Date of Award

1997

Document Type

Research Paper

First Advisor

Tony Barnstone

Second Advisor

Anne Kiley

Third Advisor

Marilyn Gottschall

Abstract

The stories of Indian immigrant women have never been more than barely audible whispers in the telling of American immigrant history. Bharati Mukherjee, herself an Indian woman and immigrant, chooses to amplify these whispers, and in the process reveals stories of women who leave Mother India and discover new ways of seeing themselves after journeying to America. Mukherjee’s tales are inevitably about the growth and changes in personal identity immigrants undergo once they separate from their homes and cultures, yet they emphasize the uniqueness of Indian women’s experiences in America. Mukherjee’s heroines come from a predominately Hindu culture that assigns specific roles to its members based on the socio-economic class into which an individual is born. A person can experience a variety of roles in a single lifetimes but these variations, which only occur when an individual passes from one life stage to another, are also assigned. Indian women, in this system, form their identities primarily from their roles as daughters, wives, mothers and widows. Furthermore, alterations in an individual’s code of conduct can only occur after physical death and rebirth. In her novel Jasmine, and to a smaller degree in “A Wife’s Story” and The Tenant,” Mukherjee portrays female protagonists who are able to transcend the rigid identities given to them at birth by modifying the Hindu idea of transformation through reincarnation and living several Lives” within a single human existence. Additionally, the paper includes an interview with Bharati Mukherjee.

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