Feminine Melancholia: Reconfiguring the Psychoanalytic Self in K.R. Meera’s Jezebel
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Abstract
This paper aims to examine how melancholia occurs in women, its effects on reconstructing the feminine self, and to analyze K.R. Meera’s Jezebel through contemporary psychoanalytic and feminist criticism. Meera portrays female melancholia not only as an individual psychic wound but also as a critique of the patriarchal structures that lead to the pathologization of women’s longing and their destructive impact on female subjectivity. Melancholia is presented as a paradoxical form of resistance, articulating the pain and grief through the confessional narrative, drawing on theories by Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan and feminist object-relations theory. It examines the protagonist's fragmented self, which becomes melancholic through internalizing loss, but is reconstituted through critical self-awareness and recognition of the self.
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