UNIVERSIDADE DA CORUÑA FACULTADE DE FILOLOXÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE LETRAS MÁSTER INTERUNIVERSITARIO EN ESTUDOS INGLESES AVANZADOS Unveiling the Mail-Order Bride: Mutated Arranged Marriages in Chitra Divakaruni's "Clothes" and Linh Dinh's Love, Like, Hate Student: Noelia Rañal Canosa Advisor: Begoña Simal González 2020 Table of Contents Abstract Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 1. Old against Mutated Arranged Marriages in the Asian Diasporas .................................... 4 1.1. Old Arranged Marriages ..................................................................................... 4 1.2. Marriage Traditions: Between the Homeland and the Diaspora ........................ 7 1.2.1. The Indian American Diaspora ................................................................. 8 1.2.2. The Vietnamese American Diaspora ......................................................... 8 1.3. Globalisation and its Effects .............................................................................. 9 1.4. Mutated Arranged Marriages ........................................................................... 11 1.4.1. Cultural Westernisation ........................................................................... 12 1.4.2. The Internet and Online Agencies ........................................................... 14 1.4.3. Fetishising the Asian Body ...................................................................... 16 1.4.4. For or Against: An Ongoing Controversy ............................................... 19 2. Arranged Marriages in Asian Diasporic Narratives ......................................................... 21 2.1. "Clothes" .......................................................................................................... 21 2.2. Love, Like, Hate ............................................................................................... 32 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 41 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 44 Appendix .................................................................................................................................. 49 I. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "Clothes" ........................................................... 49 II. Linh Dinh's Love, Like, Hate ............................................................................ 50 Abstract This Master's thesis explores the impact of contemporary globalisation on the nature of the arranged marriages in the Asian diaspora. In order to highlight the differences between the old tradition and the mutated form of arranged marriages—the term I use to refer to the renewed method—, I have organised this paper using a contrasting, comparative structure. After a brief sociohistorical contextualisation of the evolution of the arranged marriage procedure, I explore the main ways in which globalisation may have affected the latter and, subsequently, I point out the major transformations of the mutated phenomenon. Finally, I illustrate those changes in the close analysis of the proposed textual corpus. In order to accurately portray the greater placement of the arranged marriage business in recent years in the Indian American and Vietnamese American diasporas, I have selected two narratives that deal with such ethnic minorities: "Clothes," by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Love, Like, Hate, by Lihn Dinh. The aim of this study is not only to stress the mutations of the arranged marriage phenomenon through its depiction in the literary field, but also to evidence the need for urgent action in order to regulate the current mail-order bride industry. Introduction This Master's thesis aims to explore the impact of the globalisation process on the nature of arranged marriages in certain Asian diasporas. With the purpose of contextualising the appearance of new formulas particularly affecting contemporary Asian arranged marriages, I introduce in the first part of the paper a social and historical framework of the evolution from the old to the mutated practices and a theoretical approach about the main issues of contemporary globalisation. Likewise, in order to examine how the contemporary arranged marriage method is fictionalised in narratives whose diasporic authors present the most accurate depictions of traditional arranged marriages as well as the larger number of changes, the research engages in a close analysis of two narratives dealing with two ethnic minorities historically associated with the arranged marriage phenomenon: the Indian American and Vietnamese American diasporas. To this end, I have respectively analysed Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's short story "Clothes" (1995) and Linh Dinh's novel Love, Like, Hate (2010). The reason for addressing this topic for my Master's thesis was my eagerness to deepen the knowledge about the arranged marriage phenomenon that I had acquired while analysing the particular case of the Japanese American phenomenon of picture brides in my end of degree project. The idea arose from several Master's courses which had tackled theoretical concepts related to contemporary globalisation; after that, I entertained the possibility of intertwining my interest for arranged marriages with globalisation issues in order to investigate the impact that the latter had had on the former. Finally, after carrying out an initial search, the decisive fact for choosing the final topic of my paper was the insufficient amount of studies about such a contemporary and controversial matter. 1 With regards to the methodology followed in this essay, I have first scrutinised the phenomenon of diasporic arranged marriages and then exemplified the mutations of the arranged marriage procedure by carrying out a thorough textual analysis of selected texts. For this purpose, several critical schools have been crucial. Firstly, I use postcolonial ideas such as William Safran's approach to diaspora based on the trauma and nostalgia of diasporic subjects,1 or Homi Bhabha's concept of “mimicry”2 when I address the cultural Westernisation of individuals involved in diasporic arranged marriages. Secondly, I use feminist topics such as the fetishisation of the Asian female body and the recent impact of feminist movements from the West on Asian women for the study of the female characters of the narratives. In addition, Marxist theories were particularly useful when exploring the capitalist economic interests underlying the contemporary mail-order bride industry, as cultural materialism endorses the relevance of the sociohistorical situation of the time and the thorough textual analysis executed in this paper. Finally, it is worth noting that Marxist and postcolonial brands of feminism have proven especially convenient for the portrayal of the mutated arranged marriage industry: whereas the former regards women as a particularly unprivileged class, the latter highlights the double alienation of females from colonised countries and their depiction as exotic "creatures." This paper is divided into two large chapters: the first section presents a thorough study of the arranged marriage phenomenon and the second one exemplifies the concepts explained in the first chapter through a reading of the selected narratives. The first part of this paper is strategically organised in a chronological manner, in order to denote a sharp contrast between the old tradition and the new, mutated forms of diasporic arranged marriages. 1 See more in Safran's article "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return" (1991). 2 The postcolonial notion of mimicry was approached by Homi Bhabha in "Of Mimicry and Man." Bhabha proposes that the copying of the coloniser's values and culture by the colonised results in not only an emulation of the former, but often also in the mockery of the original, so that the colonised becomes "a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (122). That is the case, for instance, with the clothing transformation of several characters from the analysed stories. 2 Accordingly, its first subsection (1.1) introduces a brief social and historical account of the old arranged marriage method in Asian diasporic contexts. Subsequently, the second (1.2) and third (1.3) subsections function as a link and offer an explanation for the understanding of the metamorphosis of the arranged marriage set of practices: on the one hand, I briefly explore the main historical issues influencing the second wave of Asian migrations constituting the Indian American and Vietnamese American diasporas—the ethnic communities portrayed in the selected textual corpus—, and, on the other, I address the main effects of globalisation that may have had an impact on arranged marriages. In the fourth subsection of the first chapter (1.4), which deals with mutated arranged marriages, I point out the most relevant innovations in the contemporary arranged marriage procedure. Finally, such mutations are illustrated in the second part of the essay (2) through the close reading of Divakaruni's "Clothes" and Dinh's Love, Like, Hate. Whereas the main character of "Clothes," Sumita, undergoes a metamorphosis that resembles the mutation of the arranged marriage practice itself, Dinh's novel Love, Like, Hate presents the contrast between