Migration, disjuncture and trauma: depiction of trans-national identity of woman in Bharati Mukherjee's Wife

Trauma is a key concept of Diaspora. The metaphor of trauma draws attention to the ways that extremes of violence break bodies and minds, leaving indelible marks even after healing and recovery. But the notion of trauma has been extended to cover a vast array of situations of extremity and equally varied individual and collective responses. Trauma can be seen at once as a sociopolitical event, a psychological process, a physical and emotional experience and a narrative theme in explanations of individual trauma and social suffering. Diaspora and hybridity have certain commonalities in their relationship to notions of migration, disjuncture and trauma. Wife by Bharati Mukherjee demonstrates what devastation a hostile culture can cause in a sensitive individual. Dimple suffers from the neurotic compulsion of indulging in abnormal acts in order to conceal her own sense of intrinsic weakness and failure. Her women characters are tantalized by the possibility of passion, which they mistake for love and self expression. America which appears to be a free land is in fact the enigma of existence of all Indian women. Here chances of survival depends on an immigrant's agility to embrace mutation before reaching out for an alternative space, translated transmitted and transmuted through violence and splitting. Dimple is the embodiment of the transitional figure; she starts to question her traditional society's values and taboos, but she doesn't yet have the confidence to blend what she values in the two cultures and make that blended culture her own. Dimple's trauma of immigration and the pangs of dislocation express itself as insanity, madness and neurosis.