There is another progression that can be traced through these novels, too. Like The Tiger's Daughter and Wife, Jasmine uses the metaphor of a journey, in this case through three continents, to emphasize the distance Jasmine, and by extension all womankind, has to travel in search of her true self and freedom from the confines of a dominant patriarchal culture. In Jasmine Mukherjee's interest in the crisis of identity, while incorporating national and cultural identity, focusses primarily on gender issues, on the position of women as Other, alienated by the system of patriarchy from power structures and the right to self-determination. It is this aspect of the novel which I want to consider in this paper. To do that I want to approach Jasmine as a female bildungsroman, as a novel which specifically traces the development of a female protagonist from childhood through various experiences and crises, into maturity and, more importantly, her self-identity and place in the world.
Some critics argue that there is no such beast as a female bildungsroman.
I want to suggest, however, that the protagonist of this novel does grow up rather than down, and that Jasmine, like Jane Eyre, is a female bildungsroman. Indeed Charlotte Bront''s Jane Eyre, perhaps the most famous female bildungsroman, appears to provide a shadowy inspiration for Mukherjee's novel. But more importantly, the concept of independent womanhood contained in Bront''s novel is too difficult for her to understand. III Jasmine's birth in the village of Hasnapur, Jullundhar District, Punjab, India, is carefully stated to signpost her cultural identity. A daughter had to be married off before she could enter heaven, and dowries beggared families for generations.