Myth as Double-Voiced Discourse in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine
Abstract ::
The particular assumption of the language by women writers regulates the discourse, therefore the story has a tendency to be "new" and "distinctive." The "new" versions of myths give ample proof of this process. Critics expresses that the women author deconstructs an earlier "myth" or "story" and develops another one which incorporates, rather than excluding herself. Myths in works by women authors are frequently"changed" in light of the fact that they are reviewed from another point of view. This new revisionary point of view empowers us to see and read new stories and question the old, accepted ones, which are constantly presented from a male viewpoint. In this paper the utilization of myths with respect to the female characters in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine have been focused and commented on its re-vision.
Keywords: gender, feminism, discourse, double voiced, Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine, narration
The French feminist critics have been the first to recognize theoretically that language is gendered and that gender influences writing as well as reading. Consequently the specificity of women's language has become a central issue in feminist criticism. Women live and take part in culture and society, but they nevertheless belong to the "muted group". Gerda Lerner remarks on this duality shaping women's lives in her work, The Majority Finds its Past:
Women live their social existence within the general culture and, whenever they are confined by patriarchal restraint or segregation into separateness (which always has subordination as its purpose), they transform this restraint into complementarity (asserting the importance of woman's function, even its "superiority") and redefine it. Thus women live a duality--as members of the general culture and as partakers of the women's culture. (52)The model of women's culture outlined by Edwin Ardener also illustrates that women partake in the male sphere, that is dominant, but they also belong to a sphere in which men are not represented (22-23). As Elaine Showalter points out this model is especially applicable to feminist literary theory since it is based on the concepts of the dominant versus the muted group (29). Claudine Hermann in an abstract in New French Feminisms edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, discusses to this very space, holding that woman has always needed some distance between herself and man's world:
She must conserve some space for herself, a sort of no man's land which constitutes precisely what men fail to understand of her and often attribute to stupidity because she cannot express its substances in her inevitably alienated language. (169)The female space in women writers' texts can thus be filled with everything that is not expressed by the discourse in the dominant language, everything that has been supressed or unnoticed. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic have pointed out, there are persistent images in women's writings, which indicate that women writers try to express their confinement and their margins. But they cannot express their images and themes in their own language; thus their language may be labelled as a "double-voiced discourse" and may be said to echo a "double-consciousness." The woman writer can be said to put her viewpoint in the medium of his language.
The resulting tensions can take very different forms and texts by women writers can reflect a wide range of specific assumptions of traditional language. A striking example of this use is Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" in her work, Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces. 1913-1927, which ironically questions hegemonic patriarchal poetry (294). But not all texts by women writers so clearly illustrate a "female imagination" (Spacks 4). Especially narrative texts reveal that there are characteristics suggestive of a female authorship invisible after a first reading because it is assumed that the authors always write within their cultural tradition, which, as Virginia Woolf puts it in Women and Writing, is "made by men" (48). Thus the explanation of the double-voiced discourse will always be a difficult and diverse task because the feminist critic must discover the "empty space" and look for meaning there.
Narrative in the broad terms is "a version of, or a special expression of ideology: representations by which we construct and accept values and institutions" (DuPlessis X). Any fiction articulates ideology; for example, plots of various kinds and the fate of female characters express attitudes at least towards family, sexuality, and gender. The attempt to call into question political and legal forms related to women and gender, characteristic of women's freedom in the late twentieth century, is accompanied by this attempt by women writers to call narrative forms into question. The invention of strategies that separate the narrative from conventional structures of fiction and consciousness about women is what is examined in this study.
As the time demands, the wrtiters use myth in fiction as a narrative stretegy. Withdrawing the self from her personality falling back on a superfluous component, the women wtriters gets to be unified with humankind everywhere and with history where the limits of past, present and future break up into a solitary substance. In this way the writers create a new language and new dialectic with the use of the myth. The literary form of the myth conserves its symbolic values which surpass the historical surface. The myth communicates the reality in a powerful metaphor. It tries to show up some phase of experience in its totality. For the women novelists, most of the mythological worlds are broken to develop new world from their viewpoint. The myths utilized by them are seen to be applicable to their vision of life. Thus they can be said to make innovations by giving the myths another organic meaning and stature in the modem world from their point of view.
Joseph Campbell in his Creative Mythology: The Masks of God has given a new facet and importance to myth as opposed to the traditional view. He writes:
In what I am calling "Creative Mythology" the individual has had an experience of his own--of order, horror, beauty or even mere exhilaration--which he seeks to communicate through signs and if his realisation has been of a certain development and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth--for those, that is to say, who receive and respond to it themselves, with recognition, uncoerced. (4)Like Freud, Campbell also associates dream with myth. He says that dream is personalised myth and myth, depersonalised dream. Both are symbolic of the dynamics of the psyche. The definition of myth differs from age to age and writer to writer. According to Feder, each generation will modify and adapt the myths of the past to meet its own needs and will even recreate them or create new myths which are in tune with the climes and times. (Ancient Myths in Modern Poetry.) Naturally they will find their due place in literature as they form a vital and integral part of the creative output of human beings.
The male writers' images of the male characters are not excluded or simply altered into the female characters of the women writers; rather besides interrogating the male domain and sources of these images, they clearly reflect the precisely female way of responding to them. By depending on images of male self-realisation to express the pursuit of the female characters, the women writers address the eliteness of the relationship between the male creative spirit and the female passive muse.
Bharati Mukhejee in her novel Jasmine points out how a girl is transferred to a marginal position even before she is born while the male is inevitably granted the middle. The marginalising of woman is what is brought up when they stress the hunger of parents for a male child: "daughters were curses.. Gods with infinite memories visited girl children on women who needed to be punished for sins committed in other incarnations" (39). Jasmine's mother attempts to supress her the moment she is born because "bad luck dogged dowryless wives, rebellious wives, barren wives. They fell into wells, they got run over by trains, they burned to death heating milk on kerosene stoves" (41). Debating the myth of gender, Catherine Stimpson says in "Feminism and Feminist Criticism":
Simply speaking, gender is a way of classifying living things and languages, of sorting them into groups: feminine and masculine. However, no system of classification is ever simple. Cultural laws and myths of gender demand that feminine and masculine must play off against each other in the great drama of binary opposition. They must struggle against each other, or complement each other, or collapse into each other in the momentary, illusory relief of the androgynous embrace. In patriarchal cultures, the struggle must end in the victory of the masculine; complementarity must arrange itself hierarchically; androgyny must be a myth fiction. (275).In the case of Jasmine, she never exceeds the India of strongly divided gender roles. As an external pointer her consistence in the name giving inclination of the men can be watched. Called Jyoti by her parents, she procures another name from every husband. She is Jasmine to Prakash, Jase to Taylor, and Jane to Bud Ripplemayer. But she has been caregiver to all of them, covering out distasteful part of her personality to each. Her imagination draws sustenance from Hindu symbols Kali, the destroyer of evil, and Durga, the supplier of confidence. In spite of the fact that adaptable to her conditions, the myth of having a steady need of male supporters to help her image as a valued woman is brought out. Indeed, even as she claims the repositioning of her stars, we read, "I cry into Taylor’s shoulder, cry through all the lives I've given birth to, cry for all my dead" (241).
Jasmine can be seen satisfying the traditional burdens made by families upon a woman's energy besides observing back upon her little, village beginnings to recollect old proverbs on women’s fortune. "Girls are like cattle, whichever way you lead them, that is the way they will go. Or the villagers say when a clay pitcher breaks, you see that the air inside it is the same as outside" (48).
Mukherjee contrasts the value systems concealed in Hindu and Western myths, as in this juxtaposition of world views: " ... I have given Bud a new trilogy to contemplate: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. And he has lent me his: Musial, Brock and Gibson" (6). Jane, who freely "gives" her trio, represents their values as Creator, Preserver and Destroyer. Bud, a real banker, can only "loan" his baseball gods--Stan Musial, Lou Brock and Bob Gibson; yet these "gods" denote "speed and execution," values that lead Bud to "lend to risk takers" like Jane (6). When she goes off with Taylor, picking "the promise of America" over "old world dutifulness," Jasmine is re-embodied as Jase, a Hindu American full of "possibility" (214). Thus She has a well chance of discharge from a definition of woman's role as the servant of men, for while Taylor give new name Jase, he "didn't want to change me" or "scour and sanitize the foreignness" (165). "Greedy with wants and reckless from hope" (214), she leaves the novel robust because of her hybridisation. Jasmine can be labelled as a person who has made a logical breaking from certain patriarchal cultural follows rising out of myths, whose acts of oppositional reflexion have brought her to the other side of everything--to the questioning of primary institutes of social, sexual, and cultural establishment.
The opening sentence of the novel roadblocks ancient Hindu myths: "Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears--his satellite dish to the stars--and foretold my widowhood and exile" (1). His prophecy ascertains both right and wrong: Jyoti/Jasmine is widowed and leaves India; but her embrace of America can hardly be called an "exile." The astrologer reacts to her shouted refusal of his prediction by hurling her on the head and that makes her fall on the firewood she is conceding. The fall in turn causes a twig to punch "a star shaped wound" (1) on her head. As the astrologer returns to his spell, regarding Jyoti as "a speck in the solar system," she states her "star" to be her third eye--not a apparent "inch-long pale, puckered scar" (1-2)--and declares: "Now I'm a sage" looking into "invisible worlds" (5). "Seeing through the third eye," as Jasmine tells Taylor, leads to "enlightenment.. .and sensing designs in history's muddles" (52). Other than being a visionary "spotlight mined on lives to come," Jasmine's third eye "throbs" with sensation and emotion, with "pain and hope, hope and pain" (201). The third eye thus unites seven-year-old Jyoti in Hasnapur, nineteen year old Jasmine in Manhattan, and twenty-four-year-old Jane in Iowa.
Old stories of Shiva's third eye associate it not only with "wisdom and insight" (Basham 307) but also with violence and sexuality. According to one story, when the love god Kama attempts to inflame Shiva with love of Parvati while he is engaged in ascetic meditation, his third eye reduces Kama to ashes (Ions 81-82). Jasmine uses her third eye likewise when Half-Face, the rapist boat captain, crashes her forehead against a motel television set so that she feels her "scar tightening, and the heat from the screen on my swelling" (113). Expressive of Shiva's fire-producing third eye, Jasmine's hot scar looks to help her transformation into Kali. As Kali, her "red tongue out" (118), she destroys evil to achieve an ultimate good. Emerging into America, she reconsiders another sort of Hindu destruction: rather than actually committing sati, as she has planned, she builds a temporary burial fire to consume her widow's sari and Prakash's suit. Thus she fulfils her "mission" symbolically and Jasmine arises from the ashes of the "sati goddess"- Jyoti (102). She appears to wind up the innovative hatred of the woman hero to traditional consciousness and old patterns of myth. In the course of her journey, a new woman has been developed, one adopting her own prosperity and control. She seems to be "both hero and treasure, a unity not achieved by heterosexual bonding but by 'anticolonial quest"' (DuPlessis 133). In yet another passage that Mukhejee recognizes as the most important in the novel (Jaggi 9), a friend solaces Jasmine's widowed mother: "the Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment and sends us down. When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment" (51). Jasmine's unknown and mysterious mission contrasts completely from that of her childhood friend Vimla, who "doused herself with kerosene and flung herself on a stove, shouting to the god of death, 'Yama bring me to you" (12). Knowing such examples, Jasmine leaves India believing her central goal is to commit sati in Florida. But having been passively raped and actively murdered, she detects that she can't be a sati like Vimla or a frustrated sati like her own mother, who suffers the living death of widowhood (119). Dismissing self-sacrificers like Sita and Vimla, Mukherjee re-examines the traditional Indian "woman centered oral tale" by depicting how her heroine "moves from the position of being told to that of telling". As one who tells, Jane "feels so potent, a goddess" who has "transformed" Bud. A true "hybrid" Jyoti/Jasmine/Jazzy/ Jase/Jane/Jase has reinvented herself, with "Jasmine" as her stable core, literally fixed in Hasnapur. Under the jasmine tree Jyoti's lifeless father lies on his charpoy, lost in nostalgia for pre-Partition Lahore (36). Under the same tree she makes a bonfire of the books to mark her father's death and the end of her childhood (56). The jasmine tree offers flowers for her hair and "the sweetest smelling jasmines" are the only decorations at their "no dowry, no guests Registry Office wedding" (68). The title of the novel thus points not only to the heroine's sweetness, but also and more suggestively to her capacity for change and recovery.
Bharati Mukhejee has made an impressive fund of fictional vocabulary. When she needs to offer expression to the truth that hides behind the mask of reason, she she surrenders thr trodden paths of literary tradition, and when she is in need of revealing a tragic consciousness of survival, she tries to crush the shell of verbosity to recreate a new language of a new vision. She gives new proportions of tragic anonymity to the associations of lexicon with the help of new symbols and absurdly beautiful expressions. She makes it clear that she is not conveying her experiences through the conventional literary style but that she is able to express her emotions only through a double-voiced discourse.