WIFE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES THAT AFFECT WOMEN

In the novel Wife by Bharati Mukherjee, Dimple is a middleclass married woman who wishes to migrate and finally migrates from Calcutta to New York with a hope that Marriage would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, and fund-raising dinners for noble charities. Marriage would bring her love. Mukherjee expresses and challenges the hardships of multicultural society of an immigrant. She sets the novel in the United States to reveal both the nations limitations in multiculturalism and the discrepancies between a policy of cultural difference and the American dream of Individualism and opportunity. The novel, Wife, is a perfect version of peripheral confusions regarding American culture and habitat and internal commotion to choose between personal deliverance on the one hand and matrimonial bondage on the other that Dimple suffers from. Dimple shows signs of dilemma of cultures which is a domino effect of her phobic condition in the end. Dimple who emigrates from India to the United States suffers under the disempowerment and pain caused by a different society. Mukherjee depicts a fixed American culture that negates individual identity in favor of communal identities located in foreign culture. The Indian born American novelist, Bharati Mukherjee is also known as short story writer, non-fiction writer as well as a successful journalist. Married to a Canadian writer she immigrated to Canada in 1968 and eventually a naturalized citizen in 1972. Bharati describes those 14 years of her life as the hardest one as she found herself discriminated against and treated as a member of the "visible minority." She has spoken in many interviews of her difficult life in Canada. This is the country that she sees as unfriendly to its immigrants and one that opposes the concept of cultural absorption. In spite of her tough life in Canada, which was challenging too she manages to write her first two novels, The Tiger`s Daughter and wife. At that time she was working up to professorial status at McGill University in Montreal. During those years she collected many of the sentiments found in her first collection of short stories Darkness. In many sections of this collection reflects her mood of cultural separation while living in Canada. Finally fed up with Canada, Mukherjee and her family moved to the United States in 1980, where she was introduced herself as a permanent U.S. resident. In 1986 she was awarded a National

Endowment for the Arts grant. After holding several posts at various colleges and universities, she ultimately settled in 1989 at the University of California-Berkeley. Environment plays a dynamic role in human life especially a woman. A child needs a very good environment to be reared. Environment determines ones attitudes and character. It is the primary cause to ones strength and weakness. It works upon a mans psyche and controls his actions, behaviour and manners. Dimple, the protagonist, who wants to be an idyllic Bengali wife, moves in with her mother-in-law, whom she loathes, and soon becomes pregnant, which she sees as an impediment to her new beginning: She began to think of the baby as unfinished business. It cluttered up the preparation for going abroad. She did not want to carry any relics from her old life; given another chance she could be a more exciting person, take evening classes perhaps, to become a librarian. She had heard that many Indian wives in the States became librarians. Preparing to leave for America, Dimple induces miscarriage by skipping rope until her legs are numb, an initial indication of her incipient rejection of her role as a subservient other. In the United States Dimple experiences both her own and borrowed cultures: the self-contained domestic world of Indians in Queens and the sophisticated parties of the more expansive and Americanized Indians in Manhattan. The topics of conversations are invariably on the Indians individual and collective expectations of making it in America and on the drawbacks to living in the U.S.: the high crime in the streets of New York, the cost of buying groceries, the reasons for not getting to know American. Dimple, who believes that she would be free to experience a life different and distanced from that which she has left behind in India, finds her existence in a nebulous, and undefined social space that, paradoxically, reinforces her indigenous cultural moorings: she is most reminded of her Indian-ness among the Americanized Indians. Marginalized by the patriarchy of Indian culture, Dimple is equally at sea in her adopted culture. Dimples sense of her own identity (and marginality) frames all of her responses to her new environment, which consists generally of Indians, mostly Bengalis. That the ethnography of Indians, including Americanized Bengalis, constitutes the experience of being abroad is one of the many reversals of ideological positioning Mukherjee employs in Wife.

When Jyoti and Amit discuss guns and licenses over dinner, Dimple thought she had never really been friends with anyone before this, never stayed with someone for weeks and discussed important things like love and death. Thats what America meant to her. Mukherjee presents us with a story of an immigrant who does not survive; so long forced to identify with either Indian or American culture. Dimple completely separates herself from any culture what so ever, relying only on individual initiative [for] thats what it came down to and her life had been devoted only to pleasing others, not herself. She pleases others by identifying with a group culture that ignores her personal need to change in America and identifies her only by her role---the Indian community sees Dimple as wife, and multicultural America separates her from itself as an immigrant. At the novels end, Dimple murders her husband, and Mukherjee leaves us with an image of Dimple talking to her and to the knife that she used to stab him in elongated disintegration into insanity and commits suicide. The dissolution of Dimples mind, climaxing in her violent act, may be best understood in light of Michel Foucaults analysis of madness in Madness and Civilization. In the Preface, Foucault notes that we must try to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself. Foucault is concerned with the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reasons subjugation of non-reason, since this is the realm in which the man of madness and the man of reason, moving apart, are not yet disjunct. Foucault deconstructs madness at the moment when the division between unreason and reason (rationality/irrationality) is dissolved. In this sense, Dimples murder of Amit in Wife may be viewed as that moment of dissolution; Dimples descent into the irrational reveals the dynamics of reason and unreason, rational or irrational exploding in an act of violence as a result of horrific circumstances around her.