Shattered Yet Unbroken: Women's Resilience and Resistance in Imelda Dias's Shattered Lives: A Collection of Stories

Abstract

Shattered Lives: A Collection of Stories by Imelda Dias is a collection of short stories. It is a reflection on the plight of women shackled by patriarchal, religious, and socio-economic systems that strip them of dignity and agency. However, within the shattered narratives of their lived realities, a voice remains unbroken; an unyielding resolve to endure, resist, and recreate a vision of “woman” capable of prefiguring her future, one willing to undertake the harrowing deconstruction of an obsolete and unhealthy vision of femininity. This paper presents a critical discussion of six stories they are: “Dying for the Goddess,” “The Rogue Landlord,” “Call Me Cecilia,” “I Love You, ‘Cat’,” “Killing Rani”, and “For Two Kuddos of Rice” to investigate how Dias constructs female subjectivity through the axes of suffering and survival. By using the concepts from feminist literary theory, this paper will highlight on Dias’s depiction of women in her collection to unveil the storied representation of women which portrayed how her characters challenges social hypocrisy, violence and patriarchy through compassion, endurance and self-realization.