A strong female spirit pervades Chitra Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices to the extent that no part of the narrative may be perceived as gender free. The novel thus serves as suitable grist for the feminist narratological mill. Divakaruni’s identity as a woman engineers the telling of the tale. She accommodates all voices, and functions as the deus ex machina that controls the end of all stories. Her exclusive experience becomes the medium for metaphor, message and theme. Divakaruni uses magic realism as a natural mode of expression to build a metaphor with feminist potential. In straddling two worlds, Tilo becomes a metaphor for the post-colonial expatriate experience of cultural displacement. Via the same metaphor, Divakaruni is also able to restructure the stereotype, and so re-present the female magic-user, not as a witch, but as a kindly figure who may break the rules, and yet function as an agent of rightful social change. Again, the same image helps Divakaruni to build on her “otherness” only to subsequently erase it so as to usher in a boundary less world. Yet again Tilo becomes the vehicle by way of which Divakaruni explodes the beauty myth. Again, it is in her person that she carries the potential for rebellion against stereotypes. In effect when Divakaruni writes, she bullies the woman from the periphery to the centre, communicates effectively through image, metaphor, inversion and innuendo to paint a world where the borders of water-tight compartments coalesce into one another to create a borderless world.

Keywords: Feminist narratology, Magic realism, Metaphor, Inversion, Stereotype.