Becoming the Other: Simone de Beauvoir and the Gendered Marginalisation of Rita Welinkar

Abstract

This chapter critically reads the gendered marginalisation of the eponymous protagonist of Rita Welinkar (1995) adopting Simone de Beauvoir’s lens put forth in The Second Sex. Rita Welinkar, a forty plus single woman in Bombay is denied her selfhood on the grounds of her femininity. Opening in a hospital where Rita is undergoing treatment for her nervous breakdown, the storyline unfolds through an extended letter she writes to her childhood friend, Saraswati, in which she reconstructs the gendered architecture of her adult life. The chapter illuminates Rita’s marginalisation in the novel adopting Simone de Beauvoir’s interlinked concepts of femininity as social construction, immanence versus transcendence, and the complicity of women in each other’s Othering. The specific episodes of Rita’s alterity in the text are studied under the following interlocking gendered axes to bring coherence and rigour to the analysis: the social illegitimacy of her unmarried status, the perpetual surveillance of her body, the denial of any legitimate social existence to her sexuality outside patriarchal structures, and the policing of her selfhood by women who have internalised their own Otherness. Finally, the nervous breakdown in the novel is not seen as a point of defeat, but as a threshold; one from which the constructed Other gradually begins to emerge as a subject.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.66496/LCAP.9788168710108.2026.170-190