Archetypal Study of Female Identity in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night

Archetypal theory, rooted in Carl Jung’s psychology and extended by Northrop Frye’s literary criticism, examines universal figures and narrative patterns that recur across literature. When applied to women’s writing, archetypal criticism reveals how female characters are framed within cultural scripts such as the mother, the daughter, the goddess, and the seeker. Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night both engage deeply with these archetypes, portraying women who seek autonomy while being constrained by patriarchal structures. This paper applies archetypal theory to these novels to explore how their female protagonists both inherit and resist symbolic roles, showing how archetypes function as both oppressive patterns and sites of re-visioning.