Cultural Construct and the Female Identity: Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife

R. S. Krishnan, North Dakota State University

In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter notes that “the middle-class ideology of the proper sphere of womanhood, which developed in post-industrial England and America, prescribed a woman who would be a Perfect Lady, an Angel in the House, contentedly submissive to men, but strong in her inner purity and religiosity, queen in her own realm of the Home.”^[3] Showalter, of course, is making her remark in the context of the “rise” of women writers in early Victorian England. More significant, however, is Showalter’s characterization of the “phase” of “self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity” that “literary subcultures, such as black, Jewish, Canadian, Anglo-Indian, or even American” women writers engage in.^[4]

Feminist critics such as Showalter and others have been engaged in the task of critiquing language as an agency of phallocentrism and delineating the need for “gynocentric” (women’s) discourse to express the feminine experience. Post­colonial women writers writing within the margins of indigenous culture and feminism, therefore, have an even more acute problem, since they have to confront the twin issues of legitimacy of feminine discourse in a patriarchal society and the nebulous cultural and social “space” they occupy in their efforts to situate their texts within the context of feminism.

Additionally, the definition of “culture” itself is divided in its signification, since the term is open to a variety of interpretive strategies. Raymond Williams, for instance, imparts an anthropological sense to the term, when he observes that “Culture was made into an entity, a positive body of achievements and habits, precisely to express a mode of living superior to that being brought about by the ‘progress of civilization’.”^[5] But, as Gerald Graff and Bruce Robbins observe, the “conflict between culture in the anthropological sense and culture in the normative sense leads to a third way of using the term, one that refers neither to a people’s organic way of life nor to the normative values preached by leading intellectuals but to a battleground of social conflicts and contradictions.”^[6] However, if one were to view “cultures” as, in Graff’s words, “textual sites and processes, constitutively open to conflicting cultural currents and interpretations, and as themselves including travel both ‘ethnographic’ and other,” it is possible to develop “respect for the lived experience of cultures in the plural, particular sense.”^[7] It is this “lived experience of cultures” that forms the “textual sites” of Bharati Mukherjee’s explorations in her novel Wife. In her work, Mukherjee foregrounds the experience of a woman forced to confront her marginalization within her own (Indian) culture, while attempting to forge an identity within an alien (American) culture, both of which, however, are entrenched in patriarchal ideology. In delineating Dimple Dasgupta’s attempt at negotiating the cultural and ideological divides, Mukherjee provides for the contradictory interactions of culture, ideology, and identity.

Mukherjee reinscribes the theme of women in extremis, made familiar in the works of writers from Mary Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of a Woman, 1798) and Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, 1847) to Charlotte Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892). The opening lines of the novel signal Mukherjee’s intention to reshape the hegemonic conventions, by appropriating and revising Austen’s ironic representation of marriage in her opening lines to Pride and Prejudice: “Dimple Dasgupta had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads” (3).

Dimple initially believes that marriage “would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpet lawns, fund-raising dinners for noble charities. Marriage would bring her love” (3). A naive daughter of a well-to-do upper middle-class Indian professional, and getting close (by Indian standards) to the age where her marriage prospects seem limited—she’s twenty, after all—Dimple oscillates between fear and fantasy, constantly worrying about her “sitar-shaped body and rudimentary breasts” (4). Her notions of marriage are rather vague, derived as they are from the exaggerated art of Indian films, movie magazines, and the advice columns in “ladies’ periodicals.” Her horoscope-matched, arranged marriage by means of the ubiquitous matrimonial advertisements in ethnic newspapers and magazines insistently signifies the subordinated, passive role of a daughter brought up to obey male authority. Her father’s choice for her husband is Amit Basu, an engineer, who has pending “immigration to Canada and US” (14 ). “Marriage,” Dimple believes, “would free her, fill her with passion. Discreet and virgin, she waited for real life to begin” (13).

In typical Indian fashion, Dimple 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, become a librarian. She had heard that many Indian wives in the States became librarians” (42). 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 Dimple’s initial expectations of a change in her marriage status and in anticipation of new experiences in the United States, Mukherjee indicates the dilemma of the Indian woman whose social role, by tradition, is defined by a patriarchally encoded culture. Marriages are arranged by parents, especially the father; the husband assumes authority over the wife; the wife is expected to subsume her individual and private identity into the (patriarchally) social and cultural. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note, “Women in patriarchal societies have historically been reduced to mere properties.”^[8] Dimple is an object whose subjective self conforms to and is confirmed by male ideology and discourse.

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 (60-61). 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 Americans—“… who needs Sahibs? There must be a thousand Indians in just this neighborhood” (54). Dimple, who had believed that she would be “free” to experience a life different and distanced from that which she had left behind in India, finds her existence in a nebulous, undefined social space that, paradoxically, reinforces her indigenous cultural moorings: she is most reminded of her “Indian-ness” among the “Americanized Indians” (77). Marginalized by the patriarchy of Indian culture, Dimple is equally at sea in her “adopted” culture.

Meeting their Indian friends, Dimple is struck by their fancy talk and social behavior, so “untypical” of the Indians she knew in Calcutta. Leaving an Indian party, “Jyoti said wasn’t it wonderful that Indians abroad were so outgoing and open minded. They didn’t give a damn about communalism and petty feelings. They [Jyoti and his wife] personally counted a number of Punjabis and Gujaratis and some South Indians among their friends. Jyoti told Dimple not to restrict herself to Bengalis, or else she’d miss a lot of the experience of being abroad” (67). Introduced to Ina Mullick, a “liberated” housewife who is “more American than Americans” (68), Dimple is awed by her air of sophistication, her command of English, and her “Women’s Lib” advice to “crack the whip” (76). When Ina offers her a “weak gin,” Dimple

felt that Amit was waiting for just the right answer, that it was up to her to uphold Bengali womanhood, marriage, and male pride. The right answer, I do not need stimulants to feel happy in my husband’s presence … my obligation is to my husband, seemed to dance before her eyes as though it were printed on a card. All she had to do was read it, but she feared Ina’s laughter, or anger, more than anything in the world. If she took a drink she knew Amit would write it to his mother and his mother would call the Dasguptas and accuse them of raising an immoral and drunken daughter. The Calcutta rumor mill operated as effectively from New York as it did from Park Street. (78)

The syntax of the passage reinforces Dimple’s role as an outsider and a passive object.

Dimple’s 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. That’s what America meant to her” (84-85).

Dimple’s mistaking the social circle of Indians for “cultural experience” prevents her from experiencing life on the outside that would shape her view of American society. However, Dimple’s analysis of her earliest encounter with American society is from the perspective of her own cultural moorings. Turned away from her request for “five hundred grams of cheesecake” (59), with the reminder that Schwartz’s is a kosher deli, and does not sell “milk, cheese, sour cream—” (60), Dimple thinks, “In Calcutta she’d buy from Muslims, Biharis, Christians, Nepalis. She was used to many races; she’d never been a communalist.… She was caught in the crossfire of an American communalism she couldn’t understand. She felt she’d come very close to getting killed on her third morning in America” (60). Her failed attempt at negotiating the cultural divide reiterates Dimple’s inability to find her “space” within the confines of an alien culture. That is, she can neither negotiate the cultural barrier nor find a voice that answers to her needs, that speaks for her, that discloses meaning for her in the chaos of her experience.

Dimple’s confusion over “American communalism” is further compounded by her inability to articulate the language either of the “Americanized Indians” or the Americans. When Ina Mullick tells Dimple that talking to her is like “talking to a … porpoise,” Dimple responds, “I like porpoises.… They’re so nearly human, aren’t they?” (136). But, we are told, “she had seen only one in her life, and that too on television, flipping and squealing in a kidney-shaped swimming pool in a suburban backyard while it waited to be freighted clear across the country. A porpoise was an immense, soft, vulnerable creature. At the back of her mind floated a disturbing image of herself as child, with scarred knees and a pink taffeta bow on her head. When Ina spoke in English, her words were predatory, Dimple realized” (136-37). In juxtaposing, on the one hand, Dimple’s association of the image of the porpoise’s “vulnerability” with her own as a child and, on the other, her fear of the social world of Ina represented by language, Mukherjee reinforces Dimple’s conflict between her self-image—her interiority—and her experience of the “other,” language as signification of an alien culture. As B. A. St. Andrews points out, “In immigrant literature … [l]anguage becomes a metaphor both of belonging and of not belonging.”^[9]Feeling inadequate and unable to achieve the rapport between her experience and the language adequate to its expression, Dimple is both culturally and linguistically “silenced.” Dimple’s inability to respond to Ina iterates her insular life and, even, her fears. She reacts to her environment in a manner so instinctive and predictable as to be labeled a tropism. Denied expression (voice), Dimple is unable either to validate her experience or her identity.

Feeling left out of her own cultural grouping, afraid to venture out, diffident about meeting people, Dimple spends most of her time isolated from the world outside, reading Better Homes and Gardens and watching television: “[D]aytime shows with inspiring names like ‘Guiding Light’ and ‘Love of Life.’ The women on television led complicated lives. became pregnant frequently and under suspicious circumstances … murdered or were murdered, were brought to trial and released; they suffered through the Ping-Pong volley of their fates with courage” (72-73). From television, Dimple “learned the details of American home life” (73).

Dimple’s subservience reiterates a culture and ideology (both her own and American) that denies her the right to personal feelings and desires that serve her own interests, and which would allow her to forge her own identity. Brought up to defer to her father/husband’s final authority to examine and judge her every emotion and behavior, she cannot serve as an agent of change on her own behalf, because she cannot comprehend any reason to justify her feelings. As an Indian woman, and held up as the symbol and repository of “virtue,” it was her feminine duty to subjugate her feelings and desires to the will of her husband: “She wanted Amit to be infallible, intractable, godlike, but with boyish charm” (88-89).

Thus, when Dimple is seduced by Milt Glasser (without Amit’s knowledge), her isolation and despair become even more acute. Dimple has committed the ultimate sacrilege, the betrayal of her gendered Indian culture: “She was so much worse off than ever, more lonely, more cut off from Amit, from the Indians, left only with borrowed disguises … [living] like a shadow without feelings” (200). Isolated from the world outside and disappointed in Amit who, unable to find a professional position, had taken to washing dishes, Dimple muses, “Life should have treated her better, should have added and subtracted in different proportions so that she was not left with a chimera” (156). Earlier, Amit had reiterated the hierarchized gender relationship of Indian culture by noting that “With so many Indians around and a television and a child, a woman [Dimple] shouldn’t have any time to get crazy ideas” (69). As Gilbert and Gubar observe, “It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters.”^[10]

For Dimple, television (in itself an artifact of Western culture) becomes the other reality—the exaggerated world of social intercourse. Her final act of “cultural” immersion is stabbing Amit as he eats a bowl of Wheaties cereal. Significantly, the act comes after her strenuous attempt to give voice to her feelings in a language that is alien to her:

She groped for the right words, then remembering Ina and Milt, she pounced on an English word and trotted it out the way Ina had done on a more eventful day. ‘You just aren’t supportive, if you know what I mean.’ ‘You’re nuts,’ Amit retorted. But he took his notebook out of his pajama pocket and scribbled down a word. Dimple tried to sidle closer to him so she could make out what he had written. Could he be writing down her word, adding it to his list of words to show off in company? Revenge! Revenge!” (208; emphasis added)

Gayatri Spivak notes that “The will to explain [is] a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world … the possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject.”^[11] Dimple’s feeble attempt at asserting her identity, marginal though it is, is not only met with a wall of indifference, but even her language (word) is appropriated by her husband. Even as she is aware of this appropriation, however, her interiority—her feminine self—does not allow her to evaluate her gendered role or the power differentials between male/female.

Wife concludes with Dimple imagining Amit’s partially severed head on the dining table, as she reverts to watching television, musing whether his head would look better mounted: “I wonder if Leni can make a base for it; she’s supposed to be very clever with her fingers” (213). Dimple’s act—which loudly signals her alienated self—is both a falsification and an affirmation of her understanding of life in America, just as the television to which she is addicted reflects and recreates its own reality.

The dissolution of Dimple’s mind, climaxing in her violent act, may be best understood in light of Michel Foucault’s 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” (MC ix). Foucault is concerned with “the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s 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” (MC ix, x). Foucault deconstructs “madness” at the moment when the di­vision between “unreason” and “reason” (rationality/irrationality) is dissolved. In this sense, Dimple’s murder of Amit in Wife may be viewed as that moment of dissolution; Dimple’s descent into the “irrational” reveals the dynamics of “reason” and “unreason,” rational or irrational exploding in an act of violence.

Foucault, however, dissociates madness from any noticeable physical or mental change in the individual; rather, he attributes irrational behavior to a discourse that stems from delirium. Foucault argues that “the ultimate language of madness is that of reason” (MC 95), and delirious discourse therefore, paradoxically, has a liberating effect on passion, releasing it from the containment of reason even as it is constrained by it: “A rational hold over madness is always possible and necessary, to the very degree that madness is non-reason” (MC 107). Thus manifested in delirious discourse, Foucault views madness as an error in which the madman is self-deceived; consequently, the madman is unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong:

To entrust madness and its empty world directly to the plenitude of a nature which does not deceive because its immediacy does not acknowledge non-being, is to deliver madness both to its own truth (since madness, as a disease, is after all only a natural being), and to its closest contradiction (since delirium, as appearance without content, is the very contrary of the often secret and invisible wealth of nature). This contradiction thus appears as the reason of unreason, in a double sense: it withholds unreason’s causes, and at the same time conceals the principle of its suppression. (MC 191)

In her distorted view of reality, her delirium, Dimple imagines Amit’s head transposed onto the television set, an image that reiterates Foucault’s concept of “the culmination of the void” (MC 107). Given Dimple’s marginalization within her own patriarchal culture, and her subsequent encounter with American society which leaves her even more confused about her identity, Dimple’s act of madness can ironically be seen as a liberating one. Like the unnamed female protagonist in Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” whose physician husband airily dismisses her complaints with the admonition that “the very worst thing [she could] do is to think about [her] condition,”^[12] Dimple, too, is ignored by Amit when she is most in need of his support, since “her life had been devoted only to pleasing others, not herself” (211). In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as Mary A. Hill notes, “Gilman presents insanity as a form of rebellion, a crucial turning point toward independence”;^[13] Mukherjee posits Dimple’s descent into insanity as a trope that in the end allows silence to be overcome by an action—that of killing her husband—that simultaneously validates Dimple’s identity even as it confirms her marginality.

This point of disjunction, from both cultural and feminist perspectives, is precisely what Bharati Mukherjee discloses in Wife. By rendering as the feminine “other” Foucault’s discussion of the point at which reason and unreason “disjunct” (the “man of reason” as opposed to the “[wo]man of madness,” MC ix, x), Mukherjee appropriates and reinscribes Dimple’s act of madness or irrationality as a deviation, a delirious discourse from the perspectives of culture and (patriarchal) ideology. Dimple’s “madness” stems from her resistance to male ideology and to her own and an alien culture, from which she forcibly disengages herself. Her violent act may be seen as an expression of her anguish and desire that lie outside the rule of reason. Her act, in this sense, liberates her as she disregards the discourse that culturally and ideologically has so far construed her identity by constricting her feelings and desires as a woman. The condition of Dimple’s identity (and therefore the comportment of her “madness”) is marginalization and victimization by both her indigenous and “inherited” cultures.

When events fail to make the sense to Dimple that they should—such as distinguishing the television shows from actual life and both distancing her from her own inner “self” (though she has a vague recognition that television “was becoming the voice of madness,” 176)—her reason fails, but it is displaced by another kind of “reason” that originates in her desire to end her oppression. Mukherjee implies that Dimple’s “madness” has inevitably altered her status and her identity. As one who is “mad,” her “voice” is heard, just as “aberrant” behavior draws attention to itself within the confines of normalcy. By acting out her repression, Dimple transforms her marginality—her silence—into action, which enables her, if only briefly, to move from the cultural and ideological periphery to the center.

Mukherjee suggests that Dimple’s loss of sanity may be attributed to her sense of alienation from her own and American culture; she doesn’t understand the latter, and neither seems to accommodate her. Dimple’s sense of loss is heightened by her seduction by Amit’s friend, a moral lapse that is as inimical to her status and self-identity as it is insidious to her role as a wife. Her sense of her own subservience reiterates her marginality, which is further compounded by her continuing frustration in adjusting to her new environment and new experiences. Her descent into madness, in the final analysis, is to be seen as both an affirmation and a denial of her identity as a victim of cultural displacement and patriarchal discourse. The irony inherent in her displacement is made obvious in Mukherjee’s transposition of the cultural context of the act: Dimple does away with Amit even as Johnny Carson has just closed his sketch as Karnac the Magician (in an Indian accent). For once Carson, a cultural icon, is just an American sideshow to an Indian act.

In Wife, Mukherjee iterates the marginalization of woman by exploring—and exploding—ways in which culture and ideology construct feminine identity.

NOTES

^[1] Bharati Mukherjee, Wife (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1975) 212-13. All subsequent references to this work will appear in the text in parentheses.
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^[2] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965) 250. All references to Foucault are from this work and are hereafter indicated in the text in parentheses after the abbreviation MC.
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^[3] Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Bront to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton, 1977) 14.
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^[4] Showalter 13.
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^[5] Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 17801950 (London: Oxford, 1958) 254.
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^[6] Gerald Graff and Bruce Robbins, “Cultural Criticism,” Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: MLA, 1996) 421.
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^[7] Graff and Robbins 434.
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^[8] Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Cenury Imagination (New Haven: Yale, 1979) 12.
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^[9] B. A. St. Andrews, “Co-Wanderers Kogawa and Mukherjee: New Immigrant Writers,” World Literature Today (Winter 1992): 56.
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^[10] Gilbert and Gubar 53.
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^[11] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988) 105.
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^[12] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (New York: Feminist, 1973) 10.
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^[13] Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 18601896 (Philadelphia: Temple, 1980) 151.
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