Female Embodiment In Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

This thesis interprets Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Miss New India by applying the theories of the Corporeum proposed by Renee Dickinson. It attempts to reveal the female embodiment in the text, namely, how the female, national and geographical bodies have been inscribed by the patriarchal system and imperial rule, and to find how the textual body is employed by the author to provide a space for the protagonist to meditate on her subjectivity and identity through narrative techniques.The theories of the Corporeum combine the feminist, eco-critical, postcolonial and poststructural theories to analyze the modernist women writers’ fiction. The female, national and geographical bodies all have boundaries, which are demarcated by the patriarchal system and imperial rule in the case of the colonized countries. Within the demarcation, they are inscribed, imposed on identities, and totally essentialized. If a woman refuses to accept the enforced identity, she will be exiled from the patriarchal system. The textual body is like the female body since the act of writing is to fill the empty paper and to endow the physical, national and geographical bodies of the characters and places in the text with identities, which are often in accord with the patriarchal system, as is shown in male writers’ works. But women writers use new narrative techniques to write back, and construct women’s identity within the textual body.This thesis consists of introduction, conclusion and five chapters. In the Introduction, Bharati Mukherjee and her writing career are introduced, and previous Mukherjee scholarship is presented. Chapter One explicates how the theories of Corporeum are constructed. Chapter Two mainly explains how the Indian patriarchy inscribes femininity upon women through their physical bodies, and how the protagonist Anjali in this novel refuses to accept her complicit corporeality with Indian patriarchy, and thus rejects the enforced identities on her by breaking up the boundary, so as to be an exile. Chapter Three argues that, in the same logic, a nation has also been feminized through its affiliation with women in its productivity and maternity, for the sake of patriarchal and imperial rules. Chapter Four illustrates America’s neocolonial rule over India by feminizing the nation in the global context. Chapter Five explores how the author employs the textual body to create subjectivity and identity for the protagonist. The conclusion of this thesis points out that, in the rapidly changing India in the global context, the way out for the young girl is to pursue independence and happiness bravely, even if their efforts may fail.