Domestic Captivity and Female Agency: A Feminist Critique of R.K. Narayan's The Dark Room and The Guide

Abstract

This paper undertakes an analytical literary investigation into the representation of domestic captivity and the emergence of female agency in two novels by the Indian English novelist R.K. Narayan: The Dark Room (1938) and The Guide (1958). Employing a structured literature review of existing scholarship combined with close textual analysis, the study examines how Narayan constructs the home as a site of both confinement and, paradoxically, incipient resistance for his female protagonists, Savitri and Rosie. The paper situates these two novels within the broader trajectory of Narayan's engagement with what he himself termed the "Women's Lib" philosophy, and it interrogates the extent to which his fiction can be read as genuinely feminist, ambivalently feminist, or merely sympathetic without being emancipatory. Drawing on Western feminist theoretical frameworks — including the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, and Elaine Showalter — alongside postcolonial feminist critiques by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Partha Chatterjee, the paper develops a hybrid analytical model suited to reading Indian domestic fiction. The review of related research demonstrates a scholarly consensus that Savitri's rebellion is aborted and circular while Rosie's is sustained and transformative, though several critics dispute whether either trajectory constitutes authentic agency given the persistence of patriarchal structuring even in resolution. The paper concludes that Narayan's fiction charts an evolutionary, if incomplete, feminist consciousness — one in which domestic space functions simultaneously as prison and as the originary site from which resistance is learned. The study contributes to Indian English literary scholarship by offering a comparative framework for reading spatial confinement and female selfhood across Narayan's oeuvre, and it identifies gaps in existing criticism regarding the intersection of caste, the devadasi tradition, and gendered space that merit further research.