Marriage - A Boon or Bane

MARRIAGE –A BOON OR BANE

(with reference to the protagonists of Bharathi Mukherjee’s
WIFE and Gita Hariharan’s THE THOUSAND FACES OF NIGHT)

“It is easy ...for a barbarian to be healthy: for the civilised man, the task is a hard one”
(Freud 1940)

The twentieth century is essentially an age of unrest, doubts, turmoils and the cradle of a number of complex ‘isms’. The sociological, psychological and intellectual climate of the present times has undergone a thorough transformation. Time-tested beliefs are scrutinised under the microscope. Our epics, vedas and puranas envisage marriage not as a mere social instrument, but also as a moral weapon that both stabilise and elevate the moral stature of an individual. But unfortunately, it is an irony of fate that in a post-modernistic world, such esteemed institutions are currently subject to doubt, cynicism and erosion.

Like their western counterparts, the Indian women novelists are also minutely examining the institution of marriage. The concern is higher with women writers, since marriage demands their total transformation on socio­-cultural terms. The twentieth century woman is in a state of moral dilemma. The increasing education has made her aware of her rights as an individual. Education has enlarged her psychological terrains thereby making her highly sensitive even to the slightest psychological ruptures that life offers. Ironically, she is therefore more fragile than her predecessors. The current Indian women writers like Anita Desai, Sashi Deshpande, Bharati Mukherjee and Gita Hariharan produce an interesting array of female protagonists who suffer within the framework of marriage.

Both Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife (1990) and Gita Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) have marriage as their core issue. The protagonists of both these works struggle hard to both enter and get out of marriage. Both of them enter into arranged marriages with unrealistic notions of life, love and marriage. Their sense of individualism is strong to the extent that they feel trapped in it. Their inner void and existential anguish transform Dimple the protagonist of Wife into a neurotic with homicidal violence while Devi the protagonist of The Thousand Faces of Night elopes with her lover Gopal from the house of her husband, and ultimately returns to her mother, leaving her lover also.

            Wife is the story of a middle-class Bengali girl Dimple, who is married to Amit, an engineer. After their wedding they go to America. Once abroad, she understands that life is not as glamorous as she had imagined it to be. Cultural shock, alienation, an incapacity to form friendship with her neighbours, continual viewing of violent soap operas and her husband’s long stays at office further complicate the basically morbid mind of Dimple. It makes her neurotic to the extent of imaginatively killing her husband in a grotesque manner.

The Thousand Faces of Night has Devi, also a middle-class girl for its protagonist. Born in a traditional Tamil Brahmin family, she is sent abroad for higher education. home, she is matched by her mother to Mahesh, a regional manager of a multi-national firm at Bangalore whose job demands long tours. Migration to a new place, the vast emptiness of her in-law’s house, her husband’s long spells of absence, the lack of a proper companion, the death of her father-in-law (who was her only true companion) and her inability to produce children lure her to Gopal in whom she imagines that she has found an ideal companion. She elopes with him, only to leave him also and ultimately return to her mother.

Basically, both Dimple and Devi fail to envisage marriage as a life-long bond which needs love as an adhesive to both strengthen and ensure a life-long commitment to each other. Dimple, for instance has always wanted to marry neuro-surgeons or architects. She assumes that it would bring her ‘freedom’, ‘cocktail parties’ on ‘carpeted lawns’, ‘shopping at expensive malls’, ‘beauty parlour visits’ and ‘endless love-making’. Devi on the other hand does not cherish such illusory notions of romantic love, but her inbuilt sense of independence and her stay abroad make her inept for a traditional Indian marriage. As she mentions:

A marriage cannot be forced into suddenly being there, it must grow gradually like a delicate but promising sapling (P-49)

Therefore, both the women enter marriage with doubts, regrets and a sense of unhappiness. Dimple is not fully satisfied with Amit’s looks. Though handsome, she laments over the fact that he was not handsome the way ‘the movie-stars were’. Psychologically too, she feels depraved since she had not been the first choice of her in-laws. Devi is not moulded for an arranged marriage, but she lacks the courage to boldly dash out with a man of her choice. From the beginning she is sure of the fact that her marriage with Mahesh might not provide the type of intellectual companionship that she expects. Therefore, even after a month of their marriage, Mahesh still seems an alien to her.

A study of their individual mental make-up would further throw light on how marriage turns an ill-suited garb on them. From the beginning, Dimple is depicted as a weak and irresolute woman. Even at the age of twenty, she feels too old for marriage. A slight delay makes her contemplate suicide. She lacks the modem woman’s zeal for higher academic, pursuits. A degree to her is merely a passport for marriage. She is also afraid that all handsome engineers may get married before she gets her degree. Once abroad, she is again depressed when her intelligent husband fails to get a classy job magically on a platter. Feelings of insecurity and self-pity torment her. She feels that she deserves a better husband. When she sees her husband’s friend Jyoti Sen, she contemplates thus:

Marriage was a chancy business; it could easily have been Jyoti instead of Amit that she had married since both were of the same caste (P-85)

Though she understands that practically all marriages are a matter of mere ‘chance’, she lacks the maturity to be content with what life has to offer. She wants a husband who is ‘infallible’, ‘intractable’ and ‘Godlike’. Since the gap between expectation and reality becomes very wide, she fails to psychologically accept an ordinary human being vulnerable to the ‘ping-pong volleys’ of life. Her innate tendency to compare herself with others compounds her agony. When in India, she frequently compares herself with her bosom pal Pixie who is an announcer in the AIR, a job which Dimple imagines to be thrilling and glamorous. In the D.S., she compares herself with Ina Mullick, whose sense ofliberty, freak way of dressing, smoking and her flirtations are Dimple’s points of envy.

Thus, dissatisfaction leads to comparison, and undue comparison in turn leads to depression on account of which Dimple falls into frequent bouts of insomnia. During such moments, she suffers fromparanoia whereby she has hallucinatory fears of burglars stealing into her flat and raping her. She also imagines cockroaches scuttling in her closet. Her mind is saturated with bizzare fancies. She devises multiple ways of committing suicide like covering her head with a plastic cover, keeping her head in an oven, drinking cleaning liquid etc. The killer instinct also grows strong in her for she imagines killing her husband in his sleep or at his breakfast table. Therefore, she suffers both fromthe Eros and the Thanatos complex. Dimple transcends merely the culture shock and embraces existential angst. The external factors that play havoc on the hyper-sensitive mind of Dimple are also many. Jyoti for example, always converses with her of murder. The television operas she views are concerned with death, murder, rape and adultery. She falls an easy prey to the glamorous way in which such violence is depicted. It culminates in her imaginary killing of her husband over his breakfast table.

Thus she enacts in fantasy the entire act of murder. Her imagination stretches further until she visualises her husband’s head as an artifact to be displayed in the drawing room. That which she is unable to achieve in reality, she achieves in fantasy. Devi in Thousand Faces of Night provides interesting points of comparison and contrast with Dimple in terms of character. She is not a passive acceptor of what life could offer. She has an inbuilt sense of revolt-a trait which she inherits from her father. Her grandmother’s stories have a profound influence on her mind. She does not accept her grandmother’s versions of Amba, Gandhari and Damayanti, the puranic women. In fact she transforms herself into an active participant, viewing them as ‘a source of over-rich, unadulterated nourishment’. The stories fill her mental canvas and act as a tool of empowerment. As she says:
I was Devi. I rode a tiger and cut off all evil, magical demons (p-41)

There is a peculiar love-hate relationship that Devi shares with her grandmother’s stories, Though she does not fully agree with her grandmother’s stories, she feels desolate when her grandmother dies. The moment the mythical nourishment is deprived, her life becomes traumatic ever after. She is separated from her parents; her father and brother die. She realises that she has become a psychological destitute. Her attempts to date with Dan, to establish a home at Jaracanda, her elopement with Gopal and her final union with her mother can be seen as frantic attempts of an alienated woman trying to seek a haven of shelter and security. The security that she longs for is psychological. Like Dimple, she is more concerned with the emotional rapport that is established between a man and a woman. The moment these two women realise that their husbands are not designed to nurture their inner lives, they float in clouds of alienation. Alienation drives both Dimple and Devi to men other than their husbands in their married lives. Nilt Glasser is Devi’s answer to the problem. She knows that this ‘urban nomad’ is not brilliant and dependable like Amit. But she is able to freely communicate with him. Like the women in the operas, she believes that infidelity would make her life thrilling and glamorous. Her sex life with Nilt is also led in an imaginary world. Thereby the unreality of her personality is complete, Alienation draws Devi to Gopal, a neighbour. She is drawn by his crude handsomeness. She goes into raptures when he sings. After the elopement, she realises that the euphoria is fading fast. She realises that she had occupied merely a peripheral status in his life. Their inner selves are not united. Therefore she returns to her mother in search of a more steadfast relationship. Thus the emotional fulfilment which the women seek outside marriage also fails since those men lack the substantial strength to provide the firmly grounded emotional solace they expect.

Allied to the issue of marriage, is the issue of motherhood. In terms of maternal instincts, the attitudes of Dimple and Devi are juxtaposed. Dimple does not welcome pregnancy. She is shocked to hear the news.

She quarrels with Amit for not making her use contraceptive measures. After contemplating upon various measures to abort herself, she finally skips her way to it. The morbid Dimple detests pregnancy, but revels in the act of vomitting that accompanies pregnancy again her love of the morbid.

Part of Dimple’s inability to rejoice in pregnancy may he on account of her in­-laws’s attitude towards her state. They prefer a male child and view her merely as a carrier of the family’s lineage.

Devi, on the other hand, welcomes pregnancy. She believes that the children would keep her engaged and also keep her devouring wilderness at bay.

She expects that her children would partake of her external and dream world. But when she fails to conceive, the barrenness of her womb, and the emptiness of her married life together drive her away in search of an understanding companion.

The husbands in both these novels act as foils to their wives in terms of behaviour. They are both practical, levelheaded and are struggling for existence in a highly competitive globe. Their wives fail to understand the hardships that they undergo as bread winners of the family. Dimple misunderstands Amit’s practical approach to life. His thrift is misunderstood as stinginess, When he prohibits her from consuming alcohol, she brands him narrow minded. Similarly, Mahesh in Gita Hariharan’s novel is a realist. His shrewd intellect gives him a clarity of vision in life. Honest and straight forward, he does not lure Devi with false promises. He tells her that he will be in Bangalore only ten days in the month.

Initially Devi appreciates Mahesh’s frankness. But her myopic mind refuses to stretch beyond appreciation. She fails to come to grips with the reality of loneliness when she experiences it. She understands that she has been unprepared for this phase of life. She fails to understand her husband’s struggle for existence in a highly competitive world. As wives both Dimple and Devi lack the empathy to understand the struggle their husbands face as bread earners of the family. This factor adds to the banality of their marriage.

The titles of both the novels are significant. They suggest the central theme of the novels. Wife for example, can be read as a title in irony. The protagonist struggles hard in that social role assigned to her. Temperamentally she is ill-suited to play that role. Her pseudo intellectual approach to life, her immature views on marriage coupled with a psychic fragility play havoc on her performance as a Wife. The title of Gita Hariharan’s novel The Thousand Faces of Night is also significant since it means the myriad ways in which the unconscious mind of the protagonist works. The term ‘night’ refers to the unpredictable ways in which the mind of Devi works. Her actions; are guided by impulsive decisions which spring from the dictates of a subterranean world. These inner laws are at loggerheads with the social regulations that marriage demands.

On the whole, both Dimple and Devi suffer and face anguish within the institution of marriage. Their married lives turn baneful on account of their own mental dispositions. They fail to have holistic visions of marriage and life. This deprives them of the practical attitude towards life. They lack the solidity to erase the sorrows of their lives. Therefore they do not live happily ever after.