Transformation of Self in the Works of Bharati Mukherjee
- May 26, 2018
- Posted by: RSIS
- Category: Social Science
International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation (IJRSI) | Volume V, Issue V, May 2018 | ISSN 2321–2705
Transformation of Self in the Works of Bharati Mukherjee
Swati Srivastava
Associate Professor, Department of Applied Science and Humanities, Ambalika Institute of Management and Technology, Lucknow, India
Abstract: – Bharati Mukherjee has established herself as a powerful member of the American Literary Scene. Her works frequently redefine the process of immigration as a translation and as a new opportunity for the individuals. In this paper such a view has been articulated in her novels as The Tiger’s Daughter, Wife and Jasmine. Mukherjee’s novels tell of boundary crossings and international networks reveal a number of the effects of transnational are on people and their fates. While America remains the location for the construction of identity in Mukherjee’s writing it becomes a re-imagined global space, not the unified nation state which it has pretended to be.
Keywords: Heroines of Bharati Mukherjee, Transformation of self, Search for identity in alien land.
The starting point is the implicit inferiority of women, and the first question de Beauvoir asks is what a woman is? Woman she realizes is always perceived of as other, “she is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not him with reference to her”. A myth invented by men to confine women to their oppressed state. For women it is not a question of asserting themselves as women, but of becoming full-scale human beings. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”1 or as Toril Moi puts it “a woman defines herself through the way she lives her embodied situation in the world, or in other words, through the way in which she makes something of what the world makes of her”2. Therefore, woman must regain subject, to escape her defined role as other. “To be a woman”, says Kierkegaard in “Stages on the Road of life”3, is something so strange, so confused, so complicated, that no one predicate comes near expressing it and that the multiple predicates that one would like to use are so contradictory that only a woman could put up it. This comes from not regarding woman positively such as she seems to herself to be, but negatively, such as she appears to man.
