Alice Walker stated that to be an outcast was to be free, a freedom of ideals, actions and thoughts. However in the short story by Jhumpa Lahiri Mrs. Sen is the outcast character and there is a conflict between how she is portrayed and how Alice Walker stated that they should be seen. Mrs. Sen was able to keep all of her ideals and traditions from her homeland and was still in contact with her family and others like her but she was an outcast to the society she had moved to.
While Mrs. sen was able to keep her traditions inside of her head and her thoughts she was in no way free as all of the things she was used to in her culture were impossible to do in the new, american culture she was introduced to. While this previous statement may prove Walkers point she was in no way free as she couldn't learn to drive and was unable to even go to the market to pick up a fish that she wanted to make dinner with. When she tried taking other methods of transport like a bus she had bothered people with the smell of the fish that she had bought. The one time she actually had tried to go out to the market herself and drive ended in disaster with her crashing into a lightpost and going back into her room after and simply crying with the loss of all of the things she was used to, completely contradicting Walkers point that being an outcast is a good thing to be.
Both Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen” and Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" contain characters of different cultures; Mrs. Sen is of Indian heritage in, “Mrs. Sen”, and speaker of , “No Name Woman”, is of Asian decent. Both characters display a struggle with their place in American culture in relation to their traditional ways. Mrs. Sen sets up her home in a simply, Indian way with many rugs, colours, and always makes dinner for her husband, never ordering out. She does not know how to drive therefore limiting her freedom and dresses traditionally, in a sari. The speaker in, “No Name Woman”, displays herself as torn between acting as though her aunt that brought shame to her family never existed in order to maintain honour for her family or to remember her aunt, which could be turbulent.
ReplyDeleteThe main difference between these two characters is that although Mrs. Sen tried to break her own boundaries, she failed to push herself after her failure in driving while the speaker in, “No Name Woman”, knows no limits. She, in a sense, went a step further; she pushed her own boundary lines, disregarding her instructions of her mother which were to never think about her aunt ever. By publishing a work about her aunt and the hardship that she faced with her adultery, bearing a child from that, and her suicide, she is keeping her aunts memory alive. Mrs. Sen does makes an effort to gain freedom by driving but let her fear eat away at any chance of that. When she finally decides to go to the market, without Mr. Sen or a license, she crashes and cries in her room after leaving the reader unsure of what happens to her in the end.
Pam Kawalerski
Post #1
Pam,
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