Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.13
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9103-6493This paper compares narrative voice and constrained agency in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter and Jasmine. Building on established accounts of her movement from expatriate to immigrant writing, it examines how third-person irony and first-person self-interpretation represent female diasporic identity. Close readings of Tara’s Vassar experience and confinement, and of Jasmine’s naming, bodily trauma, and reliance on personal networks, show that both protagonists negotiate continuity and change. The third-person narrator conveys Tara’s thoughts while qualifying her self-understanding; Jasmine narrates her successive roles while navigating gendered and material constraints. Drawing on Mohanty, Spivak, Hall, and Bhabha, the analysis distinguishes access to a character’s thoughts and interpretations from the practical freedom to act. This comparison qualifies a simple opposition between expatriate immobility and immigrant liberation by examining how class, gender, and legal status shape the possibilities of agency.
Baghel, Tanuja. “Narrative Voice and Female Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter and Jasmine.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 190-206, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.13.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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