Society, Family, and Patriarchal Norms: A Feminist Reading of Meena Kandasamy’sWhen I Hit You; Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

Abstract

Society plays a crucial role in shaping individuals by prescribing norms and etiquettes that regulate behaviour within a given community. These expectations, however, are gendered—conditioning women and men into unequal social roles designed to preserve patriarchal order. As bell hooks observes, “patriarchy is a political-socio system that insists that males are inherently dominating… and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak” (38). Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) explores how patriarchy operates through both family and society to silence women, even those who are educated and self-aware. The novel critiques not only the intimate violence of a husband but also the complicity of social institutions that normalize women’s suffering. This paper investigates how Kandasamy exposes the ideological and emotional mechanisms through which patriarchal norms are internalized and perpetuated, arguing that her narrative dismantles the sanctity of the family and the myth of marital stability, foregrounding speech, writing, and self-expression as acts of feminist resistance and survival.