Published Paper Details:

This paper examines emotional deterioration as a process shaped and sustained by cultural forces in the fictional writings of Shobha Rao, with particular attention to Girls Burn Brighter (2018). Rather than presenting suffering as sudden or exceptional, the study reveals how distress develops gradually through everyday practices, inherited norms and unequal power relations. Rao's narratives portray women whose inner lives are steadily worn down by social expectations, economic dependence and restricted mobility, making emotional decline both continuous and normalized. The analysis highlights how cultural frameworks teach endurance while discouraging expression, causing pain to be absorbed inward rather than resisted outward. At the same time, the paper observes how human connection, especially between women, emerges as a fragile yet meaningful response to prolonged hardship. Emotional survival in these texts does not appear as triumph but as persistence shaped by care, memory and shared presence. By focusing on lived experience rather than dramatic violence, this study offers a nuanced understanding of how culture quietly participates in the making of emotional vulnerability. The paper contributes to contemporary literary criticism by foregrounding emotional deterioration as an ongoing, socially maintained condition, thereby inviting readers to reconsider suffering not as an individual failure but as a collective cultural outcome.