Caught Between Two Worlds: The Struggle for Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife

Abstract

This paper examines how Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Wife dramatises the wrenching, often violent process by which an immigrant is forced to remake her sense of self after crossing from one culture to another. Rather than treating identity as something fixed and portable, the paper argues that Mukherjee presents identity as something that must be renegotiated, painfully and incompletely, once the shared world that had confirmed it disappears. Drawing on the novel’s central figure, Dimple, a newlywed who leaves India for the United States, the discussion traces how she is squeezed between two rigid cultural scripts: an Indian community that insists she remain simply a wife, and an American world that reduces her to the status of an outsider, no matter how hard she tries to belong. The paper pays particular attention to small, telling scenes, an argument over the taste of chickens, a cheesecake bought from a Jewish delicatessen, a jump-rope miscarriage, and a doomed affair, to show how Dimple keeps trying, and failing, to perform a single, coherent identity rather than live inside her own continuous one. It ultimately reads the novel’s violent ending not as an isolated act of madness but as the logical, tragic outcome of a society that never allows its immigrants room to be both before and after at once. In doing so, the paper suggests that Wife has as much to say about the limits of American multiculturalism as it does about one woman’s unravelling.