The story of Mrs. Sen’s Depression Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “Mrs. Sen’s” tells the story of Eliot who spends most of his time in his new babysitter, Mrs. Sen’s house. Throughout their time Eliot learns more about Mrs. Sen’s Indian culture and her. Through Eliot’s perspective, Lahiri depicts Mrs. Sen’s as the most sympathetic character by conveying her struggles with adjusting to her new life, portraying her to be lonely and dissatisfied. Lahiri establishes Mrs. Sen as the most sympathetic character by introducing her emotional connection to India during her first interaction with Eliot. The first glimpse of Mrs. Sen describes her as a dressed up woman in traditional Indian clothing, a sari, establishing her physical connection …show more content…
Sen’s isolation through the incorporation of family and loss. Throughout her description of India, she focuses on the closeness between people, showing the importance of people ranging from acquaintances to family. This dedication to family is shown when Mrs. Sen tells Eliot “My sister has had a baby girl. By the time I see her… she will be three years old. Her own aunt will be a stranger” (Lahiri 112). Lahiri uses unsure dialogue to convey the isolation Mrs. Sen feels from her family. Since through the time Eliot spends with Mrs. Sen, Lahiri establishes the importance of family for her, the phrase “her own aunt will be a stranger” highlights the separation, heightening the feeling of loneliness through disconnection. Lahiri continues to show Mrs. Sen’s isolation through her lack of interaction with family. She writes “This time when her grandfather was speaking, she stopped the tape. She told Eliot she’d received a letter over the weekend. Her grandfather was dead” (Lahiri 128-29) to show Mrs. Sen’s loss. Her grief is heightened since she has to find out her loss through “a letter” and couldn’t say goodbye to her grandfather. The grief adds on to the pattern of a lonely tone as there is a cycle of people leaving each other, allowing readers to sympathize with her. To sum up, Mrs. Sen has only suffered since beginning her new life in New England and because of the distance between India and New England, she is unable to have …show more content…
Sen’s dissatisfaction through her continuous interactions with Eliot. Mrs. Sen shares her family’s views with Eliot by stating “‘send pictures of your new life’ what picture can I send? She sat, exhausted, on the edge of the bed, where there was now barely any room for her.” They think I live the life of a queen” (Lahiri 125). Lahiri uses contradicting diction with “send pictures” “[no] room” “queen” and “exhausted” to create a bitter tone, conveying Mrs. Sen’s unwillingness to live in New England. The phrase “what can I send” shows that she believes her life is not special and is worse off than when she lived in India, showing that she is dissatisfied with her living conditions. Her desperation to leave her new life is clear when she states “could I drive all the way to Calcutta? How long would that take Eliot? Ten thousand miles, at fifty miles per hour” (Lahiri 119). Mrs. Sen’s desire to leave is cleared as she is willing to drive to India, showing that it is her only motivation. The phrase “ten thousand miles at fifty miles per hour” indicates that she is serious, amplifying her anguish. Lahiri uses Mrs. Sen’s interaction with Eliot to show her eagerness to go back to India, inherently suggesting she is not happy with her new life. In Mrs. Sen’s, Jhumpa Lahiri establishes Mrs. Sen as one of the most sympathetic characters by revealing her struggles with
Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, an Indian by descent, was born in London in August 1967, to a Bengali immigrant Indian parents. “Jhumpa” is the nickname easier for the teachers remember his name. The Lahiri family moved from England to Rhode Island when Jhumpa was two years old. Her father was a librarian at Rhode Island University and her mother was a school teacher. At age of seven, Lahiri started to embrace writing about what she saw and felt. While growing up, Lahiri lived two lives: An Indian at home and An American outside of the home. Despite of living most of their life in the western world, Lahiri’s parents called “Calcutta” their home unlike Lahiri who thought Rhode Island as her hometown. Lahiri always felt her family had a different li...
Jhumpa Lahiri composed the two short stories: “Interpreter of Maladies” and “Sexy” that conveyed the recurring theme of feeling like an outsider. During the first story, “Interpreter of Maladies,” there was a character named Mr. Kapasi, a “self-educated man,” who was a “devoted scholar of foreign languages,” who dreamed of becoming an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, where he could aid in “resolving conflicts between people and nations, settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides” (Interpreter of Maladies). This dream became a fantasy after his parents settled his arranged marriage that turned for the worse. Mr. Kapasi’s wife “had little regard for his career as an interpreter,”and she despised the thought of him
Before Mrs. Ames and the mother realize the restrictions of their old lives, their worlds have been full of disillusionment and ignorance. Mrs. Ames, for example, is oppressed by her husband’s silence and the search for love and tenderness from anyone, because she lives each day alone, ignored by her scornful husband. And, as a result of being left companionless, she does not mature, rather she longs for tenderness. In other words, Boyle explains her dysfunctional relationship with her husband, “The mystery and silence of her husband’s mind lay like a chiding finger of her lips. Her eyes were gray for the light had been extinguished in them” (57). That is, Mrs. Ames’ spirit remains oppressed by her husband who treats her as a child, and, in doing so, isolates her from his world.
examines the effects of Eliot’s first marriage on his views of love and time. She
“It didn 't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different” (Lahiri).Even though she wears the same clothes as everyone else and looks normal on the outside, she knows she 's not different because of her background, her physical features, and most of all because of her name she wanted to pull away from anything that marked her as being ‘different’, so she wanted nothing to do with anything that made her parents(culture) different that would cause her to become an outsider . In the book Namesake by jhumpa lahiri the character gogol goes through similar experiences as the author,
In a short story called “Mrs. Sen’s”, Mrs. Sen, one of the protagonists, is unhappy with her life in the U.S. because she thinks that people don’t care about her as much as they did in India. She had all of her assets in India, but here she has to learn how to live independently and she has to learn how to drive because where she used to live she had a personal driver that took everywhere she needed to go, for example when she says, “Eliot, if I began to scream right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come?”(Lahiri 116) she is really asking if people cares about her. Eliot, a boy who she was babysitting, later answers her with a “Maybe” she says, “At home that is all you have to do. But just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has to come and share the news, to help with the arrangements” (Lahiri 116) by referring to where she used to live she is showing that she liked it better when she was at home which is for her, India. Mrs. Sen had a better life in India so when she moved to America she did not like it because she had everything she needed in
In “Mrs. Sen’s”, Lahiri portrayed Mrs. Sen as a cultural outsider to the American society and a cultural insider in her microcosm, that apartment she decorated to resemble India. Interestingly, Lahiri portrayed Eliot as a cultural outsider to Mrs. Sen version of “little” India and a cultural insider of the American society. In other words, both Mrs. Sen and Eliot are mirror images of each other as they were going through a very similar transformation process from a cultural outsider to a cultural insider. While Eliot did a pretty great job in learning, discovering and assimilating himself in Mrs. Sen’s world of “little” India, Mrs. Sen, on the contrary, was in a state of denial and was having difficulty trying to assimilate, accept and even fit into the
Mukherjee then begins to compare and contrast her sister in a subject-by-subject organization. She states, “…she clings passionately to her Indian citizenship and hopes to go home to India when she...
Louisa’s feelings for her lover have disappeared throughout the years and when her lover returns to marry her, she feels very uncertain of the marriage. Similarly, many engagements are broken due to the fact that the feelings between couples fade after there is a distance between them, for years. Another example that relates to life is, “[i]n that length of time much had happened. Louisa's mother and brother had died, and she was all alone in the world” (Freeman p). When immigrants return to their country, many deaths have occurred in the time period of their absence and sometimes the deaths include their own relatives. To their misfortune, they never have a chance to say a last good bye. The story, A new England’s Nun is very similar to the lives of many people and in many cases the same.
Kothari employs a mixture of narrative and description in her work to garner the reader’s emotional investment. The essay is presented in seventeen vignettes of differing lengths, a unique presentation that makes the reader feel like they are reading directly from Kothari’s journal. The writer places emphasis on both her description of food and resulting reaction as she describes her experiences visiting India with her parents: “Someone hands me a plate of aloo tikki, fried potato patties filled with mashed channa dal and served with a sweet and a sour chutney. The channa, mixed with hot chilies and spices, burns my tongue and throat” (Kothari). She also uses precise descriptions of herself: “I have inherited brown eyes, black hair, a long nose with a crooked bridge, and soft teeth
With Indian parents and being raised in America from the age of two, Lahiri states in her essay that in her earlier years “Indian-American” was how she was described as, however, she hardly felt as if she could identify with “either side of the hyphen” (97,98). In other words, having these two cultures present in her life that supposedly made up who she was ended up making her feel that because she fell into both categories she could not fully relate to either culture, causing her to feel alienated. She goes on to say, “As a child I sought perfection and so denied myself the claim to any identity” (98). This thinking is a prime supporter of the correlation between culture and identity because it was culture that affected Lahiri’s claim of identity, even if that claiming was no identity at all. Through the examination of Lahiri’s early life, it is evident that there is a correspondence between identity and
Some people believe that opposites attract. Others believe that people who are more similar will have a better relationship. Some prefer relationships with older people, and some prefer them with younger people. Jhumpa Lahiri, author of the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, explores the dynamic of relationships in her works. In her short story “Interpreter of Maladies” a married woman confesses a secret to a man she barely knows. In her story “This Blessed House” a couple fights over the religious relics they find in their new home. While one reads Lahiri’s stories, a theme begin to emerge that shows the woman of the relationship behaving like an adolescent and the man behaving like her father due to the internalized idea of
Her character is portrayed as being anxious through the author’s choice of dialogue in the form of diction, which is “waves of her [the mother] anxiety sink down into my belly”. The effect of this is to allow the readers to establish the emotions of the narrator, as well as establish an the uneasy tone of the passage, and how stressful and important the event of selling tobacco bales for her family is. Additionally, the narrator is seen to be uncomfortable in the setting she is present in. This is seen through the many dashes and pauses within her thoughts because she has no dialogue within this passage, “wishing- we- weren’t- here”, the dashes show her discomfort because the thought is extended, and thus more intense and heavy, wishing they could be somewhere else. The effect of the narrator’s comfort establishes her role within the family, the reason she and her sister does not have dialogue symbolizes that she has no voice within the family, as well as establishing hierarchy. The authors use dictation and writing conventions to develop the character of the narrator herself, as well as the mother. The narrator’s focus on each of her parents is additionally highlighted through
In T.S Eliot's poem, Portrait of a Lady, he gives a glimpse into the upper class of post war society- something rather dispirited and forlorn. It is filled with people from the higher social standings and they are as soulless and empty as the lady in the poem. The upper class was also represented by the main character himself, who is truly unable to connect as a whole to his surroundings. He initially describes the world in the poem as dark, covered in smoke and haze – the scene that is in and of itself a mere half life, the individuality of the characters already swallowed by the abyss of ritual that has devoid of meaning. The truly shocking part that links this poem to the author’s previous poems is the underlying brokenness and the soullessness that the characters seem to inhabit. The main character of t...
Faced with a world lacking variety, viewpoints, vibrancy, and virtue- a world without life- a fearful and insecure T.S. Eliot found himself the only one who realized all of civilization had been reduced to a single stereotype. Eliot (1888-1965) grew up as an outsider. Born with a double hernia, he was always distinguished from his peers, but translated his disability into a love of nature. He developed a respect for religion as well as an importance for the well-being of others from his grandfather at a young age, which reflected in his poetry later in life. After studying literature and philosophy at Harvard, Eliot took a trip to Paris, absorbing their vivid culture and art. After, he moved on to Oxford and married Vivien Haigh-Wood. Her compulsivity brought an immense amount of stress into his life, resulting in their abrupt separation. A series of writing-related jobs led Eliot to a career in banking and temporarily putting aside his poetry, but the publication of “The Waste Land” brought him a position at the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer. His next poem, called “The Hollow Men” reflected the same tone of desolation and grief as “The Waste Land.” Soon after, he made a momentous shift to Anglicanism that heavily influenced the rest of his work in a positive manner. Eliot went on to marry Valerie Fletcher, whom he was with until the end of his life, and win a Nobel Prize in literature. T.S. Eliot articulates his vast dissatisfaction with the intellectual desolation of society through narrators that share his firm cultural beliefs and quest to reinvigorate a barren civilization in order to overcome his own uncertainties and inspire a revolution of thought.