Narrating Anxiety: Women’s Mental Health, Trauma Repetition, and Resistance in Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53032/tvcr/2026.v8n2.18Keywords:
Meena Kandasamy, Exquisite Cadavers, trauma theory, feminist psychoanalysis, bibliotherapy, anxiety, repetition compulsion, women’s mental health, reader-response theoryAbstract
This paper analyses Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers (2019) as a narrative of women’s mental health, focusing on protagonist Maya’s anxiety amid trauma, precarity, and resistance. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s “unclaimed experience,” Juliet Mitchell’s feminist psychoanalysis, and Louise Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory, it examines how childhood abandonment repeats in Maya’s relationships and how patriarchal structures produce her distress. The novel’s fragmented form mirrors traumatic temporality while offering bibliotherapeutic potential through reader identification and politicized validation of gendered suffering.
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