Jasmine's Search for the Real Life

In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine, the title character seems to constantly be plagued by a longing for the “real life” that her husband Prakesh attempts to describes to her.  As a young girl, an astrologer foretells that Jyoti is destined for widowhood and exile, and after the death of her father brings a similar fate to her mother, this prediction seems increasingly likely. She seems to beat these odds upon marrying Prakesh, who dreams of more than the life that they have for themselves in their small town in India, and hopes that Jasmine will join him in this pursuit of something more. Perplexed, Jasmine wonders: “What is this real life? I have a real life” (Mukherjee 81). After being raised to expect nothing more than the life she was currently living, Prakesh begins to convince Jasmine that she deserves more than she is destined for. While this may be true, Jasmine becomes lost in the search for this real life after Prakesh’s death, leading to a persistent restlessness that follows her around the United States. In Queens with Professorji, she is greatly disappointed with the America that she finds, and seems to find credence with Professorji’s complaint that “America was killing him,” as she feels similarly because the reality of life in the states cannot possibly match the high expectations that Prakesh’s “real life” carried (146). The circumstances provoked by hardships in Iowa similarly depress Jane. This story strikes a comparison between expectation and reality, and how our own expectations can impact how we experience the life that we are living in the moment. In this scenario, the title character’s high hopes actually impact her real life experiences negatively, as she is often unable to enjoy living in the United States, despite the fact that it represents an escape from the life of an exiled widow that she was destined to live in India.

Shifting Identity in Jasmine

    We have discussed in class the idea of a person changing their personality, tastes, and character to reflect their relationship, their location, or their state of mind. We saw in Eat, Pray, Love, that Liz Gilbert changed herself when she moved from her marriage into her relationship with David, and it took her a trip around the world and back to find who her true self was. Even then, as we discussed, Gilbert falls immediately into another relationship which made us question whether her journey had been truly successful or not. In Sons for the Return Home, the boy becomes more and more involved with papalgi culture because of his girlfriend. He becomes a part of her world in order to be closer to her, which only cause more confusion for him later. It was interesting to see in Jasmine that the main character, as she moves from place to place and encounters hardships throughout her life. Jasmine is also "Jyoti", "Jazzy", "Jassy", "Jase", and "Jane"; as she moves further away from her homeland and Indian culture, her names become more and more westernized. The change of name also represents her changing identity; she begins as a traditional Indian girl, who wants to break free of the restraints of her society by marrying a progressive man, which she does. She learns English and becomes "Jasmine" to her new husband, stating "I shuttled between identities" (Mukherjee 77). This statement also relates to when she is widowed and she is torn between the dream of a new life in the US and what her family in India expects of her. She late becomes Jase when she meets Taylor and Jane with Bud; this seems to be similar to the way Gilbert changed to fit with the men in her life rather than changing to fit herself.

     Her journey in the novel ends with Jasmine leaving for California, which suggests that she will continue to move and "shuttle" both physically and metaphorically. Her identity is in constant flux in this novel; she adapts to her new surroundings and takes on attributes of those who surround her while deciding which aspects of her past to keep and which to get rid of. Jasmine is like a quilt, made of all of the people she has been. She says herself, "Then there is nothing I can do. Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud. I am out the door ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope" (Mukherjee 241). The woman she is at the end of the novel, is a blend of all of her past selves, but she is also moving on to continue to search for her one true identity, or home. She cries for all the people she has been and all of the people she has been that she has let go of to create her present self.

     In terms of home, this novel gives us a perspective on the post-colonial world that we have not seen before: a woman from India, desperate to leave and find a new life in America. It is interesting to see the shift from previous novels that we have read. Jasmine is a unique heroine, who will stop at nothing to find herself, and when she does, find the place where she truly belongs. The place where, she can shed all of her former selves, and be truly free to be herself.

The Search for Home and Identity in Jasmine

As we were previously informed, Mukherjee’s inspiring novel, Jasmine, is the polar opposite from Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. It tells the tale of a widow seemingly destined to spend the remainder of her days alone and unwanted in her small Indian village, according to the local astrologer. Jasmine, however, refuses to accept this as she and her late husband had originally planned to relocate to Florida. Through sheer grit and determination, Jasmine packs her belongings and elects to make the journey on her own. The story is effective through its use of reflective narration. Most of the piece is told by a now 24 year-old Jasmine, living with her husband, Bud, and their adopted son, Du. However, not everything is smooth sailing for Jasmine as she makes her way from India to New York and finally, to Baden, Iowa. Jasmine is sexually assaulted by the captain of the ship, Half-Face, and seriously contemplates suicide. Additionally, Jasmine loses her identity when she meets Bud and begins to think of herself as Jane. The work is fraught with crises of identity and the desperate search to find a place where Jasmine can truly call home. My favorite line from this book comes at the end when Jasmine challenges the astrologer who predicted she would live alone forever: “Watch me re-position the stars, I whisper to the astrologer who floats cross-legged above my kitchen stove” (240). Jasmine defies all odds for a girl her age and manages to establish herself in a strange land, making her a truly admirable character.

            This novel is a deviation from the earlier stories we have read in that the main character abandons the homeland she has always known in favor of a better future. For Jasmine, leaving is ultimately arriving. Home is defined as one woman’s search for herself, and America seems to be the one place she feels that this can be accomplished. Home is described both in terms of geography, but also in terms of identity. Like Gilbert, Jasmine has to leave what she knows in order to discover what she needs. It sounds incredibly cliché, but I thoroughly enjoyed this novel as it demonstrated the unshakable courage of such a young girl willing to take an incomprehensible risk. Home here is described in different terms, and it was interesting to read a novel that praised America, as opposed to focusing on its greed and consumerism.

Eat, Pray, Love

Elizabeth Gilbert wastes no time conveying the magnitude of her depression in the expositional chapters of Eat, Pray, Love. She describes the steady deterioration of her marriage with her husband David and claims to have “reached infatuation’s final destination- the complete and merciless devaluation of self.” This excerpt correlates with Gilbert’s persistent mindset of insecurity and inferiority in the novel’s early chapters. However, as Gilbert travels abroad she steadily cultivates into a happier individual with a flourishing sense of value and purpose. Moreover, she acknowledges the importance of sadness and depression in human development. She begins to realize that anguish and sadness are just as central to the human experience as Joy and happiness. This notion of necessary suffering as a means of cultivating into a fuller person is expressed on numerous occasions throughout the novel as Gilbert’s emotional state improves. While traveling in India Gilbert studies the Bhagavad Gita and learns that, “it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.” She gradually begins to understand that personal imperfection is inevitable but such imperfection defines people as individuals and sculpts their personal identities. Gilbert asserts that traumatic events temper our resolve to withstand depression, and are therefore necessary. Anyone who bears the burden of depression will “Someday look back on this moment of their life as such a sweet time of grieving. They’ll see that they were in mourning and their hearts were broken, but your life was changing.” Such changes allude to the gradual development of humanity through fluctuating experiences of sadness and happiness that are fundamentally necessary for development as an individual.

A Journey of Convenience

                While I was reading Eat, Pray, Love, I found it difficult to pin down exactly why I found it as unpleasant as I did. For all outward appearances, it is an optimistic, feel-good story. And yet, something about it simply does not sit right. Upon some consideration, I landed on the word “convenience.”

                I do not, of course, mean to suggest that Gilbert’s adventure is free of inconveniences – she is, after all, hit by a bus – but rather that her every experience is calculated to be of use to her. Gilbert’s entire trip is based on personal convenience; she picks and chooses aspects of the cultures she explores which suit her. Rather than truly immersing herself in the cultures of the countries she visits, she settles in with only that which she wanted to get out of her experience – pleasure in Italy, spirituality in India, and balance in Indonesia. This is evident in her decision to remain in the Ashram instead of further exploring India – she limits her experience drastically by focusing only on the religious aspects of the country. It is not clear, however, that she would have branched out even if she had continued to travel: as she explains her aborted plans, she insists that she “had specific temples and mosques and holy men [she] was all lined up to meet” (170). Even before coming to India, she had decided what her experience was going to be. In Bali, she focuses all of her energy for much of the trip on Felipe instead of learning about Indonesia.

                Adding to the sense that Gilbert limits her trip to that which is convenient to her is the self-centered tone of her account. Throughout her journey, Gilbert’s focus is entirely introspective. She turns her every experience into a meditation on herself, and rather than expand her world, she reduces it to herself and her problems. There is, of course, no problem with self-discovery: in fact, it is an important part of life. But self-discovery at the expense of fantastic, vibrant cultures is tasteless, and comes across as disrespectful. In her retelling, she reduces these nations to opportunities for privileged members of society to focus on themselves in a foreign context. When she visits Sicily, she states explicitly that she “[doesn’t] want to insult anyone by drawing too much of a comparison between [herself] and the long-suffering Sicilian people,” but her attempt at humility here falls flat as she shamelessly proceeds to compare herself to the Sicilian people (115). She uses this visit as an occasion for self-reflection instead of an occasion for solemnity.

                The problem I encounter with Eat, Pray, Love comes down the fact that it is written from an American perspective, for an American audience, about foreign cultures (and with the exception of Italy, it is in fact from a white perspective, for a white audience, about non-white cultures). The end result is a self-congratulatory variety of superficial cultural awareness: it amounts to an exclamation of "I am emotionally and spiritually fulfilled because I have seen another way of life" which completely disregards actual identity of these regions. There is something unsettlingly dismissive about the way in which Gilbert treats the cultures she portrays. She loves them – but does she love them for what they actually are, or for what they do for her? 

Eat, Pray, self serve your own deluded sense of exceptionalism by vapidly examining a remarkably nuanced life.

Back when women were considerably more restricted than they are now, when a member of the fairer sex had to be content with not implicitly being considered property and could forget voting, or choosing her husband, an escape could be found (for those with means) in the travel literature that was gothic and romantic novels. Take as an e.g. The Mysteries of Udolpho whose rich description provide a tour guide across Italy as much as an real horror. Naturally, as some rights were won and the world became increasingly connected, this sort of writing was laid to rest but it’s been resurrected by Elizabeth Gilbert who, in Eat Pray Love puts a 21st century spin on the upper class white woman traveling to somewhere exotic, in this case Italy is only the first stop, and Indonesia is the final destination. However, the narrative form isn’t as dated as the category of the memoir itself. In lieu of pages describing mountains one is subjected to a sort of hardy sleeves-rolled-up-eyes-wide wonder that reaches for a pithy intimacy with which to lead the reader upon a journey to validate her own exceptionalism that simply must exist because she wears out so many men and she has the courage to do what her mother always wanted herself.

Perhaps the most notable way she propagates this form is by the constant promotion of the inexplicable. She first experiences something so transcendent that it defies description on the bathroom floor where God speaks to her (which, as an aside, inspires a cringeworthy page and a half about what she means by God, inexplicably founded in the supposition that the type of people who would kept Eat Pray Love on the NY Times bestseller list for a few hundred weeks would be so offended by the mention of God that they would put it down). It continues throughout the rest of the book, arguably with yours affectionately favorite moment being the passage in which she states “I walk through the markets of the crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can’t answer or explain as I watch an old guy in a black wool hat gut a fish for a customer” (Gilbert 113) followed shortly by a reference to Plato that begins a justification of the watered down Epicureanism Gilbert ascribed to before getting down to the really serious business of finding herself on a more “profound” level.

There’s a lot to say about this book because there’s a lot wrong with it. Where Wendt’s sentiments were a douse of cold water by way of introducing an entirely new perspective into a postcolonial world, Gilbert’s ostentatiously egomaniacal musings bring one’s blood to a boil by sheer drop off of writing ability (see by way of example, “a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior’ (Gilbert 10) or “What happened was I started to pray. You know-like, to God.” (Gilbert 12)). There isn’t though, room enough, for that kind of discussion. The primary point of this essay is to suggest that through her propensity for the inexplicable Gilbert falls into the same trap that got her stuck as an unhappy housewife, stuck in a soulless suburban hell. I.e., there’s a decided lack of nuance. She pretends to be examining her life but takes so many things on sheer faith, waiting for the world to unfold for her (and it does. Thank the heavens she isn’t poor or a minority) that what really seems to be occurring isn’t so much a change in worldview as a change in aesthetic. An aesthetic that’s considerably more palatable to her because, although it’s the eastern version of her decidedly privileged (though justifiably morose) western life, it’s exotic, it’s fresh and most importantly it confirms something for her that the whole journey set out to do. That is to say, it confirms how special she is, how remarkable and what a great example she is for all wealthy, discontent, white Americans whose real privilege would seem to lie in the fact that they can take things on faith. They can take wait for the world to unfold for them, in fact, if they spend enough money they can make it unfold for them. And they can ignore the thought that maybe they're an asshole surrounded by other assholes.
(Pardon the profanity).

Love and Balance

In her novel Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert embarks on the harrowing journey of rediscovery that plagues the middle age of the modern (wo)man. Her story starts with the divorce of her husband and the disintegration of the normalcy in her life. Thrown into a state of chaotic depression, she resolves to restore the balance in her life. This restoration manifests in the form of pilgrimage. She travels through Europe and Asia in a 3-part excursion that she separates into Eat, Pray, and Love.

            The ultimate goal for Gilbert is to find the love that was lost to her in the beginning of her tale. This search for love is quintessential to the journey of the middle life crisis. Love is symbolic of the balance that Gilbert seeks to rediscover. It is the cornerstone of one’s faith and it is within this love that one may find his stasis–his safe haven–and settle under love’s ceiling in their true home.

            The problem I have with this story is that Gilbert needs a male companion in order to reestablish the order in her life. I understand that it fulfills the love lost in the beginning of the book, but it detracts from the idea of self-fulfillment. I perhaps harkens on the idea of a complete human being being the union of a man and a woman (2 heads, 4 arms and legs). I understand why Gilbert wanted what she got, but I would’ve like this story much better if she was able to resolve her journey purely by her own power. Still, the quest for love requires compensation for that love and Gilbert found her answer when she moved back to the United States with her betrothed.