Abstract
In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine, the eponymous protagonist’s process of self-formation is characterised by the interplay of the visual and the verbal. Jasmine’s attempt to constitute the self by identifying with the (static) images of identity provided by the literary figure Jane Eyre results in an “identification with alienation” (Morris). And yet, the analysis of the narrative methods applied in the novel reveals that Jasmine succeeds in constructing a meaningful narrative identity once she recounts her life story. This postmodern conception of identity also affects the genre of the novel. While Jasmine first orients itself on the traditional Bildungsroman, central aspects of the genre are eventually challenged so that Mukherjee’s novel ultimately presents its readers with different concepts of both personal and generic identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Volz explains that “[w]hile ‘visuality’ is a broad concept that lends itself to multiple definitions, scholars from disparate disciplines offer valuable explanations of its dependency on biological sight and the visible world” (2017, 4). Thomas Carlyle was “one of the first to use ‘visuality’ to refer to ‘a succession of vivid pictures’” (Mirzoeff quoted in Volz 2017, 4). “In contrast to Carlyle’s quasi-cinematic application of the term, recent reassessments define visuality as the nexus of multiple perceptual elements, such as ‘the gaze,’ ‘scopic regime’ and ‘ocularcentrism’” (4). At this point I would like to thank the editors, Martin Heusser and Johannes Riquet, as well as my friends and colleagues Gabriela Frey, Martin Mühlheim, Rivera Rivera Godoy-Benesch, Annina Seiler and Barbara Straumann for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful to Jane Dewhurst Bratschi for meticulously proofreading the manuscript.
- 2.
Mitchell emphasises that “[t]he relation between words and images is an extraordinarily ancient problem in the study of the arts” (2003, 53).
- 3.
Mitchell makes a point that words (“if read aloud”) are, of course, also “audible sounds in the air,” as a result of which they serve as both “optical or acoustical image[s]” (2003, 51).
- 4.
Original: “Das Selbst […] leitet sich ab aus der Unzahl höchst unterschiedlicher und zum Teil widersprüchlicher Selbste.”
- 5.
Original: “Wenn das Subjekt sich selbst zum Gegenstand seiner Wahrnehmung macht, dann wird dieses sehr spezielle Objekt der Wahrnehmung mit dem Begriff des ‘Selbst’ benannt.” Kath Woodward argues along similar lines as Kraus when she differentiates between “a ‘subject’ which is produced and controlled by social institutions and discourses and a self which has particular desires, anxieties and needs” (2002, 2–3). For a more comprehensive overview of how the self has been conceptualised in different disciplines, see Woodward (2002).
- 6.
While some aspects of Mukherjee’s novel (especially those related to migration and displacement) must definitely be examined in a postcolonial or specific cultural context, in this paper I would like to argue that the text also makes conceptual and universally human claims, especially regarding the different ways of fashioning selfhood. Critics such as Patricia P. Chu (2000), Ursula Kluwick (2007), Robyn Warhol-Down (2008) and Carmen Wickramagamage (1996) have addressed specifically postcolonial questions raised by Jasmine .
- 7.
Jane Eyre either describes herself as “plain” or is characterised as such by others (e.g. Brontë [1847] 1992, 85, 223–24).
- 8.
Bertha is treated as the evil colonial Other by Mr Rochester, who, amongst other things, calls her a “monster” and a “lunatic” (Brontë [1847] 1992, 273). By contrast, Jasmine is the exotic Other about whom the others do not know anything and who is subject to processes of mythologisation. Bud Ripplemeyer’s mother, for instance, uses the phrase “[o]ut there” to refer to India, and Jasmine is certain that Bud “courts” her because she is “alien”: “I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability” (Mukherjee 1991, 21, 200).
- 9.
The description of Jasmine’s existential crisis following the rape and murder echoes that of Jane Eyre, who nearly perishes in the moors (Brontë [1847] 1992, 285–87): “I had not eaten in two days. I had taken no water […]. Around noon, I could go no farther. My swollen, festering tongue was an agony, nearly choking me” (Mukherjee 1991, 128). In addition to this similarity, their lives show other parallels as well: they both develop and mature during their journey, work as child carers, fall in love with their married employers and live together with a handicapped man at some point (see Crane 1993 for further details).
- 10.
Jane Eyre expresses her resistant attitude in various passages of the novel, for instance when talking about her childhood in Gateshead (“I resisted all the way”) or when recounting her conversation with Helen Burns at Lowood, where she explains: “I must resist those who punish me unjustly” (Brontë [1847] 1992, 7, 48).
- 11.
Interestingly, Lacan makes use of visual imagery for the conceptualisation of his psychoanalytic theory of the mirror stage. Alan Sheridan, the first to translate Lacan’s works into English, offered “a helpful definition of the imaginary as that pertaining to the world of the imago, namely ‘the world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined’” (quoted in Hook 2018, 43). Hook adds that “[t]he imaginary is the domain of fantasy, of the stabilizing or ego-consoling production of images[,] ‘identity’ affirming reflections” (2018, 43).
- 12.
Jasmine herself seems to sense that Jane Eyre is no adequate model for her when she wonders if she is Jane with her very own Mr Rochester (Mukherjee 1991, 236; see above for the exact quotation): her repeated use of the word maybe implies that she herself doubts that she can provide herself with an identity if she simply strives to become like her ideal and recognises herself in an image.
- 13.
The fact that Jasmine moves between her different identities is further illustrated by the following passage: “I still think of myself as caregiver, recipe giver, preserver. […] How many more shapes are in me, how many more selves, how many more husbands?” (Mukherjee 1991, 215).
- 14.
See Warhol-Down in this context as well (2008, 6).
- 15.
The narrating ‘I’ “tells the autobiographical narrative” and, in Françoise Lionnet’s terms, “is the agent of discourse,” whereas the narrated ‘I’ (“the object ‘I’”) “is the subject of history” (Smith and Watson 2010, 72–73).
- 16.
For instance, see the passage where the narrating ‘I’ switches from an account of her childhood in India to a remark about her present (in Iowa) and a comment about her recent past in New York before she returns to the topic of her present life (in Iowa) (Mukherjee 1991, 5–6).
- 17.
Cf. Paul John Eakin’s claim that narrative is an “instrument of self-understanding” (2006, 184).
- 18.
Hall describes a postmodern concept of selfhood as follows: “[I]dentities are […] constantly in the process of change and transformation […]. [They] are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally-constituted unity—an ‘identity’ in its traditional meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal differentiation)” (1996, 4).
- 19.
Dilthey considered Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice Years (1795–96) and Hölderlin’s Hyperion (1797–99) to be “specimen texts” and suggested that “the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman […] is a product of sociological circumstances that obtained only in the German principalities” (Boes 2006, 232). Amongst critics, this led to a heated debate about the question of whether those novels that were often considered prototypical English examples of the genre can really be considered as Bildungsromane. It was suggested “that literary critics drop the term Bildungsroman from their vocabulary altogether” (233) and use the alternative terms instead. While English critics have mainly used ‘novel of formation,’ ‘apprenticeship novel,’ and ‘novel of education,’ Mark Stein “speaks of a ‘novel of transformation’” (241). As far as Bildungsroman studies are concerned, a similar broadening can be observed as “new conceptual approaches to the novel of formation were radically transforming the discipline” (233). Innovative contributions include, amongst others, The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983, edited by Abel, Hirsch and Langland), which focuses on the (previously largely neglected) development of female protagonists, Mikhail Bakhtin’s “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” (1986), in which he argues that the Bildungsroman “situates its protagonist on the threshold between different historical eras,” and Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987), where Moretti boldly suggests that the Bildungsroman is the “symbolic form” illustrating “modernity” (quoted in Boes 2006, 236).
- 20.
Cf. Ralph Crane, who argues that “Jasmine’s journey is not over, despite the distance she has travelled” (1993, 130).
- 21.
Jasmine also departs from the traditional ending of the Victorian female Bildungsroman , where the quest plot “was at the service of the marriage plot and was subordinate to […] the magnetic power of that ending” (Blau du Plessis 1985, 6) because “the ‘choice’ of husband” was “the single, all-determining” decision of the protagonist (Fraiman 1993, 6). Since Jasmine’s choice to go to California with Taylor simultaneously means that she decides not to marry Bud, the quest plot is no longer inferior to the marriage plot in Jasmine . By comparison, Jane Eyre finishes with the protagonist’s marriage after she has become financially independent. As Ellen McWilliams points out, there remains an “unresolved controversy” as to how this ending should be interpreted—either “as a capitulation to heterosexual romance mythologies or an announcement of a union based on autonomy” (2009, 17). For more detailed explanations of the female Bildungsroman , see Boes (2006), Felski (1986) or Fraiman (1993).
- 22.
Bildungsromane are not limited to nineteenth-century literature but can also be found in the twentieth century (e.g. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). On the one hand, “the genre was broadened to include coming-of-age narratives” (Boes 2006, 231), on the other hand, many late twentieth-century novels of formation address “the impact of race and ethnicity” on “subject formation” (Ho 2005, 8). Amongst others, Patricia P. Chu (2000), Pin-chia Feng (1998) and Jennifer Ann Ho (2005) offer studies of novels of formation that re-envision the genre of the Bildungsroman from the angle of ethnicity. Novels analysed in this context include, for instance, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Gus Lee’s China Boy.
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Frey Büchel, N. (2019). On Identification and Narrative Identity: Self-Formation in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_6
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