Scattered seeds: motherhood in foreign land in Jhumpa Lahiri's works

Abstract

In this thesis I examine the relationship between motherhood and diaspora,by analyzing how the works of the Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri depict the representation of Indian immigrant mothers in the USA. The main goal is to investigate Lahiris novels The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), and her collections of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008), having as a theoretical reference notions of diaspora studies and contemporary feminist literary theory. In order to do so, I discuss the relations between motherhood, pregnancy and foreignness, as well as the role of the immigrant mother at home and in the public space. Particularly, it interests me the manner in which the women characters in these texts negotiate with their children who live in-between the Indian and the American cultures through cultural aspects such as religious holidays, clothing, culinary habits and language. I argue that mother-daughter bonds in Lahiris fiction are different from the traditional mother-daughter relations,because they involve negotiations between different generations of immigrant women. Furthermore, I discuss how Lahiris women characters deal with widowhood in a foreign land and how sisterhood is represented as a response to the diasporic solitude these women often feel. In the final part,some conclusions are presented, demonstrating that Lahiris works can be seen both as feminist and diasporic texts, as some of the women characters in those fictional texts deal with motherhood whilst assimilating and negotiating with the host countrys culture.