Reconstruction Of Identity

Bharati Mukherjee is a well-renowned female Indian-born American writer inliterary world who published the novel Jasmine in1989. Most of her works describethe third world people’s experiences and feelings in their immigration to westerncountries. Academic scholars both at home and abroad have studied Mukherjee andher works from different perspectives. Some study her writing stages; others compareher works with other texts, and a few scholars investigate the construction of theprotagonist’s subjectivity in her novel Jasmine.This thesis studies Jasmine’s growth in this novel from the postcolonial feministperspective. For a long time, the third world diasporic women are oppressed by bothpatriarchy and colonialism and they have lost their space to survive. Relating to theconcrete plot of Jasmine’s diasporic experiences from India to America, this thesisanalyzes her three growing stages in detail. In India Jasmine accepted the enforcedidentity imposed by patriarchy, and it was her innocent age. During the illegalimmigration to America, she resisted and fought actively and her subjectiveconsciousness awakened. At last, in the life of New York and Iowa, she continued toadjust and finally established a hybrid culture identity, thus created “the Third Space”and grew to a mature woman. Her growth had provided a possible way for the thirdworld diasporic women to shake off patriarchy and colonial discrimination.