Cultural displacement means being plucked out from my place and dropped into an alien
environment. What makes a place mine? The food we love, friends and family, the weather,
shared experiences? For some people, migrating from the cozy small town they grew up in to study
at a large university can also be a form of cultural dislocation. Add to this issues of race,
language, and geographical distance, and you begin to get some idea of the displacement the
eponymousofs short story Mrs. Sen (1999) feels. Mrs. Sen is in a New England university town,
far from her native Calcutta in India. The chilly New England weather, the habitually reserved
nature of its inhabitants, and its vast, windswept empty stretches may as well be Jupiter for
Mrs. Sen, who is used to warm, crowded, festive Calcutta. While her Bengali husband goes to work
at the university, Mrs. Sen decides to offer her services as a babysitter to fill her days,
taking in eleven-year-old...
Thursday, April 7, 2016
In Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, what is the analysis of cultural displacement in "Mrs. Sen," and how does it impact the characters?
Gaia Chandler, M.A.
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