Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Suzanne Kehde

SOURCE: "Colonial Discourse and Female Identity: Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine," in International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Goozé, Greenwood Press, 1995, pp. 70-7.

In the following essay, Kehde analyzes Mukherjee's focus on the myth of America as Eden and Jasmine's identification first and foremost as a woman in Mukherjee's Jasmine.

For Jasmine, Mukherjee's eponymous protagonist, the kind of liberty she enjoys is a consequence of, rather than the reason for, her coming to the New World. An illegal immigrant from Punjab, who "phantom[s her] way through three continents" on unscheduled flights landing on the disused airfields of the shadow world, she finally crosses the Atlantic in a sea voyage as horrifying as any suffered by the Mayflower pilgrims. Her first sight of America is no more attractive than Plymouth Rock was to them:

The first thing I saw were the two...
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