Writing Back in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or A Portrait of The Writer As a Young Wife

Abstract

This paper reveals the efforts of Meena Kandasamy’s biographical novel When I Hit You: Or A Portrait of a Writer as a Young Wifeto criticize misogynistic views experienced by the author.Shenarrates her own experience through the character of Wife who endures several predicaments that include domestic violence, restriction and humiliation from her Husband as well as people around her. Since the novel depicts the real story of a woman and written by a women herself, she is entitled with the authority to manifest her bodily experience in an unbiased manner as well as make a commentary on her behalf. In analyzing the text, the researcher applied a feminist literary criticism approach primarily with the concept of Helen Cixous’s ecriture feminine/women’s writing that argues about the necessity of women to write about herself to see the independence of the main character at once the narrator in voicing her feminine world such as happiness, desire, and her freedom to represent herself through her own words. In addition to its application, Elaine Showalter’s theory of gynocriticismis used to analyze feminine writing from women’s perspective. The findings show that the wife who has considerable class and power remain very vulnerable when faced with caste and patriarchal domination. Keywords: misogyny, ecriture feminine,protest, feminine voice, gynocriticism.