International Journal on Multicultural Literature (IJML) (eBook)

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Transgressive Gender Discourse in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe’

Seema Bansal Somani & Rohit Phutela

Abstract: Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe’ is a microcosmic narrative shedding conspicuous light upon the psyche of Indian women through the lives of the six women, who have to live under perpetual constrains, haunted by fear and agony, but eventually decide to turn hostile and defiant in a bid to transgress the draconian laws. It is pervaded by fin de siècle transgressive gender discourse where Nair represents the taboo themes of female sexuality, rape, lesbianism and evil motherhood. Though these ideas got the literary voices but shunned out by critics and readers as the idea of transgressive female was not worth swallowing and digestive due to the fear factor of rupturing the codes of femininity.

Keywords: Binary, Discourse, Lesbian, Patriarchy, Transgression.

Gender relations in India as compared to west still involve politics. Women’s wing is constructed as separatist by the issues of gender, social class, caste and religion that are still lurking on periphery yet there are silent but rebellious voices echoing throughout literature registering the resilience and revolt on the part of writers as well as their textual counterparts. Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe’ does not condemn the transgressive female character, leaving her acts incomprehensible and unexplained, as in the case of many texts written by other authors of the time. Among the galaxy of emerging women writers, Anita Nair is the most promising and a writer to reckon with. Her maiden novel The Better Man has placed her among the most sincere and self-conscious Indian novelists and her second novel Ladies Coupe’ has registered her name in the hall of fame.

The novel carves a niche and manages to permit its protagonist both erotic desire and strength without presenting her in negative shades. Most of the narratives woven together are transgressive ones, in which women confess the laid boundaries of domesticity register silent resistance on their parts and acknowledge the conscious or subconscious strategies to subvert the myriad forms of patriarchal oppression. Akhila is a female character whose life experiences can be taken as sample study to reveal the hypocrisy and narrowness of the values of Indian bourgeois society. Only a handful of scholars have dealt with these transgressive issues. Due to the dearth of such excavations, it is time for an extensive gender analysis based on critical theories of Ladies Coupe’ because of its provocative representations of femininity. Butler appropriates theories for the study of gender: “A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic identity […]; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses […]” (Butler xxxi).

Through her novels Nair has presented modern Indian women’s search for liberation and transgression which are natural instincts of human beings though man or woman. She seems to be championing the cause of equality for women that the same code of morality be applied to both men and women otherwise they are bound to transgress. Hence, feminist literary criticism has become, to put it in Toril Moi’s words, “an urgent political necessity” (Moi 82). The overriding problem is now, “how to avoid bringing patriarchal notions of aesthetics, history and tradition to bear on the female tradition” (Moi 82). She points out that to write outside the dominant discourses, aesthetics and literary theory is already to accept the fact of being an outsider and posing willingly as “the other”.

The narrative is a tell tale of six women representing the cross section of women’s society including age, status, class and caste. Like Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it is an all inclusive and descriptive narration with great minute detail but as far as the inner depiction is concerned, it is not an exaggeration to say that Nair can be compared with Chaucer. She has presented the powerful galaxy of women’s characters of Indian range. Though the number is less as compared to Chaucer’s character range yet her master stroke is in depth analysis which is unsurpassable. This novel stands against the view of dominant structuralism which states that the experiences of women are dumb and dump, invalid and invisible and can easily disappear. The different instances of text of breaking the codes and the resultant consequences, contribute significantly to an extensive image of transgressive women in diversity. As Boehmer’s statement indicates that acts of resistance stress the women who break the codes. This is, as Boehmer reminds, a main feature of post-colonial writings, “more general postcolonial interest in multiplicity,” expressed i.e. in “the concept of women’s many centered, constellated power, the stress being at once on the importance of diversity “ (Boehmer 227-228).

In the novel, Nair has taken up the themes of estrangement in marriages, marital rape, and lesbianism, issues of pre-marital and extra-marital affairs. All the women passengers share one binding thread in common, that is, “affliction”; and the metaphor of family becomes the common site for it. The novel is non-linear in structure as main narrative is told in fragments woven in an intricate fabric of the sub narratives of other women. The novel begins with Akhila’s repression and disintegration and ends with the beginning of Akhila’s new life passing through the collective phase of women’s essentialism. Akhila meets five other women, the common thread that binds these autobiographical fragments is the story of Akhilandeswari, each of whom has a story to tell. The stories are all an attempt to answer Akhila’s problematic question: Are women bound to bear and if yes then to which length? Each chapter of the novel is revealing of the one woman’s secret.

Primarily it is the story of Akhila, who happens to be the most subdued, rather crushed member of the family. As a woman Akhila has her dreams, her desires, her cravings, “Dreaming for escape and space. Hungry for life and experience” (Nair 2). At the end, she transgresses and breaks the laws set out for her in the pursuit of her dreams when she decides to break the barrier and sets out alone to Kanyakumari, by throwing all the norms of her conservative Tamil Brahmin family to wind. Akhila left family, her home, out of tiredness and boredom sandwiched with domesticity to travel around the world. Her other act of transgression consists of when she develops a romantic relationship with Hari who is a twenty-eight years old chap, too young in years as compared to Akhila. Not only that she crosses the limit by entering into the premarital affair physically but she becomes the starter of this course. Her sexual starving can be traced in these lines where it is Akhila the woman who takes the control of the amorous situation which will ultimately lead her on the path of losing her long protected virginity. One case of crossing the lines leads to another; she goes on crossing one taboo after the other. Crossing the limits of the external laws helps her to find her internal strength and at the end leads her to another infringement of the rules.

The another important strand of the story is of Margaret Shanthi and men like Ebenezer Paulraj (Ebe). He seems to belong the regime of lost colonizers who are unable to see and praise the worth of the women being looked upon as the colonized ones. Initially Margaret is not able to understand the double standards of male egoism in Ebenezer Paulraj, as wifely love sometimes make a woman blind. Marriage is such a social trap where men develop and women vanish. A man grows because a woman leaves her space. Ironically Ebe gets promoted and becomes a principal and as far as Margaret is concerned, he always compels her to stay as a teacher only. Beauvoir believes that the institution of marriage has marred the spontaneity of feelings, between the husband and wife by transforming freely given feelings into mandatory duties and shrilly asserted rights. A woman is more than her body and a man dominates this body in the name of possession. The site of body is treated as commodity and husband becomes the authorized legal owner of this body of wife. Margaret’s alienation under the rubrics of sexuality is on account of Abe’s cold intellectuality. While confirming the patriarchal notions that it is not appropriate to leave husband’s home and family, she chooses a subtle method to destroy her husband. She takes revenge when she feeds him with mouth-watering dishes, fried items and excess oily food, till his curve takes a bad shape to make him a very fat man. By converting Ebenzer into a fat, lazy and dull man Margaret takes the revenge on whole mankind who still consider woman an object to be controlled. Here Margaret becomes a symbol of conformity and rebellion both. As within the range of patriarchy, she takes revenge very tactfully.

Anita Nair has chiseled the next important character Prabha Devi to delineate the parental prejudice. It is not an exaggeration to acknowledge that patriarchy shows its ugly face from cradle to grave. This unwelcoming attitude of her father is much realized by...