International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (IJELS) Vol-3, Issue-5, Sept - Oct, 2018 https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.3.5.20 ISSN: 2456-7620 www.ijels.com Page | 819 Culturally Displaced Identity of the Protagonist in the Novel ‘Wife’ Dr. Shirisha Deshpande Assistant Professor, Department of Maths and Humanities, Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, Telangana. deshpandeshirisha72@gmail.com Abstract — Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian diasporic writer. Though she migrated to USA, her roots have always been in India, associated with the culture and tradition of the native country. As an expatriate writer her works project the cultural displacement faced by the immigrants and the impact that is left on them. Her novels project the different situations the migrated characters face, problems they overcome, the adjustments they make and the feeling of isolation. The present paper discusses the impact of cultural displacement on the main protagonist Dimple das gupta in the novel Wife written by Bharati Mukherjee and published in the year 1975.My objective is to project the problem faced by the first generation of immigrants by studying the character Dimple das gupta and the impact of cultural displacement on the immigrants by using the tools of psycho-analytical theory. Application of Psycho- analytical theory to literary texts helps the readers to study the characters and find out the reasons for different behaviours .According to Sigmund Freud it is clash of id, ego and superego which are the three parts of the human psyche that makes transformation of personalities that result in different behaviors’. If people experience these type of psychological clashes they do not come under normal personality. As the founder of psychiatry Sigmund Freud mentioned the functioning of the mind at various levels in terms of psychology and neurology. The main protagonist Dimple das gupta lives in a fantasy world and makes dream as source of her living in the native country and in the alien country. Her dream takes a violent turn because of the suppressed desires and makes her a negative character. One of the reasons being the cultural displacement. She dreams a beautiful life and a good husband but when her dreams are shattered she kills her husband. She turns out to be a different personality altogether who cannot find happiness in her marriage either in Calcutta or in USA. Keywords— Culture, Cultural displacement, dream, Immigrants, India, psycho-analytical theory, tradition, USA. I. INTRODUCTION The novel Wife written by Bharati Mukherjee narrates the theme of immigrant experience in USA. It is the story of a middle-class Bengali girl who migrates to USA after her marriage. Mukherjee got the idea of writing this novel when she returns from USA to India after a long stay in USA for a period of ten years. She found a new face of India different from the innocent one what she knew during her childhood. That time she could get the material for the novel. She recollects “ quite by an accident, I heard the question that shaped my second novel-‘what do Bengali girls do between the ages of eighteen and twenty- one…..” The novel opens with a sarcastic note-“Dimple Dasgupta had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon”. Dimple was very particular of marrying a neurosurgeon which depicts something unnatural. From the beginning of the novel we find that Dimple was not natural like other girls. All the time she used to think about marriage and it is going to change her life. II. METHODOLOGY AND MATERIALS Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is a part of psycho- analysis started by Sigmund Freud in the early part of the twentieth century. Psychoanalytic dream interpretation explains the way the subconscious mind works. According to Freud every dream represents a desire. Freud through his theory explained the unconscious wishes during the conscious state. In the sleep these unconscious desires are transformed into conscious form of dream. Sigmund Freud through Interpretation of dreams divided three different layers of the mind. The Unconscious, The pre-conscious, and The Conscious. According to psychoanalysis, the conscious mind controls the thought and emotion. According to Freud there is a continuous conflict between the ‘ego’ and the ‘id’ during sleep. ‘Id’ gets changed when it comes in contact with the external world. During sleep super ego is repressed because of the absence of the voluntary action and subconscious impulses become more and are pushed towards conscious state.