WE ARE NOT OURSELVES - FEMALE CHARACTERS IN BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S NOVELS

Abstract

Louis A. Sass, borrowing from Shlovsky’s defamiliarization discusses certain patients, affected by specific mental disturbances, as “taking a very distant or else fragmentary microscopic view of an object, avoiding standard causal/narrative schemas of meaning and describing an object in terms of its mere existence or geometrical form (that is, by avoiding use of its name and suppressing all references to its usual functional role in human life)”. With the above quotation suggestive for the theoretical framework employed, the present study aims at discussing the Indian-American writer, Bharati Mukherjee’s three works- the novel “Wife” and “Jasmine”, the story and the novel- from a Gothic perspective, focusing on the psychology of the characters, in order to argue for madness and monstrosity as both subversive survival strategies and/or escapes from narrow patriarchal, political, social and cultural confines

Keywords

• Gothic, madness, patriarchy, strategy, womanhood

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