Content area
Full text
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN'S 1892 short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," has been an urtext of American feminism since its 1973 republication by the Feminist Press. Nonetheless, celebrations of Gilman's naturalist story too often ignore the extent to which the gender oppression it depicts is raced and classed. Published over a hundred years later, Bharati Mukherjee's 1989 novel Jasmine would seem to address the very issues that Gilman ignores.1 Instead of being driven mad by patriarchy, Jasmine's illegal immigrant protagonist escapes from India to the United States where she is allowed to take control of her destiny and "become an American."2 While Gilman's tale of a privileged white woman's descent into madness may serve as an allegory for many Anglo-American Second Wave feminists, Jasmine seemingly offers a happier narrative of feminist development - one that does not end in madness and one that is ostensibly available to all.3 As anyone who has read Jasmine will realize, however, its happy ending is brought about through a largely uncritical narrative of assimilation. Just as Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" depends on a race- and class-specific account of patriarchal oppression, Jasmine models a form of US exceptionalism (as the protagonist's westward trajectory suggests) with an exclusionary feminist twist; although Jasmine is successful in freeing herself of the marks of difference that would trouble her accession into the United States, her experience does not apply to most immigrant women.
Both works, moreover, display a distinctly racial logic. I will use the concept of "eugenic feminism" to describe this logic and argue that a coherent feminist subjectivity in both "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Jasmine can only be forged by rejecting all racial and ethnic difference.4 For Gilman, the problem of creating a feminist self is a potentially maddening process of freeing that self from her color, one that is too easily betrayed by the messiness of biological and cultural reproduction itself. Likewise, to "become American" in Mukherjee's novel means employing a purifying process similar to that upon which Gilman's story turns. As such, eugenic feminism shapes an identity in negative terms, repeatedly returning to raced and classed others to define them as precisely what must be abjected in order for a "pure" feminist subject to emerge. In this essay I read Jasmine as...