The Interpreter of Maladies “Mrs. Sen's”

1. Migration and Diaspora Finding Community English 1102 Spring 2014 The Interpreter of Maladies“Mrs. Sen's”

2. The Author: Jhumpa Lahiri • Indian-American • She is a relatively new author. • Her first short story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. • She has published 4 works (2 novels and 2 story collections): The Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. • She focuses on the following themes in her writing: culture clashes, generational divides, the immigrant experience, and alienation.

3. Her Work • “Maladies,” as a collection, focuses on characters that struggle with: • cultural alienation, or not feeling as though they “belong” in a new nation • crossing national borders • Finding community and longing for “home” • In a nutshell: she examines how it feels to be a foreigner in America.

4. Important Concepts • Diaspora: the dispersion of a culture into other nations and societies. • Migration: the either willful or forced exodus to another nation. • Borders: these are both the physical and symbolic lines that divide us culturally, socially, etc. • Alienation: feeling as though one doesn't belong in the society they either live in or have migrated into; often one is isolated from everyone including his/her native culture.

5. Immigrant/Migrant: person who travels from one country to another • Subaltern: the “other” or someone who is “not like us.” He/she is often devalued, subjugated, and faces prejudice and fear by dominant culture. • Assimilation • Hybridity

6. The Basics • Characters • Mrs. Sen & Mr. Sen • Eliot • Eliot's Mother • India • Fish market • Setting • Style • Word-choice • Imagery • Tone

7. What's going on: • Mrs. Sen has moved from India with her husband to live in a small university apartment where he works (112). • She babysits Eliot, a local boy, to fill her days of silence. • Mrs. Sen and Eliot fall into a contented routine, a far cry from his own home life, which is as equally isolated as Mrs Sen's. • Eliot comes to learn from Mrs. Sen, her culture, her homesickness for India, and her feelings about being alone. • All of this is eventually swept away when Mrs. Sen and Eliot are involved in an accident.

8. What's going on: • Isolation is a major theme in this story. • How is Mrs. Sen isolated? Eliot? • Here, Lahiri examines the idea of absence. Mrs. Sen's and Eliot's isolation is caused by absence of home and of community. • Mrs. Sen repeatedly references back to her “home” as if the space around her is not her own (113). • Moreover, she is confined to an apartment that is covered in plastic—a reflection of the stagnant, false, and plastic life she feels she's living.

9. Cultural Community • What Lahiri is criticizing here is the lack of community for the immigrant. • This reflects the idea that she lacks something to identify with, belong to, and this mirrors a lack of identity—Mrs. Sen is thus the subaltern. • Mrs. Sen longs for the chatter and love she had in India (115-116). • How do these scenes contrast with what Mrs. Sen has learned from America? Point to specific passages.

10. Finding Community • Food and cooking play a large symbolic role in fiction such as Lahiri's story—it allows Mrs. Sen to share her culture and reconnect with it. • Eliot notices the ritualistic nature in which Mrs. Sen prepares food (114-115). What is significant about this scene? • According to Asha Choubey, fish is a staple food for Bengali families; Mrs. Sen's obsession with obtaining quality whole fish in America becomes a character itself. How? • Also, her food becomes a way for Mrs. Sen to share her culture (118). • Why would Mrs. Sen want to pass on her culture through food? What's so important about this scene?

11. Thus, the act of consuming her fish becomes a way for her to further reconnect to India. • Also, she surrounds herself with artifacts: her cooking knife. • Yet, even this simple task grows more difficult. • She suffers increased alienation from her husband because he won't help her in transporting the fish—this spurs her to drive herself one day to the market. • This mirrors her growing distance from her homeland and adds to her isolation.

12. She becomes increasingly isolated and alienated from her life in America. • Notice her husband is rarely around—food and going to the fish market becomes her life. Food becomes her home as she gains happiness, familiarity, and security in this. • Notice the symbolism of the “whole” fish. Why must Mrs. Sen have a whole fish? • Consider this as another symbol of Mrs. Sen. Why is this significant? How does it symbolize her? (hint: wholeness)

13. Furthermore, the act of consuming her fish becomes a way for her to further reconnect to India—she is “reinternalizing” her culture. • In this vein, according to Cynthia Wong, the immigrant and food come to represent the “'me' and the 'world'” where eating becomes a physically symbolic act of becoming that which is being consumed (18). • Moreover, it is the increased alienation she finds in transporting the fish home that spurs her to find new ways to get there. • Her survival depends on her connection to fish, to her “home.” • She finds a neighborhood in it; she also gains a new-found connection to people through it (Choubey 33).

14. Driving • Driving becomes a symbolic representation of the act of migration and diaspora, of crossing into new spaces in an attempt to find a place of belonging. • Also, it reflects Mrs. Sen's navigation of her new American life, her “return” to India and her Bengali roots through her travel to buy fish. • Note Mrs. Sen's lessons in driving (119). • But the journey becomes difficult; Mr. Sen won't drive her, and she can't ride the bus. What happens when Mrs. Sen takes control of this? Why is this significant symbolically?

15. Connection and Dislocation • Note that Mrs. Sen is lost without her contacts (128-129). • She gives up driving for awhile (131). • The attention to her fish at the market declines (132). • She becomes alienated from the bus (132). • She drives herself and Eliot (134-135).

16. The Ending • How does “Mrs. Sen's” end? • Discuss the implications of this ending in relation to Mrs. Sen as an isolated immigrant. What will happen to her? • Consider the implications of the fish being her means of survival as an immigrant—what does this mean for her when she can't get it anymore? • What is Lahiri trying to say with this story? Is Mrs. Sen completely American now that her “ties” to India have been cut? Does Mrs. Sen assimilate successfully? • Or, is Lahiri saying that it's important for the immigrant to keep his/her connection to home? • What meaning do you make of Eliot's final scene?

17. Works Cited • Choubey, Asha. “Food as Metaphor in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies.” Postcolonial Web. 2001. Web. 03 March 2014. • Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Mrs. Sen's.” The Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Mariner, 2000. 109-135. Print. • Williams, Laura Anh. “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies. MELUS: Food in Multi-ethnic Literatures 32.4 (2007): 69-79. JSTOR. Web. 03 March 2014. • Wong, Cynthia. “Big Eaters, Treat Lovers, 'Food Prostitutes,' 'Food Pornographers,' and Doughnut Makers.” Reading Asian-American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1993. 18-76. Print.