ABSTRACT
Although Bharati Mukherjee was born in India and has her ancestral roots in Bangladesh, she vehemently claims to be an American novelist after several years of living in Canada and different parts of North America. An irredeemable desire to assimilate herself to the mainstream American intellectual elite has led Mukherjee to face the uncertainty of leading a life of fragmented identity. Mukherjee’s fictional world is steeped in various forms of psychic, sexual, and physical violence. This chapter explores the cause of such frequent references to instances of bombings, rapes, and murders in Mukherjee’s fictions, all of which, it claims, can be traced back to a past traumatic incident suffered by each of her protagonists. Often modelled on her own persona, Mukherjee’s characters frequently suffer from a sense of loss or what Freud terms as “melancholia,” which thwarts their attempts to adapt themselves to the new culture. Selecting one novel from each of the two phases of Mukherjee’s writing career, this chapter depicts that, irrespective of being an expatriate in Wife and an immigrant in Jasmine, the protagonist’s inability to be assimilated into the American society brings her face to face with an existential/ identity crisis. Further, the chapter probes how such moments of crisis motivate the sudden release of repressed traumas in the form of violent acts perpetrated by Mukherjee’s characters. Lastly, the chapter connects the preponderance of violence in Mukherjee’s fictions to the fulfilment of the author’s journey by looking at the act of ‘writing’ as a therapeutic process of releasing trauma.
