Jasmine | Essays and Criticism

  • The Conflict Between Duty and Desire

    In the following essay, Donald G. Evans explores the conflict between duty and desire inherent in Jasmine.

  • Mukherjee's Jasmine

    In the following brief review of Mukherjee's novel Jasmine, author Abha Prakash Leard writes that Mukherjee is offering the reader a unique, female Hindu bildungroman. As the novel's protagonist, alternately known as Jyoti, Jasmine, or Jane, travels from one circumstance and geographical location to another, so is her inner self travelling the journey of rebirth toward a higher plane.

  • Re-inventing ourselves a million times: narrative, desire, identity, and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

    In the following essay on Mukherjee's novel Jasmine, F. Timothy Ruppel suggests that Jasmine disrupts the traditional narrative process, thematizing narration and identity by illustrating, through the circumstances of Jasmine's character, how identity can be ascribed by outside influences that desire to define her character as known, or as conforming to, their own social, economic or hierarchicalized mythos.

  • Review of Jasmine

    In the following review of Mukherjee 's novel Jasmine, Eleanor Wachtel describes the life journey of a Punjabi woman, Jyoti, as circumstance moves her through varying geographical locations and personalities, and calls Mukherjee's depiction of clashing cultures and philosophies as narrated by Jyoti, or Jasmine, "powerful," "ambitious" and "impressively compact."

  • Familiar Terrain: Domestic Ideology and Farm Policy in Three Women's Novels About the 1980s

    In the following essay, author Amy Levin discusses Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine in conjunction with two other novels in an exploration of female perspective on domestic and farm ideologies, as well as the quest for self, in the American Midwest.