Cross –Cultural Confrontation In Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife

B.Kalidoss,
Assistant Professor of English
Sethu Institute of Technology, Kariapatti
Email: dossjishnu@gmail.com

Abstract
The increased mobility of people in this age has broken the continuity of the cultural environment and natural environment resulting in superficialisation of relationships. Immigration has proved to be one of those major stresses to which we of the twentieth century are exposed. In majority of the cases expatriate experience has developed the stresses which have resulted from the break-up of traditional societies bringing about a change in the ethos and man’s psyche. ‘Wife’ is the story of a middle-classed Bengali girl Dimple, who is married to Amit, an engineer. After their wedding they go to America. Once abroad, she understands that life is not as glamorous as she had imagined it to be. Cultural shock, alienation, media violence and her husband’s long stays at office complicate the basically morbid mind of Dimple. It makes her neurotic of killing her husband in a grotesque manner.

Cross-cultural confrontation has gained momentum since the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Globalisation has increased multi-culturalism. And with the advent of Science and Technology, people have started migrating to different countries in order to achieve their aims and ambitions. Indians in considerable numbers started migrating to the U.S. only after the liberalised 1965 Immigration Act. The experience of the Indian Immigrant community in America has been qualitatively different from that of earlier immigrants from Asia, which have had a much longer history on American soil. The post - 1965 Indian immigrants are educated, middle class professional and enter “an entirely different opportunity structure”. This trend has developed inter-cultural and inter-racial awareness.
In the light of the above points discussed, the paper analyses the cross-cultural confrontation of characters in the title of Bharati Mukherjee"s Wife". Being an immigrant, she was caught between the conflicting cultures in her attempt to find an identity of her own. This is best reflected in her novels.

America has become a passion of people all over the world. People migrate to this country to see their dreams come true. The migrated people find it difficult to adjust with the new culture and undergo cultural transformation. In this process, they lost the roots of their native culture as Rudyard Kipling says, „He has lost his own country and has not acquired any other”. To a large extent, they live in homogeneous communities, isolated from the mainstream white culture. But once they land on an alien land, they confront a new socio-cultural environment. They struggle mutely to survive. They try to adopt the new culture, but in vain. Their psyche is torn between the feeling of rootlessness and nostalgia. Dimple of Wife" undergoes the traumatic process of acculturation in her search for identity in an alien land and fails in her attempt. This is the plight of Dimple in Wife”.

Indian culture nurtures a feeling among young girls that marriage is their door way to happiness. Parents often give little freedom to their daughters. Hence, they yarn to taste the fruit of freedom after their marriage. Dimple Das Gupta, the protagonist of Mukherjee"s Wife", a girl of a middle class Bengali family, is no exception to this attitude. She has colourful dreams about marriage. She dreams of marrying a neurosurgeon and hopes that “Marriage would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, and fund raising dinners for notable charities. Marriage would bring her love” (1).

With these dreams after her desperate waiting finally, she enters the wedlock with Amit Basu, an engineer who is about to migrate to the United States. Her mother-in-law wants to call her Nandini and not Dimple. The change of her name is just a small thing for Amit but to Dimple it is „everything". Her christening as Nandini is the first estrangement from her identity. Soon after getting married, Dimple comes closer to reality which shatters all her dreams. Amit, she thinks, is not the man of her dreams. She often had dreams of an ideal man constructed out of „a forehead from an aspirin ad, the lips from a body builder and shoulder adds, the stomach and legs from a trousers ad" (.23).

When Dimple becomes pregnant, she indulges in self-abortion of skipping ropes. She considers that a child will be a deter rant to her migration to America. This act of abortion is a sacrament of liberation from the traditional roles and constraints of womanhood. It symbolically shows that she tries to free herself from the traditional role of a Hindu wife and asserting her will. She hopes that her new life will begin in the new world. „I want everything to be nice and a new", she informs Pixie on the phone (41).

Unfortunately, one day in order to avoid his involvement is a bribery case, Amit resigns and soon, the couple migrates to New York where they stay at Jyoti and Meena Sen"s house. During this early phase of life Dimple is not happy. Often she is struck by mental disorder. Amit"s delay in getting job frustrates her.

In the second part of the novel, the description about Dimple and Amit"s life at Jyoti and Meena Sen"s household in New York is sensibly depicted. On her first day in the New York apartment she felt like a star collapsing inwardly. She tries to convey her fears and forebodings to Amit but neither does he try to understand her nor is he capable of rising above a mundane understanding. The two do not stay happily owing to their weak economic condition. For four months Amit does not get a job.

The conflict between the protagonist"s drive towards a recreation of self and her position as a wife and a member of the small Indian immigrant community is illustrated in the sudden physical isolation that marks the beginning of Dimple"s life in New York. Instead of the freedom she has associated with marriage and America, her life is limited to the private space of the home much more than in Calcutta. Mukherjee invests her immigrant characters with a kind of self-excluding attitude, a desire to remain culturally and socially isolated from American society even when extracting a financially better future from it. For instance, in an almost stereotypical scene of “immigrant experience”, the combination of gender and ethnicity is presented as universally known among the immigrant group to signify a definite and particularly vulnerable cultural otherness in an Indian woman: Meena put her feet upon the coffee table and gave Dimple household hints: wash saris in the bathtub, throw them in the dryer, fold them in half and use spray starch. “But if the washing machine is in the basement of the building, let Amit do the laundry.” Dimple laughed at the suggestion. “I"m sure he wouldn"t do the laundry! He hasn"t washed a hanky in his life. I wouldn"t let him.” “You want to get mugged? Women in this building – not me, touch wood – have been mugged in the basement. If you want to get killed and worse things, then go do the laundry yourself. Don"t listen to me. I tell you these people are goondas [thugs].” “But why would anyone want to mug me?” “It"s all the rare beef they eat. It makes them crazy” (70). Meena"s mundane anecdote, an archetypal caveat of the literal dangers of assimilation, presents physical isolation not only as a way of maintaining individual physical safety, but also as a collective norm to ensure cultural and religious purity. Thus, Dimple is identified, first and foremost by her own peer group, as a woman of colour whose speech marks her as a cultural foreigner among the intimidating, always potentially violent Americans.

Once, the couple are invited by Vinod Khanna, a prosperous businessman in the town. He also offers a job to Dimple but on her husband"s advice she declines it in spite of the fact that the Basu"s were in need of honest earning. This is because of Amit"s doubt about Khana"s character. In fact, sexism in America appears very disastrous. The couple Ina Mulick and her husband are also evidence to this. Ina, though an Indian, living in American, imitates all bad American habits. She smokes, drinks and possesses post-marital relationships. This influences Dimple badly and leads her to fall in love with Milt Glasser, an American. Amit and Dimple experience frustration at various levels. While joblessness puts Amit in jitters, Dimple realises that her marriage is a failure: She was bitter that marriage has betrayed her had not provided all the glitterythings she had imagined, had not brought her cocktails" (115).

She hates Amit as he fails to fulfil her dreams. He is not the man of her dreams. Dejected Dimple leads a lonely life of assisting Meena Sen, watching T.V or reading newspaper. Through media she is introduced to violence. Added to this she hears about more murder. There were frequent announcements of murders in newspapers, car radio and in casual conversations. She constantly lives in fear of the unknown. Talking about murders in America was like talking about the weather. She contemplates violence and killing. An American divorces her husband for snoring. Even the American cinema displayed only sex and violence. So Mukherjee writes:

"The women on television led complicated lives, become pregnant frequently and under suspicious circumstances, murdered, were brought to trial and released; they suffered through the ping-pong volley of their fates with courage"(73).

This is now, the Indian women, in the flux of race and sexuality turn victims of their own crisis. Evidently, Dimple is caught in a tradition of passivity, female treachery and covert violence. Many more news about American"s barbarous acts of violence, sex and bloodshed do not go without frightening and corrupting Dimple. This, in fact, leads her to murder her husband later. Ina rightly says: „our trouble here is that we imitate badly, and we preserve things even worse" (95).
Dimple"s psychological imbalances, her immoderate daytime sleeping, her nightmares, her indecisiveness- everything remains unknown to him upto his dying day. Dimple has to cope up with her traumatic mental condition all alone. She turns towards Ina and ultimately Milt Glasser in her moments of crisis. Ina and Leni fail her as friends. Milt proves to be a temporary transgression. The rebel in her is devising new means and ways to commit suicide. She is an alienated being undergoing the supposed after effects of alienation- psychosis, psychosomatic disorder, delinquency and contemplation of suicide.

Because of Ina"s influence on Dimple, Dimple"s character starts changing. She meets Ina, the notorious wife of Bijoy Mullick at a party. Ina is more American than Americans. When she was in India before her marriage, she spent her leisure time by reading magazines. She wants to dress like women in advertisements. The thought gradually increased after she migrated and participated in the parties in New York.

One day Dimple goes to the market with Meena Sen to buy a cheese cake. Encouraged by Meena, she goes to the shop alone and notices one by one side the glass cake, pickles, salads pink roast beef and etc. She asks for cheesecake but the shopkeeper starts staring at her. When she repeats the sentence, the shopkeeper asks her whether she does not know the law and searches for something in his drawer. She is afraid, she thinks that the man is taking out his gun and she is left with no option but to be killed without crying. Here she realises the difference between Calcutta and New York. This very first exposure to America leaves a traumatic effect on her mind. She fails to understand the reason why a man selling beef etc. cannot sell cheese cake. What is the law of America? Dimple, in her effort to be “American”, innocently tries to buy cheesecake and is terrified by the owner"s cantankerous response and certain that she will pay for her imperfect English and cultural ignorance by being shot on the spot. She perceives her venturing into America proper as being met with the penalty of death, as warned by Meena. She thought:

"She was caught in the crossfire of an American communalism. She could not understand. She felt she"d come very close to getting killed on her third morning in America" (60).

Her bewilderment with America is due to her sheltered childhood. She had hardly ever been out of Calcutta.

The art of communication between husband and wife is essential to marital happiness. After getting exposed to the alien culture, Amit and Dimple fail to communicate with each other. This has a telling effect upon their relationship. This failure in communication develops a breach between the couple which widens day by day and ultimately ruins their relationship. The situation worsens when Amit gets a job. He fails to understand Dimple. He believes providing material comforts alone will make her happy. The couple moves to another flat – a well furnished apartment with all sorts of modern appliances. The living condition of the couple improves, yet they feel lonely.

America has outwitted her and now she is gripped by a sense of nostalgia. Dimple experiences loneliness at every quarter of her life. It is beyond her understanding „how could she live in a country.... where every other woman was a stranger, where she felt different, ignorant, exposed to ridicule in the elevator?" (112). Dimple"s disgust with American English and American system gets accentuated even by small things. She is afraid to operate the self-service elevators. She has to live within the four walls of the apartment. TV is all her cosmos where she watches endless violence and murder. She hates American English and American system of life. She indulges in a sense of nostalgia thinking about her peaceful life at Calcutta with her friends. She finds it difficult to share her inmost heart even to her husband. Thus she suffers from abnormality of mind and from the crisis of culture.

Dimple finds life impossible with the people who didn"t understand about Durga Pujah. For Indians religion is an integral part of life and Dimple"s failure at assimilation with America is due to a lack of „shared-faith." An expatriate is tenaciously conscious of preserving his identity even inmost trying moments of life. In America, she realises how easy it was to live, to communicate, and to share with people in Calcutta. She never felt frightened at the sight of the policemen whose faces were so friendly, but the scene has changed completely in the new environment:

"She is scared of self-service elevators, of policemen, of gadgets and appliances. She does not want to wear Western clothes as she thinks she would be mistakenly taken for a Puerto Rican. She does not want to lose her identity but feels isolated, trapped, alienated, marginalised" (10-13).

At Queens Dimple had a confidante in Meena Sen with whom she could share her private feelings but at Greenwich she is all alone. Here her depression manifests itself in different ways. She fails to write to Pixie, though in her imagination she begins many a time. She drops the idea because she thinks:

"Friendship was impossible through letters. Conveying NewYork, Ina Mullick, her nightmares, the „phase" (as Amit calls it) she was going through- all impossible to talk about...." (120).

Within the circle of Indian immigrants too, Dimple finds herself an alien. The Indians in America who have adjusted themselves to the American ways of life make her feel an outsider. In her own community too she fails to relate and experiences rejection. This is evident at Vinod Khanna"s party where Dimple feels restless about the food that is prepared. At night after the party, she could not sleep. She starts hating everything in Meena Sen"s flat where she is staying temporarily. It is very suggestive that Dimple and Amit do not find a flat of their own. After leaving Sen"s apartment, they shift to the flat of Marsha, who is on a long vacation. If Dimple has to live in America she has to live in a borrowed flat and clothes and also culture for that matter. When she fails to relate to the real world, she tries to relate to the unreal world shown on the T.V. But this provides wrong solutions to the real problems.

Amit may also be blamed for his ignorance of female psychology. He thinks that providing creature comforts is enough and hardly bothers for her emotional needs. He takes her out of four-walls very rarely and goes on admonishing instead: „You must go out, make friends, do something constructive, not stay at home and think about Calcutta" (111).

The protagonist is shown in very few actual contacts with Americans, whom she observes as a patchwork of violence, consumerism and a casual yet at times strangely passionate attitude towards things. Although Dimple is drawn to some of these young Americans, they always remain foreign and intimidating to her, to be contemplated from afar like the Indian film stars of her girlhood. Therefore, the discrepancy between the class and gender conventions which have formed the foundation of her self-image and the reality of Dimple"s psychological isolation and limited access to the outside world leaves her in a limbo between the immigrant community and American society. The alternative of espousing American values, clothing and thoughts of personal happiness, as one of the young wives does, is not something Dimple can consider, either: “I"m sorry,” Dimple whispered. “There are some things I can"t do. Wearing pants is one of them [. . .] I just don"t want to start all this. If I wear pants to eat pizza in the winter, who knows what I"ll be wearing to eat at the Dairy Queen next summer.” (154).
But nowhere in the novel Amit seems to have exploited her by cruelly either burdening her with household work or by neglecting her pleasures in life. He is always worried about her well-being. Therefore, they converse without communications; live together while remaining strangers.

To be fair to Dimple it can be said that with her deficiencies in English she could have hardly conducted herself well in a city of enormous size like New York on her own. Dimple expected some trouble in the American setup when she came to this city because pain was part of any new beginning. But she had never imagined to be strained like this beyond endurance.

"She had expected pain when she had come to America, had told herself that pain was part of any new beginning, ............ But she had not expected her mind to be strained like this, beyond endurance" (115).

The idea of murdering her husband ironically makes Dimple feel very American somehow, almost like a character in T.V serial. And her American frenzy accomplishes her wish. Dimple has not been able to adjust to the familial circumstances. She is alienated from her husband who, as a careerist, is hankering after lucrative jobs. Despair sets in her life. Amit has no time for her, and she is “bitter that marriage had betrayed her, had not provided all the glittery things she had imagined”. P.101 (30-31). She wants to dream of Amit, but she cannot. „Amit does not feed her fantasy life; he was merely the provider of small material comforts. Born out of this frustration are her seven ways of committing suicide in Queens. From her suicidal thoughts springs the idea of murdering her husband. In bitter moments she ranked husband, blender, colour TV, cassette player, in order of convenience". She feels that she would have been a very different person had she married someone else who unlike Amit would have altered her and showed all affection and attention on her.

This isolation and emotional starvation starts the process of her psychological disintegration, which had been incipient even when she was in Calcutta. She envies her friend Pixie who works in the All India Radio, and also longs for the outside world, but does nothing to transform her wish into action. She has no goal in life, and does nothing to do something with it. She has no understanding of the past, and can do nothing to make the future meaningful. This „inherent instability" in her personality is intensified by her isolation in the new environment. In this state of psychological drift, she hits upon the idea of violence against herself as well as Amit. She is constantly hitting upon new ways of committing suicide, or killing Amit, though she never considers murder seriously. The latent propensity for violence in her, manifested in her Calcutta days in her killing the rat in her husband"s house, and in her skipping rope to kill the foetus in her womb, is brought out and activated under the pressure of the new environment. Sometime after her sojourn in New York, we are told, “setting fire to a sari had been one of the seven types of suicide Dimple had recently devised” (115).

Dimple is left to her own devises to resist the disintegration of her personality. She is caught in the quicksand of cultural uncertainities represented by the conduct of Ina Mullick, Marsha Mookerji and her brother, Milt Glasser driven to do something in order to asset herself and her identity, she resorts to passive protest. When Ina and her hunchback friend, Leni fall out in her apartment and Leni throws an ashtray at Ina and casually adds, “It"s only a lousy kitsch ashtray for God"s sake. I"ll go down to Khanna"s Emporium and buy her a dozen, okay?”. She does not know what to make of such brazen conduct, and in silent revenge, keeps pouring tea over their cups and onto the carpet until they stop her. Dimple"s frenzied imagination is in a whirl all the while: „After Leni removed the cup Dimple kept on pouring..... over the tray....... till the pregnant –bellied tea pot was empty and Leni and Ina were standing and shaking her, „Dimple, Dimple, stop it" (152).

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 talk and social fancy behavior, so “untypical” of the Indians she knew in Calcutta. 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. Her failed attempt at negotiating the cultural divide reiterates Dimple"s inability to find her “space” within the confines of an alien culture. Her failed attempt at negotiating the cultural divide reiterates Dimple"s inability to find her “space” within the confines of an alien culture. 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).

Dimple is thus left to her own strategies of survival in the new environment. This evolution is reflected in the modulation of her response to the conduct of Marsha"s brother, Milt Glasser, who hugs, embraces and even lifts Dimple onto the top of the kitchen counter as their acquaintance progresses. She is at first embarrassed and uncomfortable with him, but slowly she discovers in him a source of emotional support and even a recognition of her identity, which she had missed in Amit. He too does sense her discontent, but makes no sincere effort to understand or help her out of her melancholy. It is his protracted indifference to her plight that makes her turn Milt as lover and seduce him one afternoon in their flat. She is untroubled by any sense of guilt at her infidelity, an indication of her drifting away from her inherited culture and its values, and the distance her psyche has travelled. She, thus, turns a rebellion and violates all stereotyped behaviour of Indian Womanhood. 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). At last she kills Amit, stabbing him seven times and making herself free from the marriage bond. Her illicit relationship with Milt seems her attempt to find an identity in America or in other words, her Americanised identity. Thus it is the cross cultural confrontation which intensifies her confusion and turns the violence inside out and she ends up as murderess.

But even Milt remains a man of mystery; Dimple cannot get him to reveal his real source of income. She has to be content with his “I"m not just hustling the foundations” and his assertion that he loves her. In this mad world of appearances and uncertainties, she loses her hold on sanity. Possibly as an escape from her sense of guilt at her adultery, she decides, with a perverse logic, to kill Amit and hide his body in the freezer. Her accumulated grievances against the world, of which Amit is the visible symbol, release the destructive energies in her. She vacillates between killing herself and killing Amit, and plumps for the latter.

She is further shaken with the knowledge that America with all its outward glitter allows Indian wives only to create „little Indias" around them but does not allow them either freedom or fulfilment as evident in the case of Ina Mullick who, despite her attempts at becoming a total American remains a frustrated individual. After this disturbing realization Dimple sinks into a world of isolation, unable to welcome the bright prospect of setting up a new home even after Amit gets a job. After a few pathetic attempts to merge herself into the new Milt Glasser, Dimple experiences total estrangement from herself and her surroundings as well. Torn by the conflict between her fantasy world and the reality of her situation, she allows her mind to be totally conditioned by the commercials on T.V. and magazines so much so she loses the ability to distinguish them from the world of reality. Perhaps it is part of the ad she is trying to follow when she strikes an illicit relationship with Milt Glasser in passionate attempt to find an identity in America. In wearing Marsha"s shoes and clothes, in borrowing English words from Ina and Milt even to quarrel with her husband, and in devising various schemes to commit suicide and to murder Amit, Dimple seems to be indulging in her passion to become a new woman and lead a very free, exciting life as the soap-operas on T.V show.

As she cannot come to terms with either her own culture or America"s culture, she finds herself at cross-roads, and visualizes her life as „dying bonfire". At the end of the novel Mr. Milt Glasser"s frequent visit to her house changed her. She enjoys all the prohibited freedom. She starts going out with Milt. She is very much impressed by the character of Milt. She thought, in the hands of Milt she felt that she was safer than ever before. The violence she sees outside turns inside. She feels guilty of her extra-marital relationship with Milt and worries about her hiding the matter from her husband. One night, after watching TV programme, Dimple accompanied Amit to the kitchen. She thought of informing him about the relationship she had with Milt. He sat on the counter and spilled sugar on the counter, which irritated her. She thought that it was impossible to live with him watching spilling sugar. She murders her husband as she is misled by the popular American culture. The idea of murdering Amit makes her feel very American somehow, "Almost like a character in a TV series".

Though married to an educated and liberated husband, Dimple is not able to strike a balance between the two juxtaposed words: The one she left behind, the other she comes to live in. Initially, she had inhibitions and taboos of her moribund Bengali life. She always thought „Marriage would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, and fund raising dinners for noble charities. Marriage would bring her love.” But to Dimple"s dismay, it happened just the opposite of what she had dreamt. She is so much frustrated from life that the words like loyalty, suffering and pain, on her husband"s part, lost the meaning and instead
she starts fantasying to murder her husband. She has been already in sick led state of mind ever since she left India but the alienation from her husband, environment and the sham and outward glitter, futility and meaninglessness of American life drive to the fits of psychic depression and ultimate insanity. Her splintered–self finds solution to her problems only in murdering her husband.

Every culture has its own strengths and weaknesses. The immigrants often try to find sync between the native culture and the adopted one. But this has resulted in psychological eccentricities that are alien to both the cultures. Hence the solution to this problem is retaining one"s culture as far as possible even while living on an alien soil.

Works Cited

Primary Source
Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife, Penguin Books Ltd, 1975. Print.

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