FROM DOMESTIC CONFINEMENT TO AGENCY: A CRITIQUE OF FEMININE DISCONTENT AND SELFHOOD IN ZAFAR’S A GOOD WIFE

Abstract

 This paper investigates the female enslavement in Zafar's A Good Wife, which actually hides the protagonist's personality and depicts her as anonymous or less identifiable. It also elucidates, how a woman shatters all the constituted ideologies to regain her true self. It highlights the continuous conflict between personal desire and communal expectations, where society is continuously forcing women to hide their full potential and lower themselves to meet patriarchal expectations. A qualitative descriptive framework is applied for textual analysis and this study is analyzed through the lens of feminism, which demands women's rights worldwide. The primary is collected from the Zafar's A Good Wife in which she describes her life's circumstances while secondary data is collected from other resources such as scholarly articles and journals, books and monographs, textbook and encyclopedias etc. Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is used as a guide for analysis, it describes that women are persuaded by society to be feminine and confine their lives to their husbands, children or housework. Women are judged on the basis of their outer appearance and restricted from showing their full potential; one can says that they are manipulated on a very broader level. Betty Friedan challenged this false perception in The Feminine Mystique. She depicts how many housewives are unhappy and unable to do anything. She called this issue something that has no name but it is something that is present in almost every married women's lives. She criticizes societal ideologies and focuses on women's agency. This research is meaningful as it expresses a woman's struggle in a society that wants to imprison her. The outcomes of this study reveal societal standards and female rebelliousness towards society where she gives more importance to her career and changes her destiny with education.