Number 22 July 2000
Breaking the Borders of Gendered Space: Female Characters
in Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address and Bharati
Mukherjee's The Holder of the World
Katherine Miller
[G]endered space should be understood less as a geography imposed by patriarchal structures, and more as a social process of symbolic encoding and decoding that produces a series of homologies between [sic] the spatial, symbolic and social orders. The social construction of gender difference establishes some spaces as women's and others as men's; those meanings then serve to reconstitute the power relations of gendered identity. However, since the outcome of the decoding process can never be guaranteed, contestation and renegotiation of the meaning of space is also always possible. (Blunt and Rose 3)
In their novels, Aritha van Herk and Bharati Mukherjee create female characters who break beyond the boundaries imposed on them by their gender and also their race, class, and economic status. The similarities among the authors' female characters are all the more striking because of the different time/place locations of the novels. Mukherjee's Jasmine is a present-day account of the changing identities of a young Indian woman, who emigrates from India to America after the death of her husband. The Holder of the World, also by Mukherjee, is set in two different times, the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, and jumps between Puritan New England, present-day America, Britain, and India (past and present) in its account of a modern-day asset hunter's fascination with Hannah Prynne, the Salem Bibi. No Fixed Address, by van Herk, is the picaresque tale of a female Canadian rogue and her sexual escapades across Alberta and British Columbia. Yet despite the differences in setting, time, and subject, these novels share a similar approach to the "power relations of gendered identity." As Ann Henley suggests, "Women writers frequently represent loss of place as a heroine's initial step towards selfhood" (82); the characters in van Herk and Mukherjee's texts not only lose their initial place in the world, but also construct and reconstruct their identities in response to different places.
The main female characters in Jasmine, No Fixed Address, and The Holder of the World are both defined by and escape gendered space. Despite the differences in race, class, and economic status among Jasmine, Hannah, Bhagmati, and Arachne (to use their most recognizable names), they share many of the same strategies of resistance. All are associated with movement and shifting names/identities, rather than stasis and a fixed/imprisoning identity of home. All of them move beyond the protected circles of gendered space. All of them use both sexuality and violence in power struggles with dominant authorities. All of them die (literally and/or metaphorically) in order to move beyond restrictions that would fix them in place. Mukherjee and van Herk have created characters who are "sites of struggle" (Moi 132): none of these characters can be fixed in place. If "space is constituted through struggle over power/knowledge" (Blunt and Rose 5), the space these characters inhabit is constantly being renegotiated.
I. Home as Security
That place called home was never an unmediated experience.
(Massey, "A Place Called Home?" 164)
Doreen Massey postulates that the "most common formulations of the concept of geographical place associate it with stasis and nostalgia, and with an enclosed security" ("Place " 167). Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in their analysis of Minnie Bruce Pratt's essay, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" write that:
"Being home" refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; "not being home" is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. (196)
Michele Gunderson, in her analysis of Daphne Marlatt's poetry, writes about the physical and mental walls which settlers erect around their homes to protect identity: "the white Europeans' private hedges, the locked and bolted doors, the iron schedules of the houses are all walls the settlers erect as they live in 'armed defensiveness' (Marlatt 99)" (85). These analyses pose an interesting question for characters who are "not home"; if home (as a concept) is a place which is a "bounded enclosed space defined through counterposition against the Other who is outside" (Massey, "Place" 168), then none of the characters has a home. All four female characters are unwanted and/or violently removed from their homes. When Jasmine is born, her mother attempts to strangle her. Jasmine says, "When the midwife carried me out, my sisters tell me, I had a ruby-red choker of bruises around my throat and sapphire fingerprints on my collarbone" (J 40).1 The birth of a girl is unfortunate, and although Jasmine protests that her mother's act is one of compassion, the Western reader's reaction is likely to be the same as Wylie's, who "shriek[s] at [Jasmine's] foremothers" (J 40). Arachne's mother also wishes for a boy: "It [Arachne] was a girl with brown fuzz and a squeezed face. When the doctor told her, Lanie frowned. 'I wanted a boy,' she said, and regarded the infant critically" (NFA 84).2 Later, Arachne is thrown out of her house/home at nineteen. She accuses her mother of sleeping with Gabriel (for whom her mother reads tea leaves) and her father breaks her arm and throws her out: "When she hit the sidewalk, Arachne knew she had left home. She would not live with Toto and Lanie again. She limped to a phone booth and called her probation officer" (NFA 159). Bhagmati loses her home at the age of eleven, when she is raped by pirates and thrown into the river to drown. Although Bhagmati survives, her family disowns her, for "A dishonored Hindu girl couldn't go back home. To have been abused was to have brought shame to the family for its failure to protect her" (HW 223).3 Hannah also loses her home; when the Nipmuc warrior who is her mother's lover comes to them in the night, home is destroyed and Hannah's mother becomes Other. Hannah "wills the memory of this night away; she will orphan herself to that memory, deny its existence" (HW 30). The narrator of Hannah's story, Beigh Masters, suggests that Hannah may have a fixed version of home: "If she [Hannah] judged the world from a single unassailable place, it might have been from a forest in Brookfield before the expulsion from that New World Eden" (HW 104-105). The ambiguous language ("might have been") and the fact that Hannah "orphan[s] herself to that memory" make any definite reading of Hannah's idea of "home" problematic.4 Home is removed or destroyed for all of these women.
II. Home as Identity/ Identity as Other
"The conflation of home and self is one of the threads that runs through the examination of home" (George 19) in several disciplines. Rosemary George states that since the publication of Bachelard's "Poetics of Space," "the consensus seem to be that 'home' and 'non-home' are the basic divisions of geographic space, just as 'self' and 'non-self' or 'Other' represent the basic divisions of psychic space" (21). Gunderson asks: "Where is home? And what role does it play in the construction of self?" (75). Nalini Iyer argues that Mukherjee's novels examine "the need for immigrants to construct for themselves a narrative of home" (29) and stresses the way in which "location becomes a metaphor for self-fashioning" (30). What role does home play in the construction of self, especially in a self which is not identified with home?5
Arachne is not identified with home. Although she says to Thomas, "I belong where I am . . . . I'm nobody except an East End kid who can't do anything right" (NFA 135), she fights against this self-definition. When she lives in Calgary, it is in Thomas's house and he is the domestic: "she will not provide him with even a minimum of domestic service" (NFA 62). Arachne is identified as someone outside the symbolic order of home/identity:
There was nothing she could do about her difference, nothing to do but exploit it, call attention to the fact that she was crossing every boundary. It was a way of declaring herself, of drawing a line. She knew where she stood. Outside. (NFA 143).
Arachne stands outside the borders; her narrator calls her "a double agent, an escaped criminal who has survived by relying on what slender veneers are available" (NFA 141).
Jasmine also identifies herself with the "outside" in the symbolic binaries of home/non-home, self/Other. From the beginning of the novel, when Jasmine visits an astrologer who tells her to "Go join your sisters . . . a girl shouldn't be wandering here by herself" (J 4), Jasmine steps outside the defined spaces for her gender and race. On her trip to America, Jasmine describes herself as one of "the outcasts and deportees, visiting outlandish shrines" (J 100-101). Her status as a foreigner in Iowa is what makes her desirable; she says that "Bud wants me because I am alien. I am darkness, inscrutability, mystery" (J 200). Describing her moment of safety in the Ripplemeyer house, she says: "Out there . . . On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out there, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least, for now. Oh, the wonder, the wonder" (J 21). The wonder is that Jasmine and Du have temporarily been accepted into the "safe" world of America, but as Jasmine realizes, this temporary refuge is not home. If Bud had not been shot, Jasmine might have stayed: "I would have had a husband, a place to call home" (J 225). But Bud is shot and Jasmine does not remain with him. Jasmine, like Du, is from "out there" and both of them have fluid identities. Jasmine compares herself to Du: "Once upon a time, like me, he was someone else. We've been many selves" (J 214).
Hannah is described in similar terms to her intertextual parallel, Hester Prynne; both are women from another "sphere."6 Luther Luedtke writes of the significance of "spheres" in The Scarlet Letter: "Hester is enclosed in a sphere of her own nature that excludes her and Pearl from the community of Boston" (184). Hester's scarlet letter "had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity and inclosing her in a sphere by herself" (Luedtke 53-54). Hannah, like Hester, is not at home in her Puritan society: she is "a Person undreamed of in Puritan society. Of course she must suffer 'spells' and be judged an invalid. Outside agencies - - the devil, the forest, the Indians - - must be blamed" (HW 59). Hannah is identified with "outside"; like Hester, she is in a different "sphere" than the community around her. In India, Hannah rejects the walls which the other English inhabitants put up between themselves and the Other: "all the impractical trappings of English society . . . the first line in demarcation that separated an Englishman from a heathen" (HW 99). The English in India are as 'branded' by their Englishness as Hester Prynne was branded by her letter: "Even the young recruits of nineteen and twenty wore their Englishness as indelibly as a criminal in Salem had worn the branded letter of his sin: E for English, Extraordinary, Ethical" (HW 127). This state of over-defined identity cowering behind the walls of the "prison-house of capital" (Massey, "Political 136), this state of "armed defensiveness" (Marlatt 85), is foreign to van Herk and Mukherjee's female characters. Home as identity, a barrier against the Other, is problematic when a character defines herself as Other. In this case, home may become a prison.
III. Home as Prison
In several instances, the concept of home/identity is associated with imprisonment in the novels. Rosemary George captures this concept of home: "Homes are not about inclusions and wide open arms as much as they are about places carved out of closed doors, closed borders and screening apparatuses" (19). When Rebecca, Hannah's mother, leaves her home with her Nipmuc lover, she is described as "escap[ing] her prison, against prevailing odds that would have branded her" (HW 31). The branding would have been literal (an "I" for Indian lover) but also metaphoric; Rebecca escapes from both the home and the symbolic order which imprisoned her both as woman and lover. Physical houses become traps, and the care involved in a house becomes a sentence of imprisonment. When Thomas invites Arachne into his home, she hesitates: "He wants to reassure her that this is not a trap, he has no designs on her life" (NFA 116). Arachne, although she is capable of housework, refuses to do it unless Thomas isn't present: "Thomas usually takes care of that angle of life, but when he's not around, Arachne can experiment, refresh her sense of the horror of what she calls house arrest" (NFA 38).
Home becomes a symbol of imprisonment, either voluntary or involuntary, for Jasmine. While speaking of their plans for life in America, the feudal Jyoti/Jasmine says to her husband: "If you're there, I'll manage. When you're at work in America, I'll stay inside" (J 40). After her husband's death, Jasmine and her mother "live alone in the widow's dark hut, little better then Mazbis and Untouchables" (J 96). As Jasmine shifts identities, she becomes less tolerant of her imprisonment behind house walls. Jasmine experiences a form of "house arrest" when she lives with the Vadheras, who have "retired behind ghetto walls" (J 145). The Vadheras are experiencing the same type of identity/enclosure that Gunderson and Pratt describe, and which is similar to the English experience in India that Hannah rejects. Jasmine finds this security constricting: "I was spiralling into depression behind the fortress of Punjabiness . . . . An imaginary brick wall topped with barbed wire cut me off from the past and kept me breaking into the future. I was a prisoner doing unreal time" (J 148).
Like Jasmine, Bhagmati accepts confinement at some stages. She refuses to leave India with Hannah because she cannot conceive of life in England without Henry Hedges. He could have kept "foreignness at bay" (HW 224). Similarly, when she and Hannah are rescued by Jadav Singh, Bhagmati rejects Hannah's designation of their stay as "prisoners" (HW 218) in Panpur Fort, even though they are "protected by a steeply built-up embattlement, a brick wall and a moat" (HW 220). Bhagmati accepts these barriers because of her situation within her gender and race; although "English factors passed easily over . . . among locals the [religious and political] borders were strongly defended" (HW 220). Bhagmati is more restricted by her gender and race than the other characters; although she transgresses borders in some instances, at other times she upholds them.
Hannah experiences several versions of "house arrest." In the villages in which she spent her first years, "in Brookfield, in Stepney and Salem, a house was a barricade to stop encroachment. Outdoors was the prowling ground for Satan and his companions; indoors was furnished, tamed and therefore safe" (HW 118). Of course, the house cannot stop encroachment; during the siege of Brookfield, which Hannah endures in "a large, garrisoned house on a hill" (HW 36) several people are wounded or killed. Later, houses are again used to "protect" Hannah from the outside world. When she is living with her step-family, the Finches, they "hid her wild embroidery; they barred entreaties; they monitored every visitor" (HW 61). In London, Hannah lives alone in Stepney, where "she didn't travel often into the city, saw no plays, had few friends" (HW 74). In India, the Legges live in "the White Town, the Europeans-only walled enclave" (HW 117). Identity defined by exclusion becomes, in Pratt's image, "a bounded fortress that must be transgressed, shattered, opened" (Martin 197).
IV. Gendered Space
The concept of home as a prison ties in with the idea of gendered space. Doreen Massey writes:
From the symbolic meaning of spaces/places and the clearly gendered messages which they transmit, to straight forward exclusion by violence, spaces and places are not only themselves gendered but . . . also reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood. ("Introduction" 179)
If woman must live within the prison of home, her identity is therefore limited.7 The idea of place as a prison is metaphorically examined in The Holder of the World in the myth of Sita and in the parallels drawn between Hannah and Hester Prynne. The story of Sita is told to Hannah by Bhagmati. Sita was taken by Ravanna because she strayed outside of the white circle of protection. At this point in the story, Hannah thinks, "White Circle, White Town" (HW 175). Nalini Iyer points out the parallels between the tale of Sita and events in the lives of both Hannah and Bhagmati.8 The idea of a protected circle is repeated in the intertextual story of Hester Prynne, a woman who, like Bhagmati and Hannah, is outside her society. Rosemary George expresses both the limitations and the opportunities of a link between home and identity: "the physical and psychic spaces called 'home' serve as sites of both potential subversion and containment" (19). The space called home can contain characters but it can also be a site for resistance against the limiting definitions of home/non-home and self/Other.
One of the solutions to the potential containment is to destroy the house. Aritha van Herk advocates this position in her essay, "Women Writers and the Prairie." In her analysis of Robert Kroestch's "An Erotics of Space," van Herk disputes the link that Kroetsch appears to make between women and home:
Robert Kroetsch claims that 'the basic grammatical pair in the story-line (the energy-line) of prairie fiction is house: horse. To be on a horse is to move: motion into distance. To be in a house is to be fixed: a centering into stasis. Horse is masculine. House is feminine. (18)9
Van Herk argues that one of the solutions to the structuring of this set of binaries (house/horse, feminine/masculine, stasis/motion) is to "Destroy the house" ("Women" 15). When the house is destroyed, women must define their identity in some other way.
Another concept which restructures the limitations inherent in a link between home and identity is to redefine home/identity as a space which encompasses both self and Other, inside and outside. Don McKay writes that "Home makes possible the possession of the world, the rendering of the other as one's interior" (132). The same concept is expressed in Jasmine: "The villagers say when a clay pitcher breaks, you see that the air inside it is the same as outside" (J 15). When the borders between inside and outside, self and Other are breached, the "fortress" of identity is opened. The image of home becomes that of Hannah's house in India: "the house she was to live in . . . was built to entice crystal-bright tropical starlight, spume-scented breezes, bugs birds and butterflies through its huge barred windows" (HW 119). No longer a prison of identity, home becomes a site which invites the outside in. Borders become porous.
V. Nomadism
Nomadism (or "the ideologically subversive stance which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Fuattari refer to as 'nomadology'" (Goldman 22)) offers the characters a way of redefining themselves and their relationship to home/space. For example, "Arachne's wanderings can be aligned with van Herk's desire to expand 'the borders of the regions we inhabit as women'" (Goldman 28). In Goldman's analysis, Arachne becomes a "nomadic warrior" (27) who, like other characters in van Herk's fictions, "explore[s] alternative relationships between women and place - - relationships based, not upon the capture and mastery of the landscape, but upon the impulse towards deterritorialization" (22). Borders are the areas for transgression, the area where identities change and gendered space becomes porous. The three main characters (Jasmine, Hannah, and Arachne) are described as escaping the borders of known space.
Samir Dayal describes Jasmine's actions as "desperately selfish nomadism, a continual urge to 'homelessness' and exile that is at the same time an inturned modality, the preservation of a precarious and interminably mutable sense of self" (75). Nomadism and a "mutable sense of self" are linked; Dayal writes that Jasmine "becomes a perpetual nomad and hybrid in the most radical sense; she shuttles between differing identities" (77). Jasmine sees America as a place where "Nothing was rooted anymore. Everything was in motion" (J 152). Unlike Professor Vadhera, who rejects this fluidity and retains his idea of his "real life [which] was in an unlivable land across oceans" (J 153), Jasmine welcomes change and movement. Describing one moment of shifting identities, she says: "I changed because I wanted to. To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in a bulletproof vest, was to be a coward . . . I bloomed from a diffident alien with forged documents into adventurous Jase" (J 186). Each of her different identities occurs in a different space - - India, Florida, New York, Iowa, and the final movement towards the West - - as nomadism and identity-shifting become linked. Jasmine welcomes movement and change: "I realize I have already stopped thinking of myself as Jane. Adventure, risk, transformation: the frontier is pushing indoors through uncaulked windows" (J 240).
Hannah makes choices throughout the novel that permit her to travel. Her marriage to Gabriel allows her to leave Salem; the marriage also links her with a man who is Other. Beigh Masters list reasons why Hannah would marry Gabriel and wonders if it was "[u]nconscious imitation of her mother, a way of joining her by running off with a treacherous alien?" (HW 69). While in London, Hannah is described as being "tired of waiting at home, of not bestirring herself in the rich new world opening at every hand" (HW 86). When she lands in India, her first action is to stroll down the beach and the narrator believes that, if not for the presence of Higginbottham, "Hannah would have kept on strolling, that on her very first morning on the Coromandel she would have made good her escape into the 'forest'" (HW 109). The jungle holds no fears for her; she does not "fear the unknown or the unexplored" (HW 104). In Fort St. Sebastian, Hannah "walked the streets and even the back lanes of Black Town, just as she had walked in Salem" (HW 132). The conventional boundaries of gendered space do not limit Hannah.
Arachne is a travelling saleswoman, a profession which is "antithetical to the type of fixed existence which women are encouraged by the State to adopt" (Goldman 28). When Arachne leaves the structured grid of Vancouver for the first time, she is described as being "giddy with travel. She has never driven the Mercedes on a highway, always in town . . . She is wild. If it weren't for the presence of this polite young man, she would explode, drive faster and faster until she vanished" (NFA 97). At the end of the novel, Arachne vanishes into the north, "the ultimate frontier, a place where the civilized melt away and the meaning of mutiny is unknown, where manners never existed and family backgrounds are erased" (NFA 316). The last image of Arachne situates her on a road with no end. The narrator states: "There is no end to the panties; there will be no end to this road" (NFA 319). As Goldman writes: "No Fixed Address develops a link between the unmapped northern landscape and the cognitive space where women can plot radical alternatives to traditional representations of female identity" (30).
VI. Power
Characters who embrace nomadism so that they can "plot radical alternatives to traditional representations of female identity" are attempting to break out of existing power-structures, "to destabilize traditional modes of conceiving identity as unified and masculine" (Goldman 23). Goldman argues that "Foucault's view of the dynamics of power" does not offer the possibility for "social and individual transformation" (22). However, Barry Smart, in his analysis of Michel Foucault's work, writes: "relations of power are clearly implicated in the 'techniques of the self' through which individuals form and transform themselves, constitute and modify their very being, their thoughts, conduct and bodies" (94). The differences among the four characters in the ways in which they transform their identities are related to the differing power structures (related to gender, but also race, class and economic status) within which the characters define themselves.
Jane M. Jacobs points out that "all negotiations of identity are located within very specific hierarchies of power and particular political and economic frames" (28). Jasmine, as a poor, Indian girl, has little power outside of her will and beauty. As Brinda Bose says of Mukherjee's "twice-marginalized" (47) ethnic female characters, "Negotiating power from the margins is a tricky proposition" (61). Although the reader may have problems accepting the many transformations of Jyoti-Jasmine-Jase-Jane,10 Jasmine does impose her will on her life. She says, "I know what I don't want to become" (J 5) and throughout the novel she defines herself though her desire. While suffering house imprisonment with the Vadheras, she asks: "Can wanting be fatal?" (J 142). In the final sentence of the novel, Jasmine says she is "greedy with wants and reckless from hope" (J 241). Jasmine's desire to change transcends all of the limitations imposed by her race, class and gender.
Bhagmati, like Jasmine, is "twice-marginalized." Nalini Iyer, speaking of the differences between Hannah and Bhagmati's experiences, stresses that "identity formation for a native woman and an immigrant woman are different because of cultural location and racial identity rather than similar because of their shared identity as women" (38-9). Bhagmati cannot choose, as Hannah does, to transgress boundaries. She is more dependent upon the protection of others: "She trusted absolutely Hedges' ability to keep foreignness at bay, just as she trusted Raja Singh to keep her safe" (HW 224). Bhagmati is a servant for most of the narrative; as a servant, she is "invisible to the women of White Town" (HW 133). Doreen Massey writes that "Ethnicity and gender, to mention only the two most obvious axes, are also deeply implicated in the ways in which we inhabit and experience space and place" ("Place" 164); Bhagmati is 'erased' by her race, class, and gender. Race, class, and gender all define and limit Bhagmati's identity.
In Hannah, Mukherjee has created a woman who is marginalized primarily by gender. She can choose to have an affair with Jadav Singh, unlike Bhagmati who is constrained by economic and ethnic factors in her relationship with Henry Hedges. In India, Hannah has the same faith as Tringham in her status as a white person: as Beigh Masters explains, "Hannah had Tringham's faith. Nothing could happen to her, not from alien enemies" (HW 244). This faith explains why Hannah can envision stopping the war: "Only a person who thought she was God Almighty could have struck out through the jungles of India at night . . . [to] the battle tent of the Great Mughal" (HW 259-60). Her identity as a white woman both protects and circumscribes her; she can challenge the Great Mughal and live, but she has no power over him: "She'd trusted in her 'firangi' status, and while it gained her a hearing and allowed her to keep her ears, tongue and head . . . her message [of peace] had failed" (HW 270). Hannah's particular situation as a white woman in seventeenth-century India both limits and empowers her.
Arachne is marginalized by both her gender and her class. When she meets Thomas's parents, Arachne "sees herself a swarthy peasant without stockings or shoes, dressed in cast-offs, unable to manage the simplest tools, illiterate, unsocialized" (NFA 131). Although Thomas teaches her how to act and dress, Arachne sees herself as an imposter: "It was not possible to escape the disdainful world. She had no tools and she didn't know how to get them" (NFA 124). But Arachne does find tools to break out of her marginalized space, and these tools include sexuality and violence.
VII. Sexuality
All of the women transgress sexual boundaries and by doing so they cross the borders between self and Other. Hannah and Bhagmati (like Sita) step outside gendered space (Sita's circle of protection) and become involved with men outside of their culture (much as the narrator, Beigh Masters, does in her deliberate choosing of affairs with Other men, with whom "the codes were different" (HW 33)). Bhagmati becomes the mistress of Henry Hedges; Hannah becomes the "white bibi" of Jadav Singh. There is a further link between Hannah's transgression and her mother's: "Hannah's rescue by Jadav Singh is also the point at which she consciously crosses racial boundaries, and like her mother, Rebecca, takes a lover from another culture" (Iyer 38). Jasmine defines her different identities by the different men she is with: "I have had a husband for each of the women I have been. Prakash for Jasmine, Taylor for Jase, Bud for Jane. Half-Face for Kali" (J 197). Sexuality becomes a means of both identification and transgression.
Arachne is "a sexually casual, itinerant trickster" (Goldman 27) who uses sex to keep herself amused. But sex is more than amusement in No Fixed Address; Arachne is not only a black widow spider who "devours" her partners.11 She is also crossing several borders in her choice of sexual encounters. She sleeps with a black pianist (NFA 66-74), in an encounter that inverts standard associations of race/class (the pianist is the one who is privileged). When "she flaunts social convention that relegates the elderly to asexual limbo, and has a passionate affair with Joseph, a coppersmith who is almost ninety" (Goldman 29), her border-crossing incorporates aspects of the destruction of homes and identification with the Other. Joseph, when Arachne liberates him from the hospital, complains: "'They tie me at night. Like a baby's crib, the sides'" (NFA 226). Later, Arachne and Joseph lie side by side, exchanging the stories of their lives:
Words, a language where they do not have to dissemble because the speaker cannot see the other's eyes, words disembodied, not layering to voices without face of body. It is the narration of captives who lie awake between their sleeping guards relating experience, why they are both prisoner, their private acts of revolution. (NFA 227)
Both characters are resisting the imprisonment of their lives. Arachne recognizes herself in Joseph: "she recognizes a chord of the same bitter displacement that she remembers tasting. East-ender Raki shredded by her own time and place" (NFA 228). Sexual union becomes identification through the Other, a concept which van Herk captures in Joseph's layered comment, "Ujedinienje ili Smrt. Union or Death" (NFA 228). This political slogan mirrors the stages the female characters go through in their quests to move beyond the borders which imprison them. In a more extreme example, Arachne has a one-night stand with a woman who is her doppelganger (NFA 272-77). And, in an audacious narrative moment, she sleeps with the ghost of a drowned airman (NFA 296-99). Arachne's sexual encounters are both an inversion of the sexual stereotype of the male predator and a means of erasing boundaries between male/female, black/white, self/Other, young/old, and alive/dead. All of these binaries are invoked and the borders between them are broken.
VIII. Violence
"Violence is the other face of power; gaining an understanding of it involves grasping the play - - and the staging - - of power structures, particularly in the post-colonial diasporic context" (Dayal 65). Violence is another tool which Arachne and the other characters use in their power struggles to escape from gendered space. Arachne, as a "city rat"(NFA 192) in Vancouver, forms a gang called "the Black Widows" (NFA 191); when her gang is insulted for including girls, she "streaked forward, knocked the leader to his knees . . . [and] held his head back by his hair, a double-bladed throwing knife she had stolen from an Army surplus store at his throat" (NFA 192). In two instances, as a member of the gang and as an adult, Arachne knocks out (and potentially kills) a male who has robbed her (NFA 193, 268). And, like Jasmine and Hannah, Arachne is a murderer. The deaths of the male characters are described in remarkably similar terms. Jasmine kills her rapist with the knife that Kingsland has given her: "I pulled the bedspread off the bed and threw it over him and then began stabbing wildly through the cloth, as the human form beneath it grew smaller and smaller" (J 119). Hannah also kills with a knife:
Hannah thrust the long dagger she'd hidden in the fold of her sari into the exposed flesh under Morad Farah's battle tunic, through the muscles and organs, back across to the spine itself. Even his scream was cut short, barely an in-suck of breath, barely the registering of pain and death from an unexpected source [my emphasis]." (HW 249)
Arachne kills a man who attempts to sexually assault her on the ferry to Vancouver Island: "She jabs the hatpin into his chest, deep into his heart, her thrust stopped only by the red jewel at the end. The man coughs once and tumbles to the deck, his relentless arms pulling her down" (NFA 286-87). Dayal writes that "Violence demystifies stability and identity for Jyoti, eventually disabusing her of her craving for stability . . . in violent destruction may lie the seeds of creation" (71). Arachne, Hannah and Jasmine do not hesitate to use violence, either to preserve their own life or to protect the lives of others; through destruction, they re-create themselves.
IX. Death/Rebirth
All of the women die to their old homes/identities, sometimes several times. Jasmine, who has several incarnations and several names, describes her transformations as murder. She says: "There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we are so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams" (J 29). Jasmine's feudal self dies when she incinerates her husband's suit and the sari she was going to immolate herself in: "Jyoti was now a sati-goddess; she had burned herself in a trash can-funeral pyre behind a boarded-up motel in Florida" (J 176). Jyoti becomes Jasmine who becomes Jase. Jasmine acknowledges her American self as a rebirth: "Today I had been reborn" (J 163). Near the end of the novel, Jasmine wonders: "How many more shapes are in me, how many more selves, how many more husbands?" (J 215). Identity for Jasmine is fluid, constantly dying and being reborn.
Bhagmati begins her life as Bindu Bashini. She is renamed after she refuses to die when she is raped and thrown into the river: "Individual effort thwarted divine fate. She had neither wanted to, nor known how to drown" (HW 223). For her survival, her relatives disown her. She becomes a kitchen worker for Henry Hedges, who renames her Bhagmati "- - his name for her, for her reborn self" (HW 224). In death, Bhagmati becomes Hester Hedges, in whose remains Beigh Masters believes the "world's most perfect diamond lies" (HW 284). Bhagmati is the only character who literally dies, a fact that could be attributed to her status as "twice a victim" (HW 223), disempowered by both race and gender.
Hannah also takes on different names and identities. In the palace of Jadav Singh, Hannah thinks of her mother's "embracing of the wilderness" (HW 223) and realizes that Rebecca "must have taken a Nimpuc name. A new name for a new incarnation. Rebecca Easton was dead. Hannah Easton Fitch Legge was dying" (HW 223). While living in the palace of Jadav Singh, Hannah and Bhagmati give each other new names. Hannah becomes "Mukta, Bhagmati's word for 'pearl'" (HW 271). Iyer suggests that "Mukherjee is indicating that identities are fluid and not overdetermined by sex or race" (41). Hannah accepts the idea of fluid identities; she says to Jadav Singh, "I was once a respectable married English lady and look at me now - - a bibi in a sari. We can all change" (HW 256). As a "bibi," Hannah realizes "she was no longer the women she'd been in Salem and London" (HW 234). When she travels to the tent of the Great Mughal, it is "her Christian-Hindu-Muslim self, her American-English-Indian self, her orphaned, abandoned, widowed pregnant self" (HW 268) who makes the journey. Like Jasmine, who describes herself as "cocooning a cosmos" (J 224), Hannah contains worlds within herself; she is literally the holder of the world.
Arachne shifts identities and states of being. When she wishes to get a paper route as a child, she gets her hair cut and changes her name:
"All right," Toto said on the way downtown. "You're a boy and you're twelve years old, got it?"
"What's my name?"
"Raki. Who the hell knows the difference?"
(NFA 178)
Arachne takes on a male identity to gain her desire. She also shifts between life and death. In the chapter called "Ferryman" in No Fixed Address, Arachne finds herself on a ferry to Vancouver Island, with no clear memories of the last three months. H. Lutz and J. Hindersmann show the intertextual link to Greek myth: "Returning to her Mercedes after having stabbed the 'ferryman,' who in Greek mythology stands for "Death," Arachne realizes she is alive. The fugu did not kill her, yet it caused a metamorphosis" (19). The ferryman is not actually "Death" but Charon, the keeper of the border between life and death; by killing the ferryman, Arachne destroys this border. Lutz and Hindersmann argue that "Arachne does not cross the water, at least not in terms of the classical crossing of the River Styx" (20). But Arachne does cross over to Vancouver Island and then comes back again; metaphorically, she does die and return: "I died, she thinks. I'm dead. I was eating fugu. It can kill you" (NFA 285). Whether she is now alive or dead is no longer clear. Her narrator reads in a newspaper that Arachne has died; Thena disputes this and sniffs, "Pack of lies" (NFA 239). Arachne comes to the "the edge; not end but edge, the border, the brink, the selvage of the world" (NFA 291). Marlene Goldman cites Stephen Scobie's comment that "the most radical subversion of traditional representation consists in the refusal of representation itself" (30).12 On the other side of the border, Arachne has sex with drowned men (NFA 296-99) and vanishes into the Arctic, "driving slow and careful, face forward and absorbed, headed into nowhere" (NFA 318). Arachne drives into "'four dimensional nothingness' (which may be the North, it may be death, it may be the space of fiction" (Howells 122); she becomes a missing person with no fixed address.
The female characters in Jasmine, The Holder of the World, and No Fixed Address all escape from the fixed identity associated with self/home and move beyond the boundaries of gendered space. Bharati Mukherjee and Aritha van Herk use many of the same techniques to create female characters who are continually changing their identities. Although Jasmine, Arachne and Hannah (and Bhagmati) are constrained, to differering degrees, by gender, race, and class, they transgress the borders of home, identity, sexuality, violence and even death. Their identities become fluid; the spaces they inhabit are continually being challenged and renegotiated.
NOTES
1. All further references are to Bharati Mukherjee's. I will use the initial J for brevity.
2. All further references are to Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address: an amorous journey. I will use the initials NFA for brevity.
3. All references are to Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. I will use the initials HW for brevity.
4. Unlike Arachne, Jasmine, or Bhagmati, Hannah does return to and stay in the general area of her birth. Also, when asked where she is from, she says to Raja Jadav Singh: "England is not my home. My home is America" (HW 255) and then makes the leap to "My mother. I must see my mother." Hannah's statement could be attributed to Mukherjee's desire to rewrite immigrant history into the American canon and associate Hannah with Hester Prynne. (See Alam Fakrul's discussion of The Holder of the World and the analysis of Mukherjee's stated intention in writing this book). Hannah as an individual character seems to disappear from the book after the scene in virtual reality; the ending is, in some ways, anti-climactic. Would a nomadic character like Hannah return to Puritan society and live out the rest of her life there? Perhaps.
5. See Rosemary George's analysis of Douglas Porteous's definition of home. For all of the female characters in these novels, George's deconstruction of Porteous's definition of home and her assertion that "Read, for instance, alongside accounts of child abuse and other forms of domestic violence, Porteous's definition . . . takes on terrifying proportions" (21) is equally enlightening.
6. Mukherjee draws several parallels between Hannah and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. Both women are noted for their embroidery. Both are "outside" their communities. And, of course, Mukherjee rewrites the American canon by claiming that Hannah was Hester: "Who can blame Nathaniel Hawthorne for shying away from the real story of the brave Salem mother and her illegitimate daughter?" (HW 285).
7. An analysis of the restrictive/liberating nature of clothing in all three novels would provide more depth into the link between the formulation of identity (this time through the body) and restrictions on female movement. See, for example, van Herk's opening section on the restricitive nature of underwear and the descriptions of Arachne's clothing in No Fixed Address for the connection between clothing and the imprisonment of women's bodies: "It was a long time taken for granted that women's body should be prisoner, taped and measured and controlled" (10). In The Holder of the World, there is the description of Rebecca "peel[ing] her white, radiant body out of the Puritan widow's somber bodice and skirt as a viper shed skin before wriggling into the bush" (HW 29) and putting on "something new and Indian and clean to wear" (HW 29); Hannah's adoption of the sari while in the palace of Jadav Singh and her forced wearing of 'modest' clothing while in the court of the Great Emperor. Jasmine associates different clothing with different identities, so that "Jase was a woman who bought herself spangled heels and silk chartreuse pants" (J 176) while the widow Jyoti must wear "plain saris and salwar-kameez outfits" (J 144). However, that is another essay entirely.
8. Iyer also notes the points of difference, both between the two characters and the mythical Sita, and between Hannah and Bhagmati: "An important distinction between Sita and Hannah and Bhagmati is that neither Hannah nor Bhagmati abstained from forbidden sexual relationships, whereas the mythical Sita's chastity is a dominant cultural trope in the patriarchal Hindu culture" (Iyer 38). And, as Iyer points out, although Bhagmati does not abstain from a "forbidden" relationship, she has fewer choices than Hannah: "Bhagmati's rape disempowers her in a culture that values virginity and chastity, whereas Hannah chooses [my emphasis] to break social norms concerning interracial relationships and the power of women to choose their sexual partners" (38).
9. Thank you to Jennifer Andrews for her comment that Aritha van Herk's novels can be read as a response to Robert Kroestch's fiction. No Fixed Address is clearly a response to Kroetsch's "The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space" with its (presumed) binaries of "male/female, horse/house." See J.R. Snyder's article, "A Map of Misreading" in Studies in Canadian Literature18.1, for an argument that Kroetsch's article has been misinterpreted by critics as being "prescriptive of Kroetsch's conception of male-female relationships rather than descriptive of the relationships discerned in previous prairie fiction" (1). Arachne both transcends gender boundaries (her "1959 Mercedes" becomes her horse) and "destroys the house."
If van Herk's novel is also a "writing back" to Kroestsch's novels, Arachne could be the female counterpart of Hazard Lepage in The Studhorse Man (the female version of "the traditional male rogue" (Goldman 27)) or Jeremy Sadness in Gone Indian (a character who, like Arachne, disappears into the landscape at the end of the novel). However, I would argue that van Herk is doing more than inscribing female versions of male protagonists in her novels.
10. See Brinda Bose (58) and Gurleen Grewal's article for discussions of the problems surrounding Jasmine's quick transformations.
11. H. Lutz and J. Hindersmann draw several parallels between Arachne's name and her status as a sexual predator, a "black widow" spider.
12. Goldman also mentions Scobie's analysis of the fusion between "the plotting of identity and the plotting of landscape" and the significance of the word "selvage."
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