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The Reflection of Globalization in Personal Identity
“There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake ourselves. ... ” Is Jasmine a celebration of globalization, a critique of it or both? ...
In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee shows a woman’s worldwide search of her own self in an attempt to offer contrasting viewpoints on the phenomenon of “Globalization.” However, it is only after we understand Jasmine’s personal quest to find her self that we are able to understand Mukherjee’s opinion on globalization. When we look closely, we see that Jasmine changes who she is a number of times. She begins as Jyoti, then becomes Jasmine with the marriage of Prakash, then becomes Kali with the death of Prakash and her initial immigration, then she becomes Jase while with Taylor, then she is finally Jane with her marriage to Bud. ... ” In one way or another, Jasmine manages to ‘murder’ who she was so as to assume new characteristics.
In trying to understand the way in which Mukherjee celebrates/criticizes globalization, we must focus not simply on the changes which Jasmine undergoes, but rather the way in which each character looks at the world around her and the philosophies with which she is bombarded and those with which she accepts. Jyoti, Jasmine’s earliest character, is stuck in a society where she is told things like “Some women think they own the world because their husbands are too lazy to beat them” (Mukherjee 47). ... When Dida, had “finally located a passable groom willing to take me (Jyoti) off their hands,” Jasmine “wasn’t quite thirteen then” (Mukherjee 48). When we look at this from a typical ‘American’ viewpoint, we feel that Jasmine is being treated very unfairly because our culture offers women more freedom. ... As we look at each of Jasmine’s characters, we see that it is through choice that Mukherjee finds reason to live, reason to change, and reason to ‘murder’ who you were. ... This being the first choice she has faced, Jyoti is murdered by a character that can actually think for herself, Jasmine. ...
The development of Jasmine shows that the first attempt at finding yourself is not always going to be the last. Jasmine becomes attached to Prakash in a similar fashion as to the way in which Jyoti was attached to the characters around her.
Approximate Word count = 1919
Approximate Pages = 7.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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