Interpreting the Maladies of the Woman Abroad: A Study of ‘Mrs. Sen’s’ from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Abstract

Diasporic Literature deals with the loss of identity, the sense of rootlessness and the resulting emotional conflicts faced by immigrants everywhere. This paper aims to study the reasons behind the neurosis and alienation faced by the women characters who have relocated to America in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning anthology of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies. It focuses on two short stories from the collection viz., ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ and ‘Mrs. Sen’s’. It tries to measure the neurosis caused by cultural displacement and the resulting sense of a broken self. While Mrs. Das, the protagonist of ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’, finds herself to be a misfit in her own country, trapped in  a loveless marriage and wracked by a sense of guilt,  Mrs. Sen,  in ‘Mrs. Sen’s’ is constantly seen to be pining over the country she had left behind - its food, people, colors and even its riotous noise. She is seen recreating a microcosmic motherland in her small university residential quarters and gradually folds over to the bottled-up trauma of cultural isolation. The paper tries to interpret the maladies of the two women characters in these short stories, that is, memories of a motherland left far behind and an intense desire to belong. It is seen that these women lead empty lives, putting up brave facades but suffering from an absolute sense of meaninglessness.