Draupadi is the wife of Yudhistira, Arjuna, Bhima, Nakula, and Sahadeva. She also demonstrates her faithfulness to her husbands through years of exile and war. Continuing the interpretation of feminine virtue, Draupadi exemplifies being a good wife to all five of her husbands even when they are not always good to her. Part of being loyal to one’s husband does not stop at being loyal when other people are involved, but to coninute to be loyal if your husband is not. Draupadi has endured ill-treatment from her husbands, but especially from Yudhistira. He bets her at a chess match and Dussasana drags her around the room by her hair and trying to disrobe her as if she was their slave. Draupadi was seeking her husband’s protection, ““This is monstrous,” she cried. “Is morality gone? Or else how can you be looking on this atrocity? There are my husbands—five, not one as for others—and they look paralysed” (Narayan 62)! With no aid from her husbands, she was embarrassed and treated like she was lower than a servant. She wept and prayed to the god Vishnu who saved her virtue from being exposed in that moment where Dussasana was trying desperately to disrobe her. The definition of feminine virtue illustrated through Draupadi is that she can be outspoken yet, she must remain submissive to the men around her. If her husbands did not act, then she must follow suit. The good wife must follow her husband, even if it leads her into the fiery wall of embarrassment and shame. Draupadi continues to stay however. She follows her husbands into exile in the wilderness.
The ultimate aspect of a woman who possesses feminine virtue is the ideology that in order to be considered a good wife, she must remain loyal to her husband no matter what. In Draupadi’s case, she followed her husbands to literally her very end. Wherever they went, she went and when it was time for them to journey out of the world to get to heaven, she died along the way. “…the Pandava brothers decided to leave the world. One by one the Pandava brothers and Draupadi died…Yudhistira alone was gifted with the power to reach heaven in his physical body” (Narayan 179).