A Psychological Exegesis of Displacement in Bapsi Sidhwa's Novel The Bride: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

This reports the psychological perspective of displacement in the English Pakistani novel The Bride (also published as The Pakistani Bride), written by a Pakistani American novelist Bapsi Sidhwa. This is a sociolinguistic study with the employment of Close Reading (CR) and Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study involves social, psychological and semantic aspects with the aim to present the psychological impact of displacement on the personal and social life of the characters. Close-Reading provides the analysis of the novel and the author. Systematic Functional Linguistics provides context and semantics as tools to analyze the historical and conceptual background of the novel. The findings of the study present mixed results, supporting the supposition that displacement affects the psychological state of the characters and disturbs their individual functionality. It partially proves that their social functionality is equally affected. It may be because people are more careful in playing their social roles.