Voices under constraint: Women’s agency across three asian literary traditions

Abstract

This study examines relationships among bodily visibility, speech, and decision-making authority in Imruʾ al-Qays’s Muʿallaqa, Serat Centhini, and Starkweather’s English translation of Bidasari. Combining comparative close reading with reproducible corpus analysis, it investigates how female agency is represented across distinct literary traditions. The corpus comprises 200 Centhini stanzas from five consecutive pupuh and 3,309 Bidasari lines across six Songs, supplemented by Arabic textual images. Quantitative analysis identifies obligation and prohibition markers in Centhini and examines speech distribution across 78 quotation spans in two Bidasari scenes, distinguishing dialogue, inner speech, prayer, and ambiguous attribution. Thirty markers appear in 23 Centhini stanzas, with coverage reaching 34.3% in pupuh 191, exceeding the preceding four sections combined by 27.62 percentage points. Bidasari contributes 36.8% and 30.0% of dialogue tokens across the two scenes, while accounting for 51.0% of quoted tokens in the abuse scene. Findings demonstrate that narrative visibility and verbal participation do not necessarily establish authority. The Muʿallaqa privileges masculine recollection; Centhini maintains instructional hierarchies despite acknowledging emotional compatibility; and Bidasari foregrounds resistance without guaranteeing autonomous decisions. These findings establish a comparative framework linking textual representation, speech allocation, and authority while respecting linguistic and editorial differences.