NOTES

1. All further references are to Bharati Mukherjee's. I will use the initial J for brevity.
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2. All further references are to Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address: an amorous journey. I will use the initials NFA for brevity.
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3. All references are to Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. I will use the initials HW for brevity.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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.
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10. See Brinda Bose (58) and Gurleen Grewal's article for discussions of the problems surrounding Jasmine's quick transformations.
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11. H. Lutz and J. Hindersmann draw several parallels between Arachne's name and her status as a sexual predator, a "black widow" spider.
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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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