Women, Domestic Space, and the Architecture of Control: Feminist Geographies in Indian Fiction

This paper will investigate the domestic space in Indian women's fiction as a gendered space of control and not a non-gendered arena.The argument presented in this essay will be that the domestic space is a political space through which women's agency in terms of mobility, utterance, desire, and identity is controlled.In this regard, this essay will challenge the conventional view of the domestic space in Indian women's fiction as a space from which women find belonging.Rather, this essay will argue for a feminist geography of domesticity in Indian women's fiction through the thresholds and confinement experienced in domestic space.This essay will use feminist spatial theory to examine how the subjectivity of women is mediated through spatial confinement.The article also argues that the domestic space in Indian women's fiction is a location that marks both physical confinement and the interiorization of psychology through surveillance.The essay argues that this psychology is mediated through women's surveillance of themselves.In speculating on home as an apparatus of discipline, this paper extends the ongoing discourse of feminist literary studies in India to exceed beyond the frameworks of empowerment and resistance, suggesting that feminist struggle is not merely one of resistance but also one of spatial contestation.This, at last, proves that politics of space is intertwined with the politics of gender, and it is through geographics of homes within Indian literary texts that patriarchy sustains itself unspoken.