The present paper will explore the psychological, socio-cultural and existential perspective to highlight the various psychological complexities faced by Indian women depicted by Githa Hariharan, Anjana Appachana, Rama Mehta and Shobha De. Their behavior patterns, guilt. Shame, self-blame, anxiety and fear are investigated through the lens of psychoanalytical theories of Freud and post-Freudian thinkers..The conspicuous feature of the Indian fiction written after the post-World War11 is the continuous corrosion of self as Githa Hariharan, Anjana Appachana, Rama Mehta and Shobha De depict the existential journey of their women protagonists following the tradition of Beckett, Ionesco, Camus and Sartre. Stryker in his Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version (1980) observes that “human behavior is dependent on a world in which physical and social aspects of the environment are named and classified and the names carry meaning in the form of shared behavioral expectations.” (2) E. Goffman in his Human Behavior and Social Processes contend that “ The self-meanings come to be known and understood through interaction with others. They are learned from the responses of others to one’s own actions. One’s actions develop meaning through the responses of others, and over time become significant symbols that call up within the person the same responses that are called up in others” (482) Similarly, the meaning of one’s behavior lies in the response to it (Burke, & Reitzes, 1981). Thus, meaning is the link between one’s identity and one’s behavior.. Githa Hariharan, Anjana Appachana, Rama Mehta and Shobha De are confronted with the baffling problem of depicting a self that seems to have lost its reality. The women protagonists of these novelists, Padma, Devi, Geeta, Karuna and Asha Rani suffer from fractured behavioral patterns struggling with upsetting emotions, frightening memories and traumatic disorders. The psychic pressures bring severe anxiety, “anhdonia”, which is characterized by a loss of interest in enjoyable activities.

Author Name: Vijayata Dhand

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Keywords: Anxiety, devious behavior, traumatic disorders, corrosion.

ISSN: 2454-2296

EISSN: 2395-0897

EOI/DOI:

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