Anita Nair’s The Ladies Coupe: An Enroute To Feminine Consciousness

Abstract

Anita Nair’s The Ladies Coupe is itself a literary journey into the world of rediscovery, reimagining and reawakening of feminine consciousness; a cluster of anecdotes weaving a pattern of fabricated motifs exposing the afflictions of ‘the other.’ Feminine subjectivity has always been put into custody to prove its significance amidst the bounties of phallic nature. Body has received vehement tortures and blows to stand erect against the supreme soul which has already been declared the sine qua non of human existence by the classical philosophers. But as days passed by the soul receded to the back and the body blossomed into prominence. Body is a powerful symbolic form in which metaphysical undertaking of culture is impressed upon. Body is the direct locus of social control which manifests itself through a series of cultural, political activities vis –a-vis the generic power of womanhood. But women are transformed into docile bodies whose energies and forces are habituated to external regulation, subjection and oppression. The body and its gestures often become the canvas over which she and its society struggle for vehement control. Helene Cixous’s powerful dictates over writing the body had phenomenal responses from various corners and women propagated proudly “the more body the more writing.”The body which speaks clearly exposes the multiple inflictions on it and in other way the mutilations on the body has their own voices. Female sexualisation is thus a counterpart of a valid requirement of the existence of a language which is sublime with respect to the bodies. Thus rediscovering one’s own body is parallel to subjectivising female hood, awakening feminine consciousness and establishing own valid identity in a patriarchal societal framework.