Character Jasmine: Mukherjee's Novel
"Jasmine's postcolonial, ethnic characters are post-American, carving out newspaces for themselves from among a constellation of available cultural narratives, never remaining bound by any one, and always fluidly negotiatingthe boundaries of their past, present, and futures..." John K. HoppeThe "American dream" means different things to different people. For many who were born in the U.S. it means a home in the suburbs with a two-car garage, a good job, and money enough for nice vacations and to send the kids to college. To Jasmine in Mukherjee's novel, just getting away from her life as an Indian widow with nothing but destitution was the realization of one kind of dream. It was a dream to fly free of the pathos and grimness of her shattered life. But there were much bigger dreams on the horizon, which have whet the appetites of millions of readers. To wit, when Jasmine became in a remarkably short time an American woman who displayed confidence, charm, beauty, sexuality, and who pursued bold and even brazen new dreams, she became a literary heroine in a very real sense. This new woman, the reader discovers, is gifted, focused, and fascinating because somehow she constantly reinvents herself.
" That willingness to risk and self-confidence could be construed to be the arrogance many in other parts of the world chalk up to Western cultures, albeit that is an unfair stereotype. Indeed, Bud never even asks her about India, ". A reader can clearly see that Jasmine's role as protagonist is to leave one cultural situation that is grim and move to another less grim, albeit on the way to discovery (as a pioneer in a new frontier) Jasmine gets to have it both ways. "She knows there is something else," Jasmine (the narrator) explains. The cliche "you can't go home" may have an application here. 40) who manages to survive with a fake passport, residency papers that are phony, and a number of new and different names and identities along the way. The American way as played out by Jasmine, Parameswaran continues, is marked with "resourcefulness, self-confidence, independence, and a willingness to risk. Jasmine figured all along that she would be at first an outsider, and she was, due to her skin color. But was her motivation also based on a desire to not only flee the misery but abandon her culture altogether? Did she have a wild streak in her and needed to manifest it somewhere - American being the most obvious place? And was it her passion based on "becoming American" in order to engage in activities and values that were forbidden in India? Several scholarly critiques of the novel provide answers to these and other questions. is "not unlike the Punjab she left behind," Carter-Sanborn writes on page 574, setting up the theme that maybe the journey she took was actually bringing her right back home into the despair and violence she thought she left behind.
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Acceptance Essays
