Mrs. Sen’s Sense of Cooking in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Abstract

Mrs. Sen’s is one of the short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999). In Mrs. Sen’s, Lahiri narrates the story of an Indian woman immigrating to a new country due to her husband’s occupation. Mrs. Sen has to leave her motherland and start a new life in a foreign country. She faces some difficulties in adapting to her new life away from India. For Mrs. Sen, the days, after moving to a foreign land, are surrounded by homesickness and loneliness. It can be observed that her reactions to these feelings are closely related to food and cooking rituals. Food-related routines are remedies for Mrs. Sen’s struggle to cope with the difficulties she encounters after immigration. Namely, Mrs. Sen’s personal experiences in her social life seem to interact closely with food-related details revealed in the story. Thus, this study aims to examine how Jhumpa Lahiri depicts food and cooking as significant instruments for sustaining an immigrant woman’s personality traits in a foreign country. To this aim, Mrs. Sen’s is analysed by considering the related literature and existing studies within this context. Accordingly, foodrelated details found in Mrs. Sen’s story are evaluated to shed light on the significance of food and cooking in the identity formation processes of immigrant women. Moreover, the significance of the kitchen as the space for preserving and projecting cultural identity is examined by taking Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space into consideration. As a consequence of the study, it is revealed that, in fiction, a deep and intimate relationship possibly exists between daily food-related routines and immigrant women who suffer from homesickness, isolation, loneliness, marginalisation, and identity crisis after moving to a foreign country. Furthermore, it is concluded that food and cooking are not limited only to nutritional needs because they have additional roles in the identity development processes of the characters in fictional works.