The Descent’s Decree

Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife charts the disintegrated relationship between a wise middle class writer wife and a dashing university lecturer who is an authoritative and abusive husband. This paper studies the trauma caused by the toxic masculinity of the husband and the rigid socio-cultural values adopted by the parents of the narrator writer daughter. The suppressed narrator takes up her known profession of writing as a weapon to tell her own story with lines and expressions to this world. Meena Kandasamy uses autofiction as an empowering narrative strategy to express the more damagingpsychological, physical and sexual abuse caused by the masculine force in the name of husbands in India

Feminism · Manifesto · Masculinity · Middle class · Narrative · Portrait · Wife · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Studies and Diaspora