Gold-Digger: Reading the Marital and National Romance in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

The best known of Bharati Mukherjee’s novels, Jasmine was lauded in “nearly every major review publication” upon its 1989 release and has enjoyed a steady presence on women’s studies and ethnic American literature syllabi since (Carter-Sanborn 575). Ethnic and gender scholars have often remarked, however, that this stature and apparent canonicity are functions of the narrative's collusion with an “Orientalizing West[ern]” gaze (Hoppe 155)¹ combined with the absence, until recently, of less ideological South Asian American fiction. Nor has the novel’s supposedly feminist platform saved it from harsh judgment—the heroine’s self-advancement by husband-hopping is said to rely on fundamentally conservative gender paradigms, amounting to opportunism². That is, rather than presenting a compensatory dynamic whereby a useful feminism may be extracted and salvaged from the narrative’s cultural nationalism, the novel makes itself convenient to both patriarchal and Western anxieties.

The novel will not be defended from these criticisms here. And yet, the present-day vantage point of advanced globalized capitalism allows a more generative, perhaps less galling reading of Jasmine than was possible in the past. Mukherjee’s heroine was legible to readers in 1989 primarily as a “female immigrant version of the American Horatio Alger myth” (Chu 130), one who successfully (if implausibly) managed the shift “from the postcolonial experience to the immigrant and ‘minority’ experience in the United States” (Carter-Sanborn 584). Jasmine’s path in the United States was, in other words, understood as a linear trajectory from foreigner to American, from border to heartland, and on toward multiculturalism. In the present day, however, it seems impossible to ignore the novel’s less teleological scripts concerning the roles into which the heroine is cast: undocumented transnational migrant worker, domestic servant, caretaker, sex worker, and mail-order bride. Considering that she arguably navigates not one but all of these key positions of the third-world woman in her sequence of employment and relationships in the United States, Jasmine’s resumé suggests less her successful assimilation than her perpetual liminality. In her, the novel prefigures the current discourse around global migration, labor, and family for the Asian female foreign body.

In fact, Mukherjee’s writing of Jasmine took place at the precise historical moment when that “global woman” was born: “Foreign females from countries outside the European Union made up only 6 percent of all domestic workers in 1984. By 1987, the percentage had jumped to 52, with most coming from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, and Peru” (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 7). This updated racial-sexual-national matrix speaks, more effectively than a multiculturalist paradigm has done, to one of ethnic feminist scholarship’s longstanding preoccupations with Mukherjee’s polarizing text: that of its slippery use of agency. While in the immigrant minority narrative of the self-made American, agency is roundly celebrated and its absence uniformly deplored, in the various scripts of the global woman, agency is commonly double-edged. Placed in the latter context, Jasmine’s maddening equivocations about her agency thus prove to be a discursive necessity rather than a mere ideological failure or character flaw. While such reframing does not enhance the character’s merits, it sheds additional light on the disenchantment of Asian American scholarship with this literary heroine.

The marital romance script plays a prominent role in this novel. To bypass the “(il)logic by which … a peasant woman who [had] only just made the transition to an Indian city” might achieve Jasmine’s rapid climb to the white American middle class (Grewal 183), Mukherjee is generally acknowledged to “[fall] back on the romance plots of English novels of education” (Chu 130), narratives which are “ancestor[s] of the slick commercial … ‘romance novel’” (131).³ The romance heroine’s fabled beauty is, of course, pivotal to the commercial version of the romance novel, and so it is in Jasmine. Jasmine’s beauty generates “much of the narrative momentum” of her story (Koshy, “Geography” 74). Readers of Janice A. Radway will be familiar with this foundational rule...