Analysis Of Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Namesake And Mistress'

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“Namesake “and “Mistress” are about the possibilities of exploring changes within oneself. Woman protagonist like Ashima and Radha are always willing and receptive for redefining attitudes and relationships shorn of undue romantic embellishments. They want to free themselves from the stultifying traditional concerns and cherish a spontaneous surge towards life. One can trace the struggle of a woman protagonist to seek a meaningful definition of life. Jhumpa Lahiri and Anita Nair vociferously put forth the private truth about what woman want. Their women feel their emotions strongly, yet retain a constant value judgment, about themselves as well as, about other relationships they have to live through. Though they belong to different stratum of society, they do possess an inner independence to experiment with their life. In the process, life yields self knowledge which imparts them the strength of accepting that a woman desire to succeed like an individual is not incompatible with her desire for love or small pleasures of domesticity. However Nair and Lahiri are excellent in depicting the inner furies of women and their rising tone for emancipation and empowerment.
One can say “Namesake “and “Mistress” are portraitures of Indian women who rebel against the tradition bound old mode of life. Anita Nair and Jhumpa Lahiri through their novels, “Mistress” and “Namesake” questions our hopeless certainty at our imagined knowledge of worldly wisdom, our false joy in unproductive routine of life, in short, our state of being. Anita Nair’s characters are so real and close to life. We do not find many who live a life advertised by existential philosophers.
Priyanka Sinha sounds right when she mentions the commonness of Anita Nair’s characters...

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...epicted in creative literature. In this sense, it would not be inappropriate and unjust to say that the concerns of Anita Nair and Jhumpa Lahiri are feminist. The above discussion with regards to their feminist concerns in the selected novels exemplifies a visible pattern of women’s ‘rising consciousnesses towards their selfhood. What make this over-all pattern interesting and challenging are the variations within the overall pattern. The variation emerges from the different kinds of repressive forces depicted, the protagonists’ individual methods of dealing with these forces and most interestingly, the authors’ different attitudes to the same complex problem of establishing female selfhood. It could then be derived that all the women characters of Anita Nair and Jhumpa Lahiri become the victims of patriarchy. The patriarchal constructs may be family or/and society.

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