Volume 11, Issue – 1, March 2026

Across Two Worlds through a Shared Story of Womanhood in Bukowski’s Women and Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe

Ariharan S,

Ph.D. Research Scholar,

School of Liberal Arts and Humanities,

Woxsen University, Telangana, Hyderabad, India

Abstract: In literature, the female gender is barely depicted as a fixed identity but rather a state of voice, control, and survival. The works of Charles Bukowski (Women) and Anita Nair (Ladies Coupe) appear to come out of irreconcilable narrative conventions: one is defined by a confessional male voice that addresses women, another one is defined by women speaking to themselves and becoming visible. But in both novels, the authors reveal the act of negotiation of women within arenas that continue to seek to enclose them. In Women, desire is expressed by the power of masculine that makes intimacy a matter of property - “I looked at her body and I knew I wanted her” - repetition which turns females into consumables already and at the same time, the frailty of the narrative supremacy unmasked (Bukowski, 45). The women who pass through the story of Bukowski do not want to be fixed but do not want to be forgotten, disturbing the very gaze that they are supposed to be giving meaning to. In comparison, Ladies Coupe builds the womanhood by collective narration, where women express the inner struggles conditioned by marital relationships and labor, and the periods of deep silence. The characters of Nair do not

question “whether they are loved or not, but rather whether a woman can ever be herself in

positions strictly prescribed to her, turning the railway couple into the ad-hoc zone of feminist expression and common protest” (Nair, 82). Womanhood in both novels illustrates itself in these repetitive emotional realities: confinement, desire, withdrawal, and survival as opposed to cultural confrontation per se. Taken collectively, these texts make known the womanhood as a negotiation that exists through anticipating and defining the self.

Keywords: Womanhood, Voice, Silence, Male gaze, Female Space, Cross cultural Feminism, Comparative literature.

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