Traumatic Experience in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies

Abstract

This research aims to depict traumatic experience of Madhu, one of the central characters from Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies in which Deshpande brings the suffering of Madhu as the major storyline. The novel brings hardships, struggle and suffering of Madhu under the patriarchal social and cultural structure. Despande depicts the traumatic experience of her central character Madhu since she goes through the traumatic events like she was once forced to involve in a physical relation with someone who was the friend of her father and she is raped, and when she reveals it to her husband Som she is abandoned by him. Her trauma is caused by oppressive patriarchal behaviour. Patriarchal assumption regards woman's body as the site of violence for it power exercise. Madhu too becomes the victim of patriarchy and she goes through traumatic experience. So, she wants to get rid of her marital tension. She travels to a town named Bhavanipur to write a biography of a famous classical singer, Savitribai Indorekar. Writing gives her a scope to escape from the trauma. This research uses the theoretical insight of trauma in order to examine the suffering of the female characters in Small Remedies since the ‘trauma’ theory provides a method of interpretation of disorder, distress and destruction caused by internal or external factors. This research concludes that Madhu is a trauma survivor with the help of the theorists like Susan Brison, Cathy Caruthand Kali Tal and deals how she copes with trauma with the theoretical insight of Dominick LaCarpa.