“Living for others”: Narrating agency in the context of failed marriages and singleness in urban Sri Lanka

Abstract

Marriage is a cultural imperative in Sri Lanka and is constructed as the principal source of personal fulfilment for women. This paper critically examines through two case studies – a never-married woman and a woman in a “failed” marriage – how women from older generations narrate their life histories using culturally coherent repertoires. By deconstructing the subject positions of the “long-suffering wife”, the “devoted mother”, and the “selfless woman”, I reveal the spaces for manoeuvre these women create to experience well-being and exercise agency outside of the culture’s “hegemonic narrative” of successful marriage and maternity. Using the life history narratives I challenge the tendency to imagine older women’s lives as more constrained and illustrate the ways in which equivocal narratives about independence and self-sacrifice, about freedom and suffering simultaneously conceal agency while allowing non-normative ways of being.