Reclaiming Feminine Voices in Myth and Media: An Indian Knowledge System Oriented Study of the Palace of Illusions and Captain Marvel

Abstract

Contemporary narratives have increasingly centered women as protagonists and positioned their stories as acts of empowerment. Yet the widening presence of women in literary and cinematic representation does not, by itself, constitute a transformation of the terms on which power is recognized. This study argues that empowerment, as it is currently constructed across dominant narrative forms, frequently operates as alignment with pre-existing masculine standards of strength rather than as a genuine reconfiguration of what strength means. The study examines how feminine agency is constructed, constrained, and potentially reclaimed in two primary texts: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008) and the film Captain Marvel (2019), directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Through close textual and visual analysis, it interrogates the conditions under which empowerment is granted, the qualities it requires women to suppress, and the standards against which it is measured. The analytical framework draws on two bodies of thought used in productive dialogue. Western feminist theory, specifically the work of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous provides the vocabulary for identifying how phallocentric structures silence, constrain, and misrecognise feminine agency. Indian Knowledge System concepts, particularly shakti and ardhanarishvara, extend this framework by proposing an alternative model of power understood as internally grounded, morally generative, and integrative rather than dominative. The two primary texts are read in dialogue rather than as equivalents, their differences in form, tradition, and medium making the shared structural problem more visible than either text could make it alone. The study concludes that the dominant model of feminine empowerment, as enacted across both texts, tends toward imitation of masculine norms rather than transformation of them. Meaningful empowerment, the study argues, requires not a revision of who holds power but a rethinking of how power itself is defined.