A Female Trauma: Theoretical Inquiry Of Modesty, Compliance And Stratification In Anjana Appachana’s Listening Now

Abstract

The culturally stratified ideals of modesty, and compliance codify female experiences that women have been burring under their skin silently through emotional restraint, and curtailed aspiration. The novel Listening Now analogously operates on series of event that adequately delineate the structural codes embedded within familial obligation and gendered socialization that stratify certain conventions of conduct and decorum intending to marginalize women and to cause in them neurotic aches that traumatize women’s everyday survival and existence within the family and society. Through narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness, silence, and fragmented memory, Appachana renders women’s interior lives as sites of both suffering and resistance in the contemporary Indian Society.

Drawing on feminist theory articulated by Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, alongside Cathy Caruth’s conceptualization of trauma, and various theorists, the present study will scrutinise the key female characters in the novel by employing  feminist and trauma-theoretical frameworks to analyse how such norms produce sustained forms of psychological distress that are frequently normalized within domestic and social spaces.