Priya Menon

Surmounting (Third) Worlding:
Bharati Mukherjee’s Ja(smi)ne

 

A critical examination of immigration as a theoretical concept and historical experience warrants an assessment of the notion of agency in so-called Third World diaspora.  In Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America, Joan M. Jensen while discussing hyphenation defines an Indian-American as “a person who was either born in India and immigrated to the United States, or was born in the United States and has Indian ancestry” (7).  The conceptual category of hyphenation that accompanies immigration suggested in the above definition certainly brings with it a sense of fractured identity of being split between multiple geopolitical and cultural temporalities.  However, immigration does not necessitate a perennial condition of lack nor misery as traditionally portrayed in cultural discussions.  Along with this, immigrants from the so called Third World also face the challenges of self-representation.  In the contemporary world order the Third World is clearly positioned in an oppositional and hierarchical relationship to the West, wherein it is characterized as a homogenous and powerless group noticeable by its common reliance on the West.  More importantly, within the general hegemonic depiction of the Third World as a defenseless group, the subaltern figure of the Third World woman most suffers the epistemic violence of misrepresentation.  Third World diasporic women  are portrayed as a group that is invested with difference and as victims that lack development and maturity to exhibit any sense of agency, let alone self-representation.   For the Indian diasporic group, in the United States in particular, the idea of representation and agency is problematic.  Can immigration entail successful assimilation into the adopted land?  Can women from the Third World exhibit any sense of resistance and agency against being portrayed in an essntialized manner?  How different are the experiences of Third World women in resisting their marginalized identities imposed by patriarchy from that of their Western counterparts?  Such theoretical questions are suggestively depicted in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine—a textthat follows the journey of a Third World woman who successfully refashions her life in the United States.  Ultimately, I want to argue here that Jasmine productively shifts our attention from a monolithic and singular construction of the Third World identity as oppressive and passive to their heterogeneous experiences that may result in agency and resistance.  Also, I want to focus on how Jasmine mirrors feminist struggles of the West, most notably as represented in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s significant yet notoriously complex essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985), considers the suicide of a young Bengali girl in North Calcutta as a futile effort of the powerless to self represent.  Spivak’s grievance that the subaltern cannot speak comes from her recognition that the historically voiceless figure of the subaltern is condemned to misrepresentation.  Literary portrayal of Third World women often assumes essentialized stereotypes in the West.  For example, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre provides us with the self-immolating Third World figure of Bertha Mason.  Spivak in Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism argues that imperialism plays a key role in the cultural representation of both the powerful and the powerless.  Spivak analyzes the subject constitution or worlding of identities, especially that of feminine subjectivities from the Third World, as based on the two registers of “child bearing” (domestic society through sexual reproduction cathected as compassionate love) and “soul making” (civil society through social mission) (245).  Spivak claims that any collective grouping such as the women from the Third World or the Latin American Culture essentializes such categories for information retrieval, consequently checking their own self-representation (247).  Worlding for Spivak is “the making of human beings, the constitution and interpellation of the subject not only as individual but also individualist” (250).  Spivakian imperial worlding can be applied to a similar subject constitution of the Third World diaspora and the processes by which First World discourse with the power to represent disguises its own hegemonic working while molding Third World subaltern subjectivities according to its own desires.  To Spivak, a subaltern figure such as a Third World woman offers “an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer” (251).  However, Spivak (nor any other postcolonial theorists) fails to offer an alternative history to counter the ongoing (and not-so-post-colonial) imperial representation of Third World women in the West.  Under such a circumstance it is desirable to look into fiction, such as Mukherjee’s Jasmine, to be instrumental in exerting social action.  Bharati Mukherjee’s representation of her eponymous heroine, Jasmine, a Third World subaltern is far from one that culminates in felo-de-se.  Jasmine not only attempts to etch an accurate portrayal of an immigrant woman’s personal search for home, wholeness and stability, but the novel also subverts Spivak’s claim that the subaltern cannot speak by demonstrating various means and methodologies for self representation that works against the imperial shackles of Western patriarchal hegemony. 

Jasmine can be read as Mukherjee’s reflection on the fallibility of exclusivist thinking by the West as it attempts to construct women from the Third World as voiceless and passive victims.  Mukherjee keeps Jasmine’s humanity and Jasmine’s role as a critic of Western hegemonic assumptions of the Third World alive by enabling Jasmine undertake a similar journey as Jane Eyre—the protagonist of one of the foremost classic feminist texts of the West.  Mukherjee even bestows the name Jane to her heroine in certain parts of the text to draw attention to the anger, rebellion and non conformity of both women to contemporary societal norms.  That Jasmine attains self-agency by undergoing a similar process of subject constitution as Jane Eyre is Mukherjee’s way of creating a niche for the Third World women in Western discourse.  It also helps Mukherjee underline the commonalities of experiences for both the women irrelevant of geopolitical backgrounds.  However, unlike Brontë who upholds Jane Eyre as a new feminist ideal at the expense of Third World-Bertha Mason, Mukherjee uses the very same elements of worlding to lead Jasmine’s progress from a state of fragmented disjointedness to one of a whole affirmation of existence.  No doubt, the similarities between Brontë’s Jane and Mukherjee’s Jasmine are striking.  Like Brontë’s Jane, Jasmine’s journey to mature freedom from a state of imprisonment must also be enacted through violence in various places and identities that she must respectively inhabit and adorn.  The narrative shuttles between past and present, between India and America.  The past centers on her childhood as Jyoti and her marriage to Prakash Vijh.  The present narrative focuses on her life as Jane in Baden, Iowa where she is a live in companion to Bud Ripplemeyer, a small town banker.  Jasmine discards patriarchy through the multiplicity of names she assumes in the novel.  The name she gets at birth is Jyoti, Prakash called her Jasmine, Lillian Gordan’s name for her is Jazzy, the Vadheras do not address her with any name at all, Taylor calls her Jase, and Bud renames her as Jane.  It is obvious that Jasmine is Mukerjee’s hyphenated Jane.  Brontë’s Jane is an orphan, penniless and plain but full of courage and spirit.  Similarly, even as a child, Jasmine expresses a fierce sense of independence and does not let others rule her life.  As a little girl in Hasnapur, a small fictional feudal village in Punjab, Jasmine rejects what the village astrologer sees in her stars—widowhood and exile.  The astrologer emphasizes to her that there was no changing fate, but Jasmine, already conscious of her female identity and armed with the belief that “she-ghosts” were guarding her, refuses to accept that she was “nothing” (Jasmine 4). Although she has the refined and delicate features of her father and has his kind of presence around her, she cannot help think that he was a fool to drown himself in nostalgia for Lahore, a city that he left behind during the Partition of India in 1947.  Jasmine also discovers early on in life of her ability to pick up foreign languages. As a seven-year-old, her attempts to read Alice in Wonderland, Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre prove to be a difficult task, but nonetheless impressive.  Jasmine was coaxed into abandoning her dream to pursue an education by her grandmother who thinks that “individual effort counts for nothing” (Jasmine 57). While the grandmother and the astrologer predict a fatalistic finale to the life of a Third World woman, Jasmine is capable of rising above it to maneuver her own destiny. 

In Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, Spivak credits Jane Eyre’s progress as a journey “through a sequential arrangement of the family/counter family dyad” (254).  The family consists of the legally, lawfully and socially accepted norms while the counter-family includes the incestuous, illicit and illegal.  This “active ideology of imperialism” Brontë employs is based on Kant’s viewpoint, which was considered to be the universal moral law (Spivak 243).  This moral law states that everything other than human beings is simply there as means to an end (the end being himself).  Brontë pathologizes Third World Bertha as a silent, self-immolating animal-figure with a dumb brother and a mother in the lunatic asylum.  Her description of Bertha as the not yet human other gives Jane the means to transgress law and to enter the feminist register of “compassionate love” for Rochester (Spivak 254).  The compassionate love Jane exhibits towards Rochester allows her to move from the counter-family segment to that of legal domestic society and childbearing (Spivak 253).  Similarly, Mukherjee’s Jasmine too travels through this legal/illegal binary to accomplish female self-discovery but Jasmine’s self-fulfillment comes from challenging this in-law/outlaw dyad as she moves from the secure conformity of being in-law to the exciting and innovative domain of new possibilities provided by being outside law.  As the narrative begins Jasmine is presented to us as being in-law: she is legally married to Prakash and anticipates setting up home with him in America.  Unfortunately, a Sikh terrorist bomber kills Prakash leaving Jasmine a widow.  Still being in the legal register, Jasmine is almost prepared to immolate herself—to commit Sati as expected of her by patriarchy.  However, Jasmine refuses to submit to the violence expected of a Third World woman as she subverts patriarchal norms by illegally immigrating to the United States.  It is here that Jasmine enters the illicit register as the immigrant Third World woman.  During her journey, Jasmine is brutally raped by Half-face, the captain of the ship that she travels to America and she is further cast as an outlaw as she ends up killing him and escaping the police.  However, it is through her journey and experiences in America that Jasmine accomplishes agency and the power of self-representation. Mukherjee makes her heroine triumph over widowhood, and depicts her as opting for a fate different from what seemed to be stereotypically in store for her as a Third World woman in the West. 

In America, Jasmine finds employment as the governess for Duff—Taylor and Wylie’s daughter.  Jasmine’s affection for Duff continues to place her in the counter-family register because Wylie does not approve of the bond that Jasmine shares with Duff.  Meanwhile, it is hard to doubt Mukherjee’s intentions on providing Jasmine with an occupation similar to that of Jane Eyre.  Just as Jane’s social progress in 19th c Britain occurs through her work as a governess, Mukherjee endows social mobility to her heroine without depriving her of the maternal instincts that is crucial for her protagonist.  Also, Mukherjee temporarily anticipates allowing her heroine to enter the normative and legal register of marriage as Jasmine waits for Bud Ripplemeyer in Iowa:

may be things are settling down all right. I think maybe I am Jane with my very own Mr. Rochester, and maybe it’ll be okay for us to go to Missouri where the rules are looser and yield to the impulse in a drive-in chapel.  I’m three months away from what the doctors assure me will be, in my wide-hipped way, an uneventful birth.  (Mukherjee 236)

Jasmine goes on to bears Bud a child but rejects his marriage proposal.  One of the ways in which Jasmine achieves maturity in the novel is through child bearing, a principle component of imperial worlding.  Spivak claims that child bearing which leads to mothering (256) endows Jane the means to be domesticated and thus initiated into the register of being in-law while Bertha Mason, Rochester's Third World wife remains sterile till death.  While Spivak defines child bearing as “domestic-society-through-sexual reproduction cathected as compassionate love,” Jasmine works the definition backwards in order to reverse its effect on her (245).  Mukherjee succeeds in rewriting the generally essentialized fate of her Third World heroine when Jasmine soon realizes that she considered marriage with the handicapped-Bud out of compassion and not out of love.  Unlike Brontë’s Jane who enters the legal register through marriage with Rochester primarily out of compassionate love, Jasmine goes beyond conventional morality to seek self-fulfillment.  In spite of carrying his child, Jasmine leaves Bud and finds love with Taylor.  Mukherjee’s Third World immigrant is certainly ab-normal, a realm typically ascribed to someone of her kind but in embracing the non-normative Jasmine explores a more agential and different life-choice than Jane Eyre.  Mukherjee’s creative assessment of the in-law/outlaw dyad is very provocative because she succeeds in challenging, through our attention to normativity and legitimacy, the notion of conventional representation and stereotyping.

Moreover, Unlike the racial splitting of femininity that one encounter in Brontë’s Jane Eyre where the self-assertive Jane is placed in contrast to the self-immolating Third World figure of Bertha, Jasmine’s relationship with her conceptual counterpart (First World women) is one of equality.  Mukherjee ensures that the progress that her heroine makes does not come at the expense of the identity of any other women.  In fact, Jasmine’s advancement can clearly be credited to her ability to challenge patriarchy—be it in India or in the United States.  In other words, unlike Brontë, Mukherjee does not allow for any violence of female subjectivities as Jasmine takes up arms against patriarchy and gains agency.  For instance, upon her arrival in the United States, Jasmine chances upon an American Quaker lady, Lillian Gordon, who helps by providing her with shelter.  Jasmine finds a feminine  model that she can imitate in Lillian. Lillian teaches Jasmine to talk; walk and dress like an American and advises her to trust in God.  Spivak claims that such proselytizing is another component of imperial worlding called soul making defined as “civil society through social mission” (254).  In Jane Eyre, we find the Western St. John Rivers who sets out to Calcutta to “make the heathen into human so that he can be treated as an end in himself” (Spivak 248).  Mukherjee gives us a glimpse of a similar character in Lillian who asks Jasmine to “pray to God” and to put away her “Third World heels” (132).   However, Jasmine, through imitation and internalization of the American social structure that Lillian embodies, is able to quickly assimilate into the adopted land.  For Jasmine, Lillian stands for a new ethos, and just as Showalter (refer to footnote below) elucidates the manner in which the female literary tradition has journeyed from a state of dependency through imitation and internalization to achieve sovereignty, so does Jasmine find an existing model in Lillian that she can employ as a touchstone in her path to self representation.  In fact, when the self-education of Jasmine intersects with the civilizing mission of Lillian, Jasmine is able to eschew her encounter with soul making, a principal component of imperial worlding according to Spivak.  Jasmine is shrewd not to allow Lillian’s use of Christology affect her, instead she takes financial help from Lillian for a trip to New York so that she can live with Professor Vadhera, who was her husband’s mentor in India.  By subjecting Jasmine’s journey to the two registers Spivak considers as the components of worlding—child bearing and soul making, Mukherjee liberates Jasmine from being interpellated as a typical Third World woman—a powerless victim of nomenclature. 

By presenting cross-cultural representations of Third World women in the West, Mukherjee has successfully brought attention to the inevitable transformations, triumphs and plurality of experiences in the lives of subaltern women in the West.  Just as Spivak sees worlding as the inscription of a eurocentric imperial world upon India’s tabula rasa, so does Mukherjee pave way for a new worlding, one in which Third World women with a will of her own, mark the canvas of the New World.  Although her very identity is questioned in the process, Mukherjee’s worlding refashions not only the monolithic figure of the non-Western woman as circulated in the West, but also help in re-visioning and a redefining this stereotypicaldepiction that stems from the want to construct an identity based on the desire for otherness.  However, by acknowledging this epistemic violence of Third World othering and by subverting  literary inscriptions of the Western marker upon the Third World immigrant tabula rasa, this paper hopes to move closer to what Anthony O’Brien suggests the task of literary critique finally be: “to ask new questions of old histories” (55).

My use of the term “Third World” is based on the definition provided by Bill Ashcroft et al in the text entitled The Empire Writes back.  Ashcroft et al traces the etymology of the term to the cold war in 1952 to refer to those countries that neither aligned with USA nor USSR, and its eventual signification to evoke ideas of poverty, war, disease, and underdevelopment.

Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, details three stages in the journey of female literary tradition where the feminine stage is achieved through “imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition”, the feminist stage through “protest against these [masculine] standards and values, and the female stage through “self-discovery” (13).

 

Works Cited

Jensen, Joan M.   Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New York: Grove, 1989.

O’Brien, Anthony. “Staging Whiteness: Beckett, Havel, Maponya.” Theatre Journal 46 (1994)

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.  “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”.  
Critical Inquiry 12:1 (1985)