Frankie Dimple Identity

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 motion and behaviour, 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 help up as the symbol and repository of “virtue”, it was her feminine duty subjugates her feelings and desires to the will of her husband: “She wanted Amit to be infallible, intractable, godlike, but with boyish charm” (88–89). 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 Mukherjee posits Dimple’s descent into insanity as a trope that in the end allows silence to he overcome by an action – that of killing her husband – that simultaneously validates Dimple’s identity even as it confirms her marginality. In Wife, Mukherjee iterates the marginalization of woman by exploring – and exploding – ways in which culture and ideology construct feminine identity.

Tyhurst traces three stages of adjustment. In the first stage, says, Tyhurst, the person’s immediate concern is to find a job, shelter and then making money. At this stage, he may experience a general restlessness and increased psychomotor activity. In the next stage, when he has grown to his new surroundings, he may be beset by “increased anxiety and depression” and a “general withdrawal from the host society” in contrast with his previous activity. He may feel extremely helpless and different from everybody, suffering from severe mental shock. This may last for several months. This is the worst stage in his adjustment. In the third stage, some adjustment to the new surroundings takes place. This relative adjustment is more often is a matter of “acculturation”, that is, the adapt of changes in external behaviour for a smoother acceptance by the new society, than a matter of “assimilation”, which consists in the ability to react instinctively and emotionally to a culture. What may even seem like a perfect adjustment to the new culture may only be a superficial one, consisting in the correct imitation of expected external behaviour in the host