Material Bodies and Immaterial Loss: Failed Marriages, Female Subjectivity, and Emotional Displacement in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain and Moonlight into Marzipan

Abstract

Marriage is frequently imagined as a space of emotional security and social completion, particularly for women in patriarchal cultures. However, literary representations increasingly challenge this ideal by exposing the emotional fractures and psychological costs embedded within marital relationships. Sunetra Gupta’s fiction offers a sustained interrogation of marriage by foregrounding women whose inner lives are shaped by betrayal, emotional neglect, and cultural displacement. This paper undertakes a comparative study of Memories of Rain and Moonlight into Marzipan to examine how failed marriages generate forms of immaterial loss—losses that are emotional, psychological, and existential rather than material in nature.

Drawing on feminist literary criticism and sociocultural theory, this study analyzes how Gupta represents marriage as an unequal emotional structure in which women disproportionately absorb pain while male autonomy remains largely unquestioned. This paper argues that Gupta’s female protagonists respond to marital failure through varied strategies, ranging from emotional withdrawal and silence to psychological collapse. By situating these narratives within diasporic contexts, this study further demonstrates how cultural displacement intensifies female alienation within marriage. Ultimately, this paper contends that Gupta’s novels dismantle the romantic myth of marriage and foreground the urgent need to acknowledge women’s emotional suffering as a legitimate form of loss.