Cultural Outsider

In her fiction “Mrs. Sen’s”, Jhumpa Lahiri channels her unique experience as an Indian-American in the United States by constructing characters that reflect the juxtaposition she faced as a descendant of immigrants. She portrays the protagonist, Mrs. Sen as a cultural outsider to the American society and a cultural insider in her microcosm — the apartment she decorated to resemble India. Interestingly, Lahiri portrays another protagonist, the 11-year-old Eliot, as a cultural outsider to Mrs. Sen’s version of “little” India and a cultural outsider of the American society. In other words, both Mrs. Sen and Eliot are mirror images of each other as they go through similar transformations, from a cultural outsider to a cultural insider. While Eliot …show more content…
Sen’s question “is it too much to ask?” reveals that she feels she has sacrificed everything (life and happiness) for her husband. In addition, Mrs. Sen asks Eliot , if she began to scream at the top of her lungs, anyone would come. Then, she shares: “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 come to share the news, to help with arrangements” (Lahiri 116). Eliot understands that by home Mrs. Sen means India, not the apartment where she sat chopping vegetables (Lahiri 116). Mrs. Sen refusal to acknowledge the fact she has a new “home” ultimately molds her state of denial, resulting in her struggle with cultural estrangement. These depictions reveal that Mrs. Sen affiliates her self-identity with her past life. By accepting her new home, she will lose touch with her sense of self and identity irrevocably, which can be the worst nightmare for Mrs. Sen. In effect, Mrs. Sen’s homesickness is her unique way to rationalize the unbearable pain of losing her self identity. 
 On the contrary, Eliot approaches the new culture with open …show more content…
When this happens, Eliot takes initiative to adjust himself accordingly to the new culture by placing his own shoes on the bookcase every time he is at Mrs. Sen’s apartment (Lahiri 114). Eliot is able to engage and adopt the new culture without any hesitation because he, unlike Mrs. Sen, has no deep connection with anything or anyone in his past life. Therefore, nothing can hinder his progress of transformation from a cultural outsider to a cultural insider. By using such contrast, Lahiri manages to shed light on the excruciating transformation of Mrs. Sen from a cultural outsider to a cultural insider as she awkwardly reminiscing her past life, without allowing herself to explore and absorb the everyday experiences of the new culture. 
 Back to Mrs. Sen: she refuses to put in effort to adjust correspondingly to the new culture, she draws hers own boundary and traps herself within the bubble of her own making. Lahiri brilliantly assigns meaning to the artifacts Mrs. Sen brought along from India such as knife, aerograms, tape, saris and etc. They reflect Mrs. Sen’s longing to move back and live with her family in India. Furthermore, Mrs. Sen heavily clung to all the rituals, like food preparation and objects from her life in