Female negative coping with trauma in Manjula Padmanabhan's Lights Out

Abstract EN

This paper investigates how far Indian women's modern theatre portrays women's position in modern India, particularly how they go through trauma due to being subject to patriarchal violence or abuse and often fail to cope or show recovery.

The paper employs a psychoanalytic approach in analyzing the female character, Leela, in Manjula Padmanabhan's Lights Out (1984) in order to examine how far Leela, and in turn women in the modern Indian society, are subject to physical and/or emotional patriarchal abuse, both within domestic and social contexts, which render them liable to experience psychological trauma.

Leela faces the trauma of her husband's emotional neglect and abuse, as well as being forced to witness physical abuse of women, each being gang-raped daily in her hearing.

While some women manage to cope positively with their trauma, the research attempts to investigate how far Leela fails and shows negative coping signs.

These signs are represented in showing psychosomatic symptoms, or physical pain and health problems that come in parallel with emotional disturbance and feelings of anxiety, fear, and hypersensitivity.

Furthermore, Leela shows cognitive disorder seen through her adoption of negative self-image and a false feeling of guilt.

Her unsuccessful adaptation is similarly traced through her demonstration of behavioural, interpersonal, and communicative signs of negative coping with trauma like passivity, social and physical withdrawal, besides silence.