Bharati Mukherjee's Wife Analysis

Bharati Mukherjee, one of the significant novelists of Indian Diaspora has secured a worthy place for herself by her considerable contribution to Indian English Writing. The traumas and the agonies that people of Indian Diaspora face in fulfilling their dreams constitute the prime concern of Mukherjee’s literary oeuvre. She mainly focuses on her diasporic women characters, their problem like isolation, alienation, cultural clash, cross-cultural crisis and “… their struggle for identity, their bitter experiences and their final emergence as self-assertive individuals free from the bondages imposed on them” (Mythili 527). Even though she has been acknowledged as a voice of expatriate-immigrants’ sensibility, a close observation of her novels reveals that she has written all the novels with predominantly feminist views. Her novels also focus on the changing psychological realties of female characters in her fiction. In this novel, Mukherjee has not only portrayed the psychological eccentricities in the protagonist, but has also presented her as a ‘new woman’ with a ‘new identity’ breaking the taboos of the archetypal woman. But pathetically her identity as a ‘new …show more content…
She recognizes her own alienation as a woman and a wife both in India and Abroad. The fiction relates to the canonical archetypes relating to a wife in the patriarchically constructed Indian traditional society. This would mean that the Indian woman’s identity is always two layered – the first one being the society-assigned external identity and the second being the hibernating subterranean real identity which remains always silenced and which is constantly seeking to find an expression. It is this dichotomy which is powerfully and so very realistically portrayed in the novel by Bharati