In ―Mrs. Sen‘s,‖ the first-generation Indian American title character suffers from severe home sickness and has difficulty adapting herself to the mainstream American culture. The author parallels many Indian and American cultural differences in the story to highlight Mrs. Sen‘s marginalization (otherization) in the States.
Eliot‘s mother and Mrs. Sen‘s different ways of life exactly pinpoint cultural disparities between America and India. Eliot‘s mother embodies the American fast food eating habit. She always have bread and cheese and order pizza for Eliot. In contrast, Mrs. Sen spends a lot of time delicately preparing meals every day and particularly preferred ―a whole fish‖ freshly delivered from the seaside (Lahiri 123).
While Eliot‘s mother supports the family and works full time, Mrs. Sen serves as a full-time housewife at home and financially depends on her husband.
Additionally, in the U.S., American people consider driving a common and required skill for a person to navigate through places. Driving also indicates independence, a total self-reliance to go anywhere without others‘ assistance.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Sen used to depend on a chauffeur to go places back in India and does not know how to drive. She ―hated driving‖ (Lahiri 131) just as she fears and rejects American culture.
With regard to interpersonal relations Americans and Indians vary tremendously.
Americans value privacy and personal space. Even though they greet neighbors and acquaintances upon seeing one another, they do not intend to intrude people‘s life and privacy. Noelle Brada-Williams comments that ―the American model of polite
behavior depicted in Lahiri‘s work is to be wholly in one‘s own world and to maintain the smells, sounds, and emotions of that world so that they do not encroach upon
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another individual‘s life‖ (459). To American people, the best way to show hospitality toward others lies in the maintenance of a suitable mental and physical distance to prevent unnecessary transgression. On the contrary, Mrs. Sen believes that hospitality connotes intimate interpersonal relations. The boundary does not exist among every household. Neighbors or nearby community members assume responsibilities to take care of one another by handling trivia or celebrations with great enthusiasm.
To American people, the fast food eating habit, women‘s possession of a full-time job, driving, and the Americanized politeness remains the whites‘ norms.
Nevertheless, the Indian expatriate Mrs. Sen hardly acculturates herself to the American mainstream society. Accordingly, she basically alienates herself from the outside world and stays at home most of the time. Even though she attempts to go out on her own to the fish market, her intention to break free of the apartment fails since she faces racial prejudices from the Americans.
When she sits on the bus and carries ―the blood-lined bag‖ with fishes in it, an elderly woman looks at her suspiciously and reports to the bus driver who also treats Mrs. Sen with unfriendly attitude (Lahiri 132). Her resistance to driving and the bus incident exemplifies her inability and unwillingness to adapt to the mainstream American culture. Since Americans in the host country pose a hostile attitude toward the relocated guest, she retreats to the apartment to shelter herself from social
marginalization and racism in American society. In this sense, according to Sharmila Rudrappa, ―home remains a safe haven to which the immigrant retires from public scrutiny. This private sphere is seen as a separate social universe, unsullied by the happenings of the public world‖ (92). In other words, to Mrs. Sen, within the utopia, she does not have to force herself to pursue the white‘s social norms. The apartment serves as a private space where she sanctions herself from the public‘s hostile scrutiny and racist preconceptions.
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Furthermore, unlike her husband Mr. Sen, who teaches mathematics at the university and interacts with college faculty and staff, Mrs. Sen alienates herself from American society and works as babysitter at home. The contrast between the couple protrudes Indian women‘s plight as immigrants in the States. Both male and female Indian immigrants undergo racism and prejudices in the States. Nevertheless, female Indian immigrants not only suffer from racism, they also fall victims to Indian patriarchal gender role. Since Indian patriarchal ideology firmly roots in Mrs. Sen‘s mind, she simply transplants such ways of living to the States. Depending on her husband financially and lacking the professional skill required to make a living on her own in the host country, she constrains her daily lives within the realm of home.
Compared with her husband who stays at home briefly, Mrs. Sen spends the majority of her time at home babysitting and preparing Indian food. Such a contradiction between her husband and Mrs. Sen highlights her role not only as the hostess of the apartment but also a marginalized Other in the American society.
To Mrs. Sen, she not only regards the U.S. home as a haven free from the Americanized norms, but also attempts to relate it to her native country India. Even though she referred to the U.S. home as ―this place‖ (Lahiri 115) and negated it the real home—―India,‖ (116) she replicated Indianness in the sphere of home. Through the reproduction of Indian cultural practices, she temporarily escapes from her displaced predicament in the host country and seeks to ―create a separate space, an ethnically Indian place‖ (Williams 51). At home, Mrs. Sen possesses the autonomy to be Indian regardless of the whites‘ norms. Creating a place within a place, she fills the geographically American home with Indian cultures. She always dresses herself in
―saris‖ (Lahiri 112) — a form of traditional Indian clothes with exquisite patterns on them, which are ―more suitable for an evening affair‖ (112) than for a random
afternoon. Her bedroom drawers and closet are ―filled with saris of every imaginable
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texture and shade, brocaded with gold and silver threads. Some were transparent, tissue thin, others as thick as drapes, with tassels knotted along the edges‖ (125). For Mrs. Sen, home does not merely functions as a corporeal space that offers shelter, but operats as a site of Indian traditions. She repeats Indian lifestyles in order to
reconstruct Indianness in the host country that excludes her from the whites‘ norms.
Home, therefore, serves as a spiritual shelter and India itself for the Mrs. Sen.
Besides, it represents a cage to imprison the hostess physically and psychologically.
Despite her repetition of Indian ways of life as mentioned in the above passages, Mrs.
Sen plays tapes of Indian classical music called ―raga‖ with ―people talking in her language‖ (128) from time to time. The melancholic tone of the music embodies the hostess‘s displaced emotions as an Other marginalized in the American society. Rather than moving forward and leading a new life, she ritually listens to the tape ―farewell‖
(128) tape in which her Indian parents and relatives talk about ―the things that happened the day after she left India‖ (128). In this sense, she never really waves goodbye to her past life in India. On the contrary, she reiterates Indian cultural practices and evoked her recollections regarding her life in India so as to reinvent Indianness within the soil of the U.S. Although the Indian hostess strives to recreate the cultural experiences in Indian, ―. . . our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary ones, Indias of the mind‖ (Rudrappa 107). No matter how hard she endeavors to recall her memories in the past, there is no way for her to retrieve
something lost after she leaves India. Therefore, ―if the cultural identity of the migrant is shaped in terms of imagined place, it means that this identity was not carried alone wholesale from homeland to destination. It is, rather, actively created and recreated in an act of identification with the homeland‖ (Alphen 56). The moment when she leaves
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India, the country, the Indian people, and its culture and history change and move on.
Consequently, to freeze herself within the Indian past does not mean that she
preserves Indianness. In fact, the hostess confines herself between the Indian past and the commencement of a new life. In this sense, she rejects and further severs possible bindings with the alterity.