Women, Space, and Silence: A Comparative Reading of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp

This article examines the representation of women in the writings of Virginia Woolf and Banu Mushtaq, exploring the articulation of feminist resistance within Western modernist and Indian postcolonial contexts. Through a reading of Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and Mushtaq’s “Heart Lamp”, this article examines the related ideas of space, voice, and silence as the frameworks of women’s agency. While Woolf’s feminism emphasizes the need for intellectual freedom, economic independence, and creative space as the conditions for liberation, Mushtaq’s feminist writings represent women’s struggles within patriarchal society through the ideals of endurance, emotional strength, and silence. This article contends that these two works of literature present two different paradigms of feminist thought: one theoretical and transformative, and the other experiential and survivalist. Through this comparative analysis, this article also contests the universalist ideals of feminism and shows that women’s resistance takes culturally specific forms that are determined by the material and social realities of the society.