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The Maximalist Transformation of the Female Immigrant Identity in Bharati

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The Maximalist Transformation of the Female Immigrant Identity in Bharati Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2010 The am ximalist transformation of the female immigrant identity in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine and The oldeH r of the World Lauren D. Hazenson Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Hazenson, Lauren D., "The am ximalist transformation of the female immigrant identity in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine and The Holder of the World" (2010). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 11304. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/11304 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 00000000 The maximalist transformation of the female immigrant identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and The Holder of the World By Lauren Hazenson A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Literature) Program of Study Committee: Diane Price Herndl, Major Professor Constance J. Post Eugenio Matibag Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2010 Copyright © Lauren Hazenson, 2010. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 JASMINE 8 THE HOLDER OF THE WORLD 30 CONCLUSION 53 FURTHER DIRECTIONS OF STUDY 56 WORKS CITED 57 1 Mukherjee begins her 1988 New York Times article “Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists” by declaring to American readers, “I am one of you now,” heralding her new identity as an American citizen and American author (Mukherjee 1). Her article encompasses much of the argument regarding immigration that provides the framework for two novels she wrote after this article, Jasmine and The Holder of the World. These books mark the beginning of maximalism's presence in Mukherjee's writing, where she began to work against the minimalism, which she pinpoints as the reason that “'American fiction' has become synonymous with the mainstream, big-advance, well-promoted novel or story collection, and that that American fiction - clever, mannered, brittle - has lost the power to transform the world's imagination” (“Immigrant Writing”). The minimalism that Mukherjee writes against opts for simplistic sentence constructions and character descriptions that leave most of the story's content in what is not said. This writing focuses mostly on lacking, either in its content or its subject matter, which is primarily concerned with social criticism. Conversely, maximalism defines itself similarly to Mukherjee's description of Mughal paintings. Mukherjee has explained that her novels seek to emulate the Mughal painting by giving multiple characters equal significance and putting multiple narratives together so that they are inextricably connected to one another (Chen and Goudie 78). Similarly, maximalism places secondary characters and details of equal importance to main characters. Like Picasso's cubism, maximalism attempts to meld all angles into one image that attempts to be more reflective of its subject than more two dimensional views of cultural ancestry, especially that of American literature. Maximalism also provides enough overlapping elements to create a hybrid space, a “borderland” for immigrants and those labeled as Other. In this hybrid space immigrants 2 move beyond the unwashed Ellis Island stereotype to experience more freedom to pick and choose which elements of culture to retain or adopt. Mukherjee's “New America” (as opposed to one comprised of mostly European immigrants) is portrayed in Jasmine and The Holder of the World by female characters that embody many ideals Mukherjee ascribes to recent and mainly nonwhite immigrants : [America is] a world, by definition, of doubles. Characters in this world have the density of 19th-century presences; like creations out of Balzac or Dickens, they pass before me leaving real footprints. They have all shed past lives and languages, and have traveled half the world in every direction to come here and begin again. They're bursting with stories, too many to begin telling. They've lived through centuries of history in a single lifetime--village-born, colonized, traditionally raised, educated. What they've assimilated in 30 years has taken the West 10 times that number of years to create. Time travel is a reality - I've seen it in my own life. Bionic Men and Women are living among us. (2) Mukherjee’s “Bionic Men and Women” in this quotation present a parallel concept to Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Most literary critics who have written about Jasmine or The Holder of the World examined these works as an exploration of the American immigrant as a hybrid, usually citing Bhabha when doing so. Mukherjee, in this New York Times article, certainly encourages the concept of immigrant as hybrid by characterizing “New America” as existing in constant reinvention and the tangling of timelines. 3 This reinvention and entanglement of time and place are prominent in Mukherjee's books, especially in Jasmine and The Holder of the World, both in their plot and characters as well as the works she chooses to interweave thematically in her own text. Mukherjee creates a maximalist text by fusing her narratives with canonical works such as The Scarlet Letter , Jane Eyre, and Pygmalion as well as the Ramayana and other sources of Hindu mythology. What is analyzed as a rewriting or deconstruction of canonical texts is only part of the process. The texts are broken down and then introduced as a new incarnation, one that adapts itself to the “New America” of maximalist writing. A significant example of textual reincarnation is that of Hindu goddess Sita. Sita, Ram's wife in the Ramayana, has been upheld for generations in India as an ideal wife, though left-wing Hindus increasingly challenge this view of Sita, claiming it portrays a misogynist expectation for women. If we ignore the significance this text has in The Holder of the World and implicitly in Jasmine , we lose a tie between Indian and Western culture that would directly apply to the female characters in Mukherjee's fiction. Mukherjee uses the Ramayana and other Indian cultural artifacts in an American context to emphasize a tie between the two countries, and the Indian texts therefore have equal significance to the canonical Anglo-American works that are more widely studied in relation to these books. Both novels have significant portions of the plot in India and America, with Jasmine depicting more time in America and The Holder of the World focusing more on colonial India. When the novels straddle both worlds, they highlight the immigrant woman’s ideological liminality. In Jasmine the plot follows the titular character in the process of becoming an empowered individual more than it does her process of becoming 4 an American. It is noteworthy that Jasmine's process of “becoming” does not have a foreseeable end, even on the last page of the novel. The Holder of the World also centers on becoming American, but the storyline explores the early formation of the country's ideology through the transformation of a Puritan woman in colonial South India during the 17th century. The storylines of both books are as “tangled” as the identities of their main characters, which complicates any attempt to categorize the characters of the book or the plot into cultural archetypes. Part of the “tangling” results from the narrative, which is often told from the present looking into the past, but not in chronological order. Multiple characters are blended with narrative elements from canonical works and Hindu mythology. Finally, primary characters in both books change their names frequently and in the process embody different incarnations of themselves, much like Hindu deities depicted in the Bhagvad Gita. This “tangling” has several functions. First, it provides enough starts and stops to different storylines that although the narrative reaches a conclusion it seems inherently incomplete, which leads to greater focus on the “becoming” process than a particular arrival at the end. This lack of a definitive limitation to the storyline frustrates categorization of both the author and the characters into stereotypes. It also provides enough overlapping elements to create a hybrid space, a “borderland” for immigrants and those labeled as Other. In this hybrid space immigrants move beyond the unwashed Ellis Island stereotype to experience more freedom to pick and choose which elements of culture to retain or adopt. Mukherjee works to make a space for South Asian writers and 5 “maximalist” texts within the American literary canon by interweaving reinterpretations of canonical texts. Jasmine and The Holder of the World are compared in this thesis in part because they were written during a shift in Bharati Mukherjee’s thinking about immigration from India to the West, which works as a foundation for her concept of “maximalism.” Her previous books, Darkness and Wife , contain criticism of Canadian multiculturalism and express little hope for Canadian acceptance of South Asian immigrants. Though Mukherjee cemented her reputation as a more exilic writer like Rushdie or Naipaul because of these early works, it was after her immigration to the United States that she began identifying herself as an immigrant writer. In her interviews Mukherjee recognizes that she puts more stock in Indian immigrant women than their male counterparts. She explains women undergo a more “psychological transformation” whereas men aim to make money and return to India. Jasmine is the clearest example of an Indian woman undergoing this psychological transformation, but the white American-born main characters in The Holder of the World expand the “maximalism” she attributes to “New America” and plant it in “Old America” and the Puritan immigrant foundations of the nation.
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