This work attempts to analyse some of the fictional texts written in Bengali by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya. It focuses particularly on women seen in relation to other members of the family, in their varied attempts to create space for themselves within their restrictive social parameters and in their endeavour to forge an individual identity by resisting the given role models. The book does not essentialize women into categories, that is, wives, daughters, widows or prostitutes; it rather perceives each character in her unique subjectivity, marked by ambivalence, hesitation, indecision, ideological conviction, strong determination or other configurations of attitudes. It seeks to place the narrative texts of a culture at the intersection of different kinds of tensions. The objective here is not to arrive at a neat theoretical paradigm, but to uncover the paradoxes and ambivalences of the colonial Bengali educated class that regulated its social code and its constant erosion and subversion from within, albeit in quiet, rather than assertive ways.