A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S WIFE

Abstract

Mukherjee in the novel Wife deals with the neurotic phenomena in the protagonist Dimple. The fiction gives a profound psychological insight into Dimples inner world. She always prefers to live in a world of fantasy than face the realities of life. Whenever her expectations are thwarted she feels depressed. She thinks that by emigrating to America she can experience a rich and sophisticated live but she experiences humiliation, loneliness and marginalization as an immigrant which makes her behave abnormally. Unable to communicate her problems to her husband, she goes to the extent of murdering him. Whenever Dimple tried to convey her problems Amit exhibited a wall of indifference. The novel concludes with Dimple imagining Amit’s partially severed head on the dining table as she starts watching TV. The margin between rationality and irrationality gets diffused and results in a violent act of murder. Dimple loses her sanity because she was alienated and marginalized in her indigenous culture and faced the same predicament in the host culture.