An Analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri's Fiction
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Eldorado - Ressourcen aus und für Lehre, Studium und Forschung Immigration: ‘A Lifelong Pregnancy’? An Analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Würde des Doktors der Philosophie in der Fakultät Kulturwissenschaften der Technischen Universität Dortmund vorgelegt von Ramona-Alice Bran 1. Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Walter Grünzweig 2. Zweitgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Randi Gunzenhäuser Dortmund 2014 Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Prof. Dr. Walter Grünzweig for accepting me as his PhD student and for believing I could pull this through, for having had the patience to read my work and guide my steps when I was stuck, for providing so much help and insight, and for having taken the time to get to know me. I am immensely grateful to you. I am also thankful to the other wonderful people I have met at the American Studies Department from Dortmund. First and foremost, thank you Prof. Dr. Randi Gunzenhäuser for having read my dissertation. I really appreciate your humor and witty comments. Thank you: Sina, Elena, Mario, Johanna, Julia, Eriko and Martina for your friendship and support. Looking back, I realize I have had such an enriching experience and I can only hope we will keep in touch. All my love goes to my closest friends back home who have stood by me all along. Thanks, in particular, to Remus, the one with whom I have embarked on this unexpected adventure. This five-year long journey has taken us to different places, but what an amazing experience it has been! Most of all, thanks to my family who has always believed in me. Thank you, mum, for supporting me unconditionally in every choice I make. Thank you, dad, for everything. I wish you could still be here to read this. Timişoara, September 2014 “For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.” (Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake 49-50) Table of Contents Introduction and Theoretical Foundations................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Cultural Translations, Interpretations, and Misinterpretations in Interpreter of Maladies………………………………………………………………………........................... 37 Chapter 2: Transnational Belonging in The Namesake………………………………......... 125 Chapter 3: Transplanted Identities in Unaccustomed Earth…………………………........ 215 Chapter 4: The Lowland: Away, but Living in the Yesterday....……………..…………... 296 Conclusions …………………………………………………………………………………... 317 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….. 328 Introduction and Theoretical Foundations In my thesis, I will investigate the fictional work of Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Her oeuvre belongs to what Rosemary Marangoly George calls the “immigrant genre”, namely that type of “contemporary literary writing in which the politics and experience of location or rather of ‘dislocation’ are the central narratives” (278). She also suggests that “it is the search for a location where one can feel at home, in spite of the obvious foreignness of the space that propels the discourse engendered by the experience of immigration” (285). This ‘feeling at home’ may or may not require assimilation into mainstream culture, and often the process of making oneself at home stretches across several successive generations. Therefore, George proclaims that the marks of the immigrant genre are the easy movement between past, present, and future, as well as between countries. Further, it is concerned with a juxtaposition of recognition and the impulse to forget. In the past five decades, numerous literary works by Indian-born writers have placed issues connected to immigration at the center of their narratives. Internationally acclaimed authors like Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie, to mention only a few, have drawn attention to the experience of migration and the traumas often associated with leaving one’s homeland and coming in contact with another culture. However, Sanjukta Dasgupta has pointed out that male migrant writers engage more with concerns regarding ‘imaginary homelands’ (Rushdie, Ghosh, or Rohinton Mistry) whereas female writers of the diaspora (including Jhumpa Lahiri) focus on the very basic quest for home as a secure, familiar space (2007: 82). Lahiri was born in London in 1967 to Indian parents, and she migrated with them to the United States two years later. Her narratives are a mixture of fiction and autobiography filtered through a dual lens, even though she confessed that while growing up in Rhode Island in the 1970s, she felt neither Indian nor American: “Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen. Looking back, I see that this was generally the case. But my perception as a young girl was that I fell short at both ends, shuttling between two dimensions that had nothing to do with one another” (“My Two Lives” 2006). The hyphen both separates and joins, and from the interstices thus created Lahiri is able to investigate both sides. She differs from writers such 1 as Bharati Mukherjee or Chitra Davakaruni, with whom she is often paralleled, in that she is a second-generation non-resident Indian whose interest in her roots is “most likely that of an intelligent and sensitive tourist” (Sanjukta Dasgupta 84). While the former praise American freedom and demonize traditional Indian cultural norms, Lahiri is able to avoid both these pitfalls and to produce a balanced representation of the two cultures. Critics such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Vijay Mishra have theorized the writings into which hybrid identities are inscribed. Using the concepts of cultural translation and cultural hybridization (Bhabha), subaltern status (Spivak), diasporic formation and diaspora space (Brah), cultural identity (Hall and Grossberg), transnationalism (Faist, Vertovec, Kennedy and Roudometof), and ‘third space’ (Bhabha and Soja), my thesis will demonstrate how Lahiri uses physical space (houses, other buildings, and cities) in her oeuvre in order to move from cultural translations, through cultural hybridity, to a ‘third space’ of transnational encounters. Thus, I will construct a logic of the sequence of Lahiri’s texts, a unitary development from her first work, The Interpreter of Maladies (published in 1999 and dealing predominantly with cultural translations), through her novel The Namesake (which appeared in 2003 and includes cultural translations, but also examines cultural hybridity and transnationalism), to Unaccustomed Earth (her second collection of short stories, which was printed in 2008 and explores ‘third space’ and transnationalism). I will thereby demonstrate that intratextuality is a defining feature of her oeuvre. Her latest book, The Lowland (2013), intricately communicates with the other three published works, and in the fourth chapter of this dissertation I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’ in order to show how. During my research I have come across several volumes which try to provide a radiography of Lahiri’s work. An early attempt was edited in 2002 by Suman Bala and was called Jhumpa Lahiri: The Master Storyteller. The collection gathers thirty essays, mainly by Indian contributors, and offers a critical response to her debut volume. Another critical overview is On the Alien Shore: A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee (2010). The articles edited by Jaydeep Sarangi analyze Lahiri’s books before turning briefly to some of Mukherjee’s writings. The contributors touch upon issues like identity (examined through a Lacanian lens), the importance of objects (as tools for memory or nostalgia) in her narratives, and the ways in which immigrant parents want their children to live out the American Dream while preserving a strong connection with their Indian roots. 2 But my project will be guided by one particular analysis of Lahiri’s text corpus, namely the book edited by Lavina Dhingra and Floyd Cheung and called Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies (2012). Intrigued by the enormous media and popular attention drawn by Jhumpa Lahiri’s first three published books, the authors included in this volume attempt to determine the literary canon(s) to which she contributes. They suggest in their essays that several labels are appropriate to her work which “subtly sheds light on both universal dimensions of human experience and more specific Bengali, postcolonial, Indian diasporic, South Asian American, and Asian American politics” (Introduction xii). In other words, while depicting specific ethnic experiences of educated, upper middle-class Bengalis living and working in New England since the mid-1960s, Lahiri simultaneously addresses universal themes like marital harmony, loss of a loved one, or parenting. These qualities make her narratives easily consumable by many categories of readers. Furthermore, her choice of genres (her first and third books are short-story volumes, whilst