Writing the Body: Tracing Écriture Féminine in Mattathi by Sarah Joseph

Écriture féminine, a critical concept that emerged from French feminist theoretical discourse in the 1970s, designates a mode of writing that challenges the phallogocentric structures embedded within language and literary representation. Developed through the works of theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, the framework foregrounds the inscription of female subjectivity, corporeality, and desire within textual practice. This paper examines the manifestation of écriture féminine in Mattathi by Sarah Joseph, situating the novel within the broader trajectory of feminist literary production in Malayalam literature. Through a close textual analysis of the protagonist Luci’s experiences, the study demonstrates how Jo-seph disrupts patriarchal linguistic conventions by employing metaphor, natural imagery, vernacular idiom, and non-linear narrative structures that privilege embodied female consciousness. The novel reconfigures menstruation, sexuality, romantic desire, and maternal longing not as sites of shame but as sources of creative and existential affirmation. Joseph’s strategic deployment of feminine language re-sists masculine modes of representation by articulating women’s lived realities from within rather than through external objectification. Furthermore, the paper explores how Joseph’s association of women with nature, use of regional dialect, and semantic ambiguity function as narrative techniques that destabilize dominant symbolic structures. By inscribing the female body and consciousness into language, Mattathi exemplifies an indigenous adaptation of écriture féminine that interrogates social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of women’s oppression. Ultimately, the study argues that Joseph’s writing constitutes a liberatory linguistic practice that reclaims female agency and redefines feminine identity within the socio-literary context of Kerala.