Jhumpa

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Recommended: Narrative essay of immigration

“Mrs. Sen” from Jhumpa Lahiri’s, 1999 short story collection “Interpreter of Maladies” deals with the experience of the Indian immigrant to America. Mrs. Sen is constructed around her experiences of immigration and the cultural differences between Indian and America. Additionally, this story discusses the issues of identity, cultural displacement and the difficulties of those who are physically and psychologically displaced. In his book “The Postcolonial Short Story,” Paul Russell states that it Lahiri’s stories focuses more on dislocation rather than location and thus this dislocation has become a dominant trait and theme in her stories (np).
The short story “Mrs. Sen” resolves around a recent and dependant immigrant Mrs. Sen, the wife of a university professor, who is cultural, physically and psychologically displaced, because she has left behind her home and family in Indian to migrate to America because of her husband’s job “Here in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot sometimes sleep,” (115) In an interview with Frankfort, Lahiri states that women only migrated to America because of their husbands and thus did not have an identity or purpose of their own when they reach (Awadalla & Russell, np). The story portrays the life of Mrs. Sen who is caught between the culture she is born and socialized into and the new American culture she experiences when she migrates. Physically, Mrs. Sen resides in America, but psychologically her mind remains at home in India. Mrs. Sen, who is a first generation migrant, chooses not to assimilate into American as she states on page 113, “Everything is there,” referring to India. For Mrs.Sen, Calcutta remains in her memory as being her true home, “By then Eliot understood that when Mr...

... middle of paper ...

...Westernized in Mrs. Sen’s dress were the over coat and the sunglasses. Lahiri paints a vivid image of Mrs. Sen’s appearance to display her Indianness to the readers, thus showing her desire to remain intact with her cultural traditions and her reluctant to change.
Lahiri uses the private space of the home to portray to the readers the extent to which Mrs. Sen felt displaced in her new society and the strong relationship she maintained with her homeland through tradition. Mrs. Sen reconfigures the apartment to match the one that she left in India. In America, the Sen’s lives in “a university apartment located on the fringes of the

Work Cited
Awadalla, Maggie and Russell, Paul. The postcolonial short story: contemporary essays. Hound mills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Web. 9 March, 2014.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Print.

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