CHALLENGING THE GRAND NARRATIVE OF MARRIAGE: A LYOTARDIAN READING OF KULSOOM BANO'S “A DEAD DAUGHTER”

Abstract

This study examines Kulsoom Bano's short story “A Dead Daughter,” published in The Stained-Glass Window: Stories of the Pandemic from Pakistan, through Jean-François Lyotard's theory of grand narratives and petit récit. Against the social conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the story presents marriage, feminine obedience, familial duty, domestic violence, and female resistance as interconnected dimensions of gendered experience. This study argues that marriage in the story functions as a culturally legitimized grand narrative through which female worth, family respectability, and social success are defined. The ideal of the “good girl” reinforces this narrative by associating femininity with obedience, sacrifice, endurance, and accommodation. However, Mehru's experience of domestic suffering exposes the contradiction between the idealized meaning of marriage and its lived reality. The study further examines victim-blaming as a mechanism through which the dominant narrative attempts to preserve its legitimacy and interprets Mehru's resistance as a petit récit that challenges the universalizing claims of the marital order. The fragmented narrative structure is also examined as a formal strategy that disrupts singular narrative authority. Drawing on recent scholarship on Pakistani women’s writing, gender, marriage, patriarchy, and pandemic experiences, the study offers a theoretically focused reading of an underexamined Pakistani pandemic text. It concludes that Bano's story does not merely represent domestic violence but interrogates the cultural narratives through which women's suffering can be normalized, justified, or rendered invisible.

Keywords: Lyotard, Grand Narrative, Petit Récit, Pakistani Women's Fiction, Marriage, Patriarchy, Domestic Violence, COVID-19.