Wife, Bharati Mukherjee second Nobel falls into the category of the work by "native alien and expatriate novelists and gets concerned with a woman's life as it enforce itself in search for self-realization and freedom. Dimple, the heroine moves from maidenhood to marriage, and from Calcutta to New York, carrying her shifting load of dreams and hopes from one place to another, unrealized and unfulfilled or realized in a manner she had least anticipated. From the feminist angle it is in line with writing like Mupassant's A Women's Life and Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. It reminds one of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, works which examine feminine attempts to understand and redefine women's role in society and try to defy the limitations of the role which has been handed down to women through tradition and society. The present paper is an attempt to examine the backdrop against which Bharati Mukherjee has set Dimple's life and the psycho-cultural dimensions of her conflict. Each of the three parts of the novel helps to highlight the different aspects of the conflict she experiences as she moves from her rental home to that of her husband, and then from Queen to Manhattan leaving behind the 'little India' of the Sen's apartment, and finally as she moves from marriage to adultery. It becomes a conflict between her fantasy world and the reality of her life, and her withdrawal from human contact is paralleled at every step by an increasing reliance on the synthetic and commercial world, projected by the magazine and television until finally she is no longer able to distinguish between this projected world and the actuality.

Keywords: Psycho-Cultural, Native Alien, Self-Realization, Commercial World.