A Wife's Story and American Dreamer

This weekend while reading “A Wife’s Story” in The Middleman and Other Stories by, Bharati Mukherjee, I was very interested in the story of Panna.  She is an Indian woman living in New York City, trying to get her degree in special education.  You can tell that she has emerged herself in the American culture and has learned to adapt to this different way of life.  When her husband visits the big city and the American people entrance him.  They go site seeing together and he criticizes American culture and the way that Panna seems to accept it.  At one point when the couple are purchasing tickets for a bus tour of the city he says he her, “What was the chap saying? I told you not to wear pants. He thinks you are Puerto Rican.  He thinks he can treat you with disrespect” (Mukherjee 36).  From this quote alone you can see how he thinks down on American culture and believes that he can be controlling towards his wife.  A lot of American women would hear a comment like this and think that it is wrong for a man to talk to a woman in such a commanding way.  On the other hand, Panna had an arranged marriage, a regular custom in India, and is having to deal with the consequences of that.  The article also written by Bharati Mukherjee, explains some of her views of an Indian woman living in an American society.

Mukherjee describes in the article more about how it is being an immigrant.  She is not a native-born American citizen, but worked hard to gain her citizenship so that she could be a part of society.  She says how she had a “love of the ideals embedded in the American Bill of Rights” (“American Dreamer”).  She lived in Canada for 10 years with her husband, Clark.  This time on her life was difficult and she felt a lot of cultural divide.  She struggled with her identity and was not sure whether she would be able to remember and life the old life of India in a new culture of the Americas.  Mukherjee goes on to describe the “dangers of an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality” (“American Dreamer”).  She explains that this theme can be seen in California, where there is increased violence towards minority and ethnic communities.  By the end of the article the reader can tell that Mukherjee really loves being an American citizen and see’s it as a right that she had to earn, it was not handed to her by birth, and is therefore proud of that fact.

Definitions:

Derisive – chatacterized by or expressing derision; contemptuous; mocking

Demagogues – a person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people