The Question of Desire in Singlehood and Marriage: A Critical Reading of Eating Wasps by Anita Nair

Abstract

Anita Nair’s Eating Wasps (2018) explores everyday lives of ten women, who are fighting their own battles with different facets of patriarchy. This feminist fiction presents the issues of contemporary women in all its complexities. This paper focuses on two characters (Urvashi and Sreelakshmi) who functions as the prominent narrative voices of their own stories. These female characters, who are separated by more than half a century, are taking up the agency to move ahead with their desires against the current of societal pressures. This critical analysis explores what happens to these women when they act on their desires, in the context of their position inside/outside the institutions of marriage and family. This paper proposes that both the suicide of Sreelakshmi (which appears like a flight), and Urvashi’s confrontation of her stalker (which appears like a fight) can be read as the acts of resistance that reinforces both their agencies and unapologetic nature of their desires.