Envisaging Identity and Imagining Home for Her/Self: A Feminist Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife

Abstract

Cultural schizophrenia, psychological imbalances and social crisis that a diasporic writer suffers due to the hyphenated identities motivates her to construct an imaginary homeland that would fill all the passion through an alternate reality. It is not necessary that such writers would liberate their characters in order to fill the vacuum. Indeed, leaving crisis on its own fate may be an alternate mode of portraying reality. The Indian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee in her novel Wife (1975) depicts the character of Dimple Dasgupta, may be her own image, to unearth that identity crisis which a woman always experiences either at home or in the world outside under the constant oppression and subjugation of patriarchy. Marriage, one of the powerful machineries to propagate patriarchal ideology in the Indian society subsumes the self of women and then represents her as other. The paper thus is an attempt to excavate those areas of patriarchal oppression which reduce women as mere commodities in the name of upholding cultural values. The psychological exigencies that the socially constructed woman suffers due to the predetermined sex role, is another area of study in the research work. It is also a critique of home in the context of female social identities.