Women’s Desires Men expressing desires is manly, women expressing desires is indecency. Societies double standards are unfair to women. Justify. Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe traces the lives of six women from different Strata’s of society and how they in their own way try to find their own identity, cracking the walls of patriarchal expectations. The Novel demonstrates, how even education and responsibilities can reduce a woman’s identity to mere roles, i.e. how the protagonist Akhila, though she takes on the responsibility for her family after her father’s death, her mother, brothers and sister take her for granted and see her as a mere provider and not as a human being with dreams and desires of her own. In this paper, I will focus on
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The entire novel revolves on the lives of the women travelling in the Ladies Coupe, in a Bangalore-Kanyakumari express to each woman has a chapter dedicated to her life alternating with bits and pieces from the protagonist Akhila’s life. The novel deals with almost every aspect of feminism including sensitive subjects like prostitution, rape and lesbianism. This paper mainly focuses on how indecisive and insecure Akhila finally decides to live life at her own terms gaining courage from the women’s life-histories and how they managed to defy patriarchy by conventional and unconventional …show more content…
But, nobody acknowledged her sacrifice and instead dominated her so that she had absolutely no freedom. Akhila wanted to get married and start her own family, but nobody even brought up the subject of her marriage as it would mean losing the only breadwinner of family : “In their minds Akhila had ceased to be a woman and already metamorphosed into a spinster”(77) But, Akhila was a woman and had womanly desires. She wanted to know what it felt like to be loved by a man.
This is the core argument of the paper. Nowadays, the increasing cases of women demanding equality in India is directly connected with education broadening their minds. The traditional women did not have the wisdom to know that they were being wronged and even if they did they were helpless because society frowned upon them if they tried to even voice their opinion:
Do you know that my sister was sent back home for many months because ... in all innocence, she asked her husband if he would teach her to read the time? They said she was ignorant and unfit to be the daughter-in-law of the house
The entire novel revolves on the lives of the women travelling in the Ladies Coupe, in a Bangalore-Kanyakumari express to each woman has a chapter dedicated to her life alternating with bits and pieces from the protagonist Akhila’s life. The novel deals with almost every aspect of feminism including sensitive subjects like prostitution, rape and lesbianism. This paper mainly focuses on how indecisive and insecure Akhila finally decides to live life at her own terms gaining courage from the women’s life-histories and how they managed to defy patriarchy by conventional and unconventional …show more content…
But, nobody acknowledged her sacrifice and instead dominated her so that she had absolutely no freedom. Akhila wanted to get married and start her own family, but nobody even brought up the subject of her marriage as it would mean losing the only breadwinner of family : “In their minds Akhila had ceased to be a woman and already metamorphosed into a spinster”(77) But, Akhila was a woman and had womanly desires. She wanted to know what it felt like to be loved by a man.
This is the core argument of the paper. Nowadays, the increasing cases of women demanding equality in India is directly connected with education broadening their minds. The traditional women did not have the wisdom to know that they were being wronged and even if they did they were helpless because society frowned upon them if they tried to even voice their opinion:
Do you know that my sister was sent back home for many months because ... in all innocence, she asked her husband if he would teach her to read the time? They said she was ignorant and unfit to be the daughter-in-law of the house