GradProg talk this Weds: Marriage as the Medium of Exploitation in "Wife" by Bharati Mukherjee

 

Wednesday 26 November 2014 4.30pm - 5.45pm

Venue: Room 2.19, MediaCityUK

 

 

 

This talk highlights marriage as the medium of exploitation in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife. Women are seen as indissoluble from the family and most functions assigned to family are indirectly assigned to women. The family places mammoth obligations on women’s shoulders and contours on their place and rewards in the toil market their roles in local, national and international affairs. Marriages are rooted in the Indian tradition: they are arranged by the family, and the people concerned have no choice. Social anxiety and social convention lead to the failure of marriages but since divorce is not allowed, people still have to live with each other. As a consequence, the characters experience alienation, and the terrible pressure children are subjected to, generally has its roots in failed marriages. Let us take the case of women: they cannot find fulfillment in marriage. The modern woman lives in a society dominated by men and marriage recurrently brings annihilation of the wife’s individual persona. The view embodied female cohort Amit Basu is no company for Dimple, they are mismatched. Mukherjee takes up the quandary of a wife’s adjustments in her husband’s home.

 

 

Dr.K. M. Sumathi, a specialist in Indian Writing in English, has 16 years of teaching experience and 10 years of Research experience (and has supervised 3 PhD scholars). She is the Recipient of the First Time Speaker Award instituted by the British Council, UK, and chaired at the First International Conference of the English Language Teachers Association of India (ELTAI) in association with British Council, Chennai, Tamilnadu on 3 and 4 of Feb 2005. She was also awarded a Major Research Project (2011-2013) funded by University Grants Commission of India for her project entitled Strengthening Communication and Vocational Skills of the Differently Abled for Self-Employability in Dindigul District, Tamilnadu, India. She was competitively selected as an Academic Visitor to visit University of Salford this year.