul’s journey to
salvation. In it, Sita
represents the jivatman. According to him: ‘Rama was the Paramatman and Sita
was the Jivatman, and each man’s or woman’s body was the Lanka. ... The Jivatman
which was enclosed in the body, or cap- tured in the island of Lanka, always
desired to be in affinity with the Paramatman, or Shri Rama. But the Rakshasas
would not allow it, and Rakshasas represented certain traits of character.’ (Complete
Works, 5.415)