Examining The Phenomenon Of Objectness To Thingness In Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

Abstract

The epistemological and ontological construction of subjects and objects in the human world shapes various cultures. Every nation narrates its own culture that is constituted by multiple objects and human subjects. The movement of both subjects and objects from one domain to other initiates a new paradigm in literary and critical discourses. The philosophical, intellectual, and literary structure of the present study includes the dialectical relation between animate world and inanimate world. The animate world consisting human subjects is studied through the fundamental concept of self as the point of origin and the inanimate world of objects is analyzed through the fundamental concept of thing. The journey of ‘becoming’ a subject and an object encompasses the process of subjectification, subjectivization, objectification, and interpellation. The formation of a subject and an object, thus, takes them away from the sublime unity from which they arose. The development of self through factors that affects, conditions, and constructs it into a subject is reflected by the diachronic and synchronic study of Empiricism, Structuralism, Cognitivism, Rationalism, and Pragmatism. The study explores and exposes a running parallelism between the factors affecting self and thing which transform them both into interpellated, signified, pre-established, and fractured identities of subject and objects respectively. It examines this process through Thing Theory, developed by American theorist Bill Brown. The phenomenological bracketing of objects in ordinary conditions expose their power and potency over human subjects. At the same time objects seem to reflect different relation in the event of Diaspora. The present study examines through thing theory the refashioned and ambiguous relation between subjects and objects in the condition of cultural shift i.e. Diaspora. Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989) deals with the objectification of Jasmine, the protagonist of the novel, and her ultimate progression towards her thingness in diasporic conditions. The paper intends to examine the process of  subjectivization and objectification of Jasmine is through seven key characteristics conceptualised by Martha Nussbaum that quintessentially verify the transformation of a human subject into an object..