Analysis: Female Subjects and Negotiating Identities
This essay
from Bahareh Bahmanpour regarding Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, focused on stories surrounding female
characters as opposed to males. The stories contain suffering, adaptation, and
negotiating their identities through “silence, resistance, negotiation,
acculturation or assimilation.” (Bahmanpour, 44). The strength women played in a cultural role
was discussed in “This Blessed House”, The Treatment of Bibi Hledar”, “Mrs. Sen”,
and “Sexy” provides interpretation focused on identity and provides a voice to
these diasporic females in a post-colonial setting.
Providing a
background of identity, stating that they are “conceived as a process”
(Bahmanpour, 45) rather than fixed as we know it, Bahmanpour provides the idea that
identity is a process not just to be a representation of oneself. Since our
identity can be an ongoing process, understanding boundaries could provide a
focus for which Lahiri does in her works. Such as in the sixth story of “This
Blessed House”. The character, Twinkle, a young wife who moved into a new house
in America with her husband. She is considered a second generation Indian where
she is ethnically Indian but culturally American. This story displays the
hybridity where she lacks traditional Indian cultural knowledge, willingness to
adapts all while display solid confidence for which her husband cannot
comprehend providing fluidity traveling effortlessly from one culture to the
other as see needs.
In “The Treatment of Nibi Haldar”
the setting is in India with a theme of anxiety of the globalization of Indian
women who is essentially homeless. Bibi is sick, received treatment without
results, she longed for a normal life yet no one took her for their wife. She
ends up living alone, happy, and gave birth to a son after she is mysteriously
cured. Bibi negotiated between gender identity and ethnic codes established in
her community she wanted to belong to, although she felt out of place. She
became a mother without a wife, in this manner displayed the hybrid nature of
identity.
“Mrs. Sen’s” is a story for which
she is the caretaker , she expounds on her past, each detail creating her
identity to Eliot, an eleven-year-old boy. As a self-described first generation
immigrant, she found it difficult to adapt to her new surroundings as she could
not remove her own cultural background and values. She takes a massive step to
drive, thus proving her independence and to soothe loneliness and alienation
she felt being far from her family. She
faced her fears in order to show to release past trauma is to gradually release
her fears.
Lastly, in “Sexy”, Miranda is an American young woman
from Boston in an affair with a married Indian man. She is thrilled with the
fascination with Indian culture and tried to learn more about it. The man she
has an affair with is not as invested in sharing his cultural identity beyond
their conquest; therefore her search for the cultural other isn’t complete.
In
closing, the female characters in Lahiri’s works provide their own voice in
order to display their identity in each quest to develop them.
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