Tropes of Sexuality in Select Short Stories of Jhumpa Lahiri

Abstract

Sexuality is no longer a taboo subject of discussion to be spoken about in subtle tones; rather it is a significant element of postmodern writings. D.H. Lawrence was one of the major literary stalwarts who had extensively utilized ‘sexuality’ as a prominent leitmotif in his fictional oeuvre and encouraged an entire gamut of writers, scholars and litterateurs to probe in this subject matter, eventually breaking through social taboos and conventional moralities. This paper attempts to explore this apparently conventional concept of sexuality in the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and its impact on the volatile relationships and disposition of the characters. The Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, and Unaccustomed Earth revolve around the diasporic postcolonial lives of Indian migrants, settled in a new world. Lahiri’s personal experience of being a second generation migrant leads to her intrinsic understanding of the expatriate characters and their hyphenated identities. Her characters are trapped in a mesh of traumas like identity crisis, emotional isolation and cultural hybridity. This on-going struggle manifests itself prominently in their erratic and turbulent sexual orientation. In order to dispel the sense of alienation and ambulatory existence, the Indian immigrants ascribe to sexual liberation offered by the Western society as a means to an emotional succour. This culminates in an interweaving of sexual desires and emotional wants in stories like “A Temporary Matter”, “A Choice of Accommodation” and a triptych story, “Hema and Kaushik”. The short story “Hell-Heaven” has parallelisms with Tagore’s The Broken Nest, with elements of diasporic acculturation. The titular story, “Interpreter of Maladies” dismantles the hackneyed notion of India being a land of sexual suppression and unveils various promiscuous issues germinating from loneliness in an alien society and culture, which leads to grave consequences. The theory of ‘sexuality’ has been dissected and popularized by literary theorists and critics like Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and others. In this paper I seek to examine the lattice of sexuality in the diasporic matrix.