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Research Paper | Arts and Humanities | Volume 15 Issue 8, August 2026 | Pages: 1645 - 1650 | India
Toxic Relationships and the Crisis of Female Identity in Contemporary Literature: A Comparative Study of Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us and Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You
Abstract: Contemporary literature has increasingly moved away from the idealised representation of romantic relationships and has begun to examine the psychological complexities that emerge when intimacy becomes associated with domination, manipulation and violence. The representation of toxic relationships has consequently become an important concern in contemporary fiction because it exposes the fragile boundary between love and possession, companionship and control, and emotional attachment and psychological suffering. Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us (2016) and Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) provide two significant representations of women confronting destructive intimate relationships. Although the novels emerge from different cultural and literary contexts, both reveal the gradual erosion of female autonomy within relationships governed by patriarchal power. Hoover presents Lily Bloom's struggle to recognise and resist domestic violence within a contemporary romantic relationship, whereas Kandasamy transforms an autobiographical experience of marital abuse into a powerful narrative of psychological resistance and self-reclamation. The present study comparatively examines the representation of toxic relationships in the two novels with particular reference to domestic violence, emotional manipulation, patriarchal control, psychological trauma, silence, female identity and resistance. It argues that both writers challenge the romantic idealisation of suffering and demonstrate that love cannot be regarded as a justification for the destruction of individual freedom. The study further observes that while Hoover foregrounds the emotional dilemma involved in breaking the cycle of abuse, Kandasamy places greater emphasis on language, writing and narrative authority as instruments of survival.
Keywords: toxic relationships, domestic violence, psychological trauma, patriarchy, female identity, resistance, intimate partner violence, Colleen Hoover, Meena Kandasamy
How to Cite?: T. Authi Bhuvaneswari, "Toxic Relationships and the Crisis of Female Identity in Contemporary Literature: A Comparative Study of Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us and Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You", Volume 15 Issue 8, August 2026, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1645-1650, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR26817154241, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR26817154241