Envisaging Identity and Imagining Home for Her/Self: A Feminist Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife

Cultural schizophrenia, psychological imbalances and social crisis that a diasporic writer suffers due to the hyphenated identities motivates her to construct an imaginary homeland that would fill all the passion through an alternate reality. It is not necessary that such writers would liberate their characters in order to fill the vacuum. Indeed, leaving crisis on its own fate may be an alternate mode of portraying reality. The Indian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee in her novel Wife (1975) depicts the character of Dimple Dasgupta, may be her own image, to unearth that identity crisis which a woman always experiences either at home or in the world outside under the constant oppression and subjugation of patriarchy. Marriage, one of the powerful machineries to propagate patriarchal ideology in the Indian society subsumes the self of women and then represents her as other. The paper thus is an attempt to excavate those areas of patriarchal oppression which reduce women as mere commodities in the name of upholding cultural values. The psychological exigencies that the socially constructed woman suffers due to the predetermined sex role, is another area of study in the research work. It is also a critique of home in the context of female social identities.  &nbsp

Romanticism in Victorian Poetry: A Reading of the Major Poets

The prolonged history of English literature is demarcated in different ages with a view to comprehending literary and cultural atmosphere of the time. However, the literary influence of one particular age does not stop at the last year of the age, rather it continues. Hence, it can be said that Victorian poetry was highly influenced by the Romantic trends in English literature. All the major Victorian poets were immensely motivated by the seminal Romantic poets. In this respect, it deserves mention that following T. S. Eliot’s notion of tradition the Victorians were influenced by their predecessors and they turned their own works to suit their own purposes. However, while being influenced they have nevertheless retained their originality, maturity and craftsmanship. The paper is an attempt to look and enquire into the discourse of similarity and differences that one finds between these two major trends in English literature- Romanticism and Victorianism. While drawing the parallels one also finds the changes in tone implicit in Victorian poetry which is an outcome of the socio-historical and political environment of the period. The research paper unearths these discourses through the comparative analysis of canonical poems of these two periods