Marital Mismatch and Its Outcomes in Bharati Mukherjee’s Select Novels
Dr. Satrughna Singh
Associate Professor
Department of English
Raiganj University
West Bengal, India
Abstract:
Marriage, as an institution has been in existence since
time immemorial. It not only ensures the vitality and continuity of the human
race but it also acts as a vital link which binds together two humans into a
union of co-existence and mutual fulfillment. The couple who tie nuptial knot
promise to nourish each other, to share joys and sorrows, to protect and
preserve the harmony of the family. The relationship is built on mutual love
and understanding towards each other. But if these qualities lack in them, life
for both of them not only becomes difficult but leads to many other problems
also. Marriage and marital relationship form a very important place in the
novels of Bharati Mukherjee. Almost all the protagonists had always dreamed of
marriage as an escape from the traditional constrict of Indian society but
unfortunately their dreams get shattered after marriage. All the expectations
and dreams regarding life after marriage do not come true. In fact they
sometime even thought that waiting for the marriage was better than getting
married. Whether they married men of their choice like Tara of The Tiger’s
Daughter or a groom chosen by their parents like that of Dimple in Wife the
life after marriage remained the same. The present paper intends to highlight how
a misalliance affects the life of both the partners. In fact marrying an
American or migrating to a new land do not help them to come out of the
traditional construct rather it leads to more complications as they are in
‘daisporic dilemma’ - tradition vs modernity.
Keywords: Co-existence; Marital Relationship;
Mutual Fulfillment; Traditional Construct
Bharati Mukherjee who has come a long way in her writing
career spanning over thirty eight years, needs no introduction. Perhaps she is
“the only writer who features in anthologies of Asian American literature,
Canadian multicultural literature, Indian Women Writing in English, Post-
Colonial literature, writer of Indian Diaspora and in main stream American
writing” (Mandal, 11). Mukherjee refuses to be associated with any ‘ist’ or
‘ism’, yet her fictional world is full of women characters. She has vividly
portrayed the female psyche and each of her characters represents a different
characteristic of feminism. She creates women characters who attempt to attain
an identity and individuality of their own.
Mukherjee writes about the traditional Indian society
where marriage and marital relationship form an important segment in the lives
of her protagonists. Though the different protagonists have different attitudes
towards marriage and marital relationships, the conflict they face in their
life is more or less the same. They face the problem of uprooting themselves
from their native land and re-rooting in an alien culture, and ‘Marriage’ plays
a very prominent role in the whole process. Almost all her protagonists belong
to middle class traditional family background and migrate to a new land after
marriage. They suddenly confront the new modern culture of the host land which
creates conflict in their lives.
Tara, the protagonist of The Tiger’s Daughter marries
a man of her choice, an American without informing her parents. Actually her
marriage with an American is an impulsive act. Being a frustrated and rootless
person in a new land, marrying an American seems to be the only way to be a
part of the alien land. But even then for her the gap between the two cultures
could not be erased. David fails to understand many aspects of her life because
“he expected everything to have some meaning or point.” He asks “why three
baths a day for god’s sake?” (The Tiger’s Daughter, 157)
Thus, she decides to return back to her homeland. But in
her homeland she was treated like a foreigner. Even she herself was not able to
feel a part of her own family; she was not comfortable with her old friends who
once “had seemed to her a peaceful island in the midst of Calcutta’s commotion.
She had leaned heavily on their self- confidence” (69).
The unexpected situation forces Tara to look back to
David but in her letters, “she managed quite deftly not give her own feeling
away.” She finds herself sandwiched between personalities and suffers from
identity crisis. Sitting in her drawing room she finds it difficult to think of
David as her husband. Thus the lack of understanding between David and Tara
forces her to look at the matrimonial relation which now appears to her as a
‘contract’ rather than a ‘union’.
Dimple, the protagonist of Wife had always thought
of marriage which “would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns,
fund- raising dinners for noble charities.”(Wife, 3) However her set
opinion that “real happiness was just in the movies or in the west” does not
hold true. All her dreams get shattered after marriage because her husband was
“merely a provider of small material comforts. In bitter moments, she ranked
husband, blender, colour T.V. cassette tape recorder, stereo in their order of
convenience.”(89)
Dimple belongs to a traditional middle class Bengali
family where the choice of a girl regarding the prospective groom is of least
concerned. Dimple too “had set her heart in marrying a neurosurgeon” (3) but
her parents are busy searching for eligible groom; “her father still circled
ads for the ideal boy” (10) and after lot of negotiations she finally marries
Amit - a consultant engineer who is soon going to migrate. The marriage between
Amit and Dimple is not based on mutual understanding but rather a sort of
compromise. Amit was not the person Dimple had dreamed of regarding her prince
charming. So in his absence, she often fantasises about his appearance:
She borrowed a forehead from an aspirin ad, the
lips eyes and chin from a body-builder and shoulder ad, and stomach and legs
from a trousers ad and put the ideal man. (23)
Both Amit and Dimple appear fully preoccupied with
themselves and hardly notice the needs of the other person. Dimple had no life
apart from that of being a wife. She lacks a real open communication with her
husband and so tries superficial tactics to please her husband:
…Dimple took to wearing bright colours: reds,
oranges, purples. She wore her hair up in a huge bun and let a long, wispy curl
dangle behind each ear, like Mrs. Ghose. She even tried to imitate the way Mrs.
Ghose laughed and left sentences half- finished... (22)
Even after migrating to the new land the gap between them
keeps on widening day by day. In
The US she thinks of Amit as being a failure:
Here in
New York, Amit seemed to have collapsed inwardly, to have grown frail and
shabby. (88)
Dimple’s struggle to maintain the balance between her
desire to assimilate and feel at home in the USA on the one hand and retaining
her self-imposed Indian identity on the other, messes up her life. When her
dream of ‘freedom’, ‘love’, ‘real life’, and ‘expressing yourself’ do not seem
to materialize in marriage, she places them in the wish list of her vision of
life in America. Even after she is in her dream apartment and has the chance to
change in the company of Milt and Ina and with that the promise of a kind of
life she wished at heart, she fails to act upon her wishes as she does not
possess the strength to break off from her marital bond. At last desperate and
depressed, oscillating between self- imposed old world duties and heart’s
longings, she kills Amit. She is so immersed in her self-generated imaginary
world that she is not even able to realize the intensity of her act and takes
it as something happening on the television.
She touched the mole very lightly and let her
fingers draw a circle around the delectable sot, then she brought her right
hand up and with the knife stabbed the magical circle once, twice, seven
times…women on television got away with murder. (213)
Jasmine who is a defiant and determined woman of free
will, is doomed to a stagnant widowhood in India. She rises up to be an
independent, free and potent woman destined to be a negotiator of new life for
herself on her own terms. Being born as a dowryless fifth daughter in a small
village of Punjab, she blossoms into the ambitious wife of an even more
ambitious budding engineer who dreams of migrating to the US.
Jasmine was born as Jyoti in a family where “daughters
were curses” (Jasmine, 39) but she is a fighter and survivor who faces
every situation boldly. She goes against her father and her grandmother and
refuses to marry a middle aged widower because she does not wish to marry a
person who does not talk in English. Thus, she marries Prakash, a man of her
choice. Marrying with Prakash opens up a new vista of life and experiences for
her, who renamed her Jasmine. He was a modern man who believed that “only in
feudal societies is a woman still a vassal.” (77) However, she cannot continue
her happy married life with Prakash because of his sudden death in a bomb
attack on the eve of his departure to the US.
The sudden death of her husband does not let Jasmine to
succumb her life to traditional widowhood rather it gave a new purpose and
confidence to her. She decides to go to the U.S. all alone, with the sole
purpose to commit ‘sati’ in the campus of the university where her husband
wished to seek admission:
I had planned it all so perfectly. To lay out the
suit, to fill it with the twigs and papers. To light it, then to lie upon it in
the white cotton sari I had brought from home. (118)
To fulfill her dream she illegally migrates to the west.
The migration on forged document brings lots of problems but she faces them
boldly. After being raped by the Captain of the ship she emerges as Kali - an
avenger of evil and kills him. She quickly learns the American ways of “walk
and talk” under the guidance of kind-hearted Lillan Gordan. She helps her not
only to adopt the American culture but also to get a job as a caregiver. The
Taylor and Wylie not only gave her a job but also a new name – Jase. Thus she
was reborn once again from Jasmine to Jase, “I bloomed from a different alien
with forged documents into adventurous Jase” (186). Unlike Tara of The
Tiger’s Daughter and Dimple of Wife, Jasmine does not cling to her
past rather she willingly accepts the fact that life in the U.S. is radically
different from that in India. She enjoys her arrival in a new land and makes no
attempt to be in touch with the Indians:
Aside from my Dr. Jaswani and Dr. Patel in
Infertility, I haven’t spoken to an Indian since my month in Flushing. (222)
Living with the Hayes, Jasmine thinks that her life is
complete with Du and Taylor. But unfortunately things did not go as she had
planned. Jasmine had to run away from New York too as she saw the murderer of
her husband in guise of hot dog vendor. The circumstances force her to move
from New York to Iowa where she meets Bud Ripplemeyer who suddenly falls in
love with her and renames her Jane. Though she gets pregnant with his child,
she does not marry him. She thinks that she is saving his life by not marrying
him. At the end she moves with Taylor and Duff without any sense of guilt.
However, the three characters - Tara, Dimple and Jasmine
have different attitudes to marriage and marital relationship. Tara who considers
her marriage to David as an emancipated gesture, realizes that her emancipation
is not accepted by her relatives and her friends. She marries David to be a
part of the American culture but she fails to experience a sense of belonging
in the west. At the same time, her years in the west make it impossible for her
to settle down in her home town also. She is in dilemma, “too Western to accept
life in Calcutta, she is too Indian to be happy in the U.S.” (Nityanandam, 102
). Dimple is a neurotic character whose neurosis goes on increasing after
marriage and migration. The loneliness and the conflict of the old traditional
ways and new modern culture add as a surplus factor to increase her neurosis.
Jasmine is the only character who is happily married with Prakash and has
positive attitude towards life. She is realistic and ambitious and adapts
herself to every changed circumstances of life. All the protagonists in the
novel struggle against the odds but do not give up.
Works Cited
Mukherjee,
Bharati. The Tiger’s Daughter. Fawcett Columbine, 1971.
---. Wife.
Penguin Books, 1990.
---.Jasmine.
Groves Press, 1989.
Mandal,
Somdatta.. Bharati Mulkherjee : Critical Prespective. Pencraft Books,
2010.
Nityanandam,
Indira. Three Great Women Novelists. Creative Books, 2000