 |
Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 17. Nr. | August 2008 |
| Sektion 5.4. | Women’s Performances in Transnational Migration
Sektionsleiterin | Section Chair: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (University of Bucharest, Romania) |
||
| |
Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 17. Nr. | August 2008 |
| Sektion 5.4. | Women’s Performances in Transnational Migration
Sektionsleiterin | Section Chair: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (University of Bucharest, Romania) |
||
Adriana Elena Stoican (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Email: s_elena2000@yahoo.com
Abstract
The paper investigates overlapping normative and anti-normative concepts of womanhood in the construction of two female characters in Lahiri’s short stories. My claim is that the hybrid nature of these identities introduces a subversive dimension. This thesis comes to contradict current criticisms that regard the literature of South Asian American female authors as a neutral cultural product addressing a new cosmopolitan audience. While I agree that this world of fiction mirrors aspects of a globalised world, I also think it constructs alternative visions of Hindu femininity. Since these unsettling identities undermine both Hindu hegemonic norms and Western stereotypes of subaltern female identities, the “apolitical safety” of Lahiri’s fiction (Rajan and Sharma 164) may be contested.
I. Introduction
This paper analyses the construction of female characters in two short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. I rely on the assumption that writers from Lahiri’s generation address a “new cosmopolitan audience“ (Rajan and Sharma 159). This particular readership appreciates literature that mirrors contemporary aspects of globalisation: “[...] a world of emigration, immigration, travel, multiple authenticities, of diaspora and its attendants, a kind of self-conscious hybridity, of language that stretches the borders of nations, communities and ironically, ideas of purity” (Rajan and Sharma 161). I would like to examine whether Lahiri’s characters’ identity performance corresponds to this mixture of specificity and generality and whether this mélange is a mere aesthetic device. In other words, my analysis focuses on the interplay of normative and anti-normative models in the construction of Indian femininity. I have employed the terms continuities and discontinuities to underline the similarities and differences in the process of female identity formation. The purpose of my research is to answer several questions with respect to an alternation of roles in negotiating female identity: Do the characters analysed - whether located in India or the USA – display a normative/ anti-normative behaviour? How can we interpret the interplay of roles other than mere forms of hybridity? Can one establish a connection between these types of female identities and (female) postcolonial subjectivities? Rajan and Sharma consider that the popularity of this literature is due to that fact that it presents difference in “a safe apolitical way” (164). However, my claim is that female identity performance in Lahiri’s short stories has an oppositional nature that deconstructs this assumed neutrality.
II. Indian women: between acceptance and subversion of traditional gender roles
Lahiri’s short stories present quotidian episodes from the lives of women placed in two different countries: the USA and India. Bibi Haldar’s Cure is the story of a marginalised woman who lives in Calcutta, India. I am interested in analysing the ways in which the main character’s choice of identity models involves possible alternatives to traditional female roles. The normative Hindu womanhood is delineated by Bibi Haldar’s attempts to overcome her marginality and by the attitude of the local community of women. The character’s final choice of self-fulfilment offers an alternative to this model. The next section of the paper will present the female identity model accepted locally as it is outlined by the collective female voice in the story.
II.1. Collective female voice: prescriptive womanhood
The community of women introduced through a collective narrative voice “we” is a local audience of Bibi’s identity performance. One notices that their reactions to her attitudes define the normative vision of womanhood from a collective feminine perspective. These women are sympathetic to Bibi’s fate. They realise that Bibi is not suitable for marriage. Thus, they agree that Bibi’s illness prevents her from being trained into proper womanhood. By defining what Bibi lacks, her neighbours actually imply what a normative female identity involves. It becomes very clear that marriage is a pivotal point in a woman’s destiny. Thus, a husband is defined as the person who speaks in a woman’s name, protects her and sets her on the right path in life. Other features of a desirable woman derive from these women’s statements. A marriageable woman should be able to cook, (i.e. know how to feed a man), wear a sari, embroider, and make nice conversations. She must also be well-dressed, seductive, smiling and attractive. It seems that life as a wife involves serving dinner, scolding the servants, going to the beauty parlour once every three weeks. A part of the marriage procedure is an interview where the girl has to face her future husband and one of his relatives. They examine her body, her knowledge of politics, poetry and cooking.
Bibi’s female neighbours state their adherence to traditional womanhood. They are placed somehow in between since they support Bibi without being able to understand her completely. They sabotage her cousin as a protest against his scapegoating Bibi (they stop buying cosmetics from him, leading him to bankruptcy). At the same time, they support Bibi, although they realise she can never overcome her abnormal condition. Consequently, at some point they admit that they perceive her as a burden and are happy when she is not around. Unable to understand her sadness, they leave her alone at nights. In conclusion, despite their solidarity, these women cannot completely relate to Bibi’s difference. There seems to be a barrier created by the fact that they do not share the same experience of womanhood.
The next chapter discusses the main coordinates of female normality as established by Bibi Haldar’s community.
II.2. Marriage as a norm
Nevertheless, Bibi Haldar wishes to be like any other woman. Thus, she equates normality with marriage and becomes obsessed with the idea of finding a husband. This craving for a married life is confirmed by the doctor’s prescription which scandalises the entire community: he suggests that a sexual life as a married woman may be the appropriate treatment. Marriage as a cure implies that normality for a woman is defined in terms of a male presence. Bibi Haldar seems to have internalised these traditional norms, since she is desperate to become a wife. Consequently, she begins to take care of her body. Gradually, she becomes interested in keeping a diet and goes to the tailor’s to make new saris. She also plans her future wedding in detail, although nobody proposes to her. But the marks of alterity prevent her from reaching this goal. Her cousin refuses to arrange a marriage, because he does not want to support the wedding expenses. We can see that Bibi’s sense of agency develops in her attempt to undermine the cousin’s opposition. She starts spreading compromising rumours about him. As a result, her cousin advertises her nubility in a local newspaper. But Bibi’s “abnormality” is a well- known fact in the community and there are no suitors for her.
I have identified the main coordinate of the female ideal that Bibi has to adopt. I will go on by analysing the elements that turn Bibi Haldar into a peculiar case in her community.
II.3. Female identity and marks of alterity
The main element that emphasises Bibi Haldar’s difference is mental illness. She has periodic convulsions when she falls into delirium. The society considers her disabled, since she is not trusted to manage on her own. She is far from being beautiful, which further accentuates her “abnormality”. Her ill and unattractive body is regarded as a sign of failure to perform according to established norms of (female) identity (Woodward 124).
Another core identity marker is that Bibi Haldar has no family. Her only relative is a cousin who owns a cosmetics shop. He allows Bibi to live with him and his wife. In exchange for this “hospitality”, Bibi draws up the shop’s sales inventory. When her cousin’s wife gets pregnant, Bibi’s disease means that her status further deteriorates. Her illness is considered a threat to the unborn child. Therefore, she has to eat from separate dishes and use separate towels and soaps. She is no longer allowed to sleep in the same building with the pregnant woman and has to retreat to the storeroom. The same scapegoating takes place after the child is born. Thus, Bibi is blamed when the baby catches a cold and the storeroom becomes her permanent home. One may conclude that, as a sick woman, Bibi is desired neither by her relatives, nor by a man. Her inappropriate corporeality is a stigma that prevents her fulfilment as a “normal” woman.
The next chapter analyses manifestations of Bibi’s agency, the way she defines her identity on her own terms, deviating from the norm.
II.4. Anti-normative womanhood
Bibi Haldar wishes to fashion herself in accordance with traditions, but her marks of alterity force her to choose a different path. Confronted with general hostility, the sick woman reacts against the community’s treatment. As a result, her fits increase in frequency after Haldar and his wife launch their separatist campaign. This may be interpreted as an organic protest against marginalisation and it precedes Bibi’s deliberate breaking of rules. Her attitude gradually changes from attempts to imitate a normative behaviour to that of undermining it. One may say that her identity performance shifts from a “purposeful expression” of normative roles of femininity to “a suppression of behaviours relevant to those norms conventionally associated with a salient social identity” (Klein et al.7).
The first sign of this change is Bibi’s self-isolation. The second time her cousin sends her to the storeroom, Bibi seems determined to start a new life. Thus, she is happy to have her own place. She decorates the room, giving it a personal touch. She comforts her women neighbours telling them not to worry, since she enjoys her new freedom. She refuses their company and sinks into further isolation. The idea of finding a husband seems no longer appealing to her. After some time the women are surprised to discover that Bibi Haldar is pregnant. They stand by her during the pregnancy period and help her deliver the baby. Bibi refuses to reveal the identity of the father. Later on, Bibi takes over her cousin’s bankrupt business and becomes an independent single mother. Although her neighbours are curious about the circumstances of conception, they stop looking for explanations when they realize Bibi is completely cured.
This story presents an Indian woman whose behaviour is caught in the dilemma of wishing but being unable to be accepted by the community. Her illness and unpleasant looks are obstacles to social integration. The patriarchal standards reject a woman who is unfit for marriage. Realizing the futility of her attempts, Bibi Haldar finally chooses not to conform to the prescribed standards. She thus “recovers” by means of an unconventional cure: she becomes a mother, without being a wife. Her destiny as a woman is fulfilled without the presence of a man. This is why the child’s conception remains an enigma: the act as such does not matter; the male role is marginalised in her “cure”. In relation to female subaltern agency, I think Rajan’s interpretation of silence as “a refusal to speak” (87) can be applied to Bibi Haldar’s story. The fact that she acts secretly and silently may be read as a sign of empowerment. If one defines agency as the “the extent to which people participate actively in shaping their identities” (Woodward 3), one may consider that Bibi Haldar does have agency. She realises that society will never allow her to be a conventional woman. In consequence, she chooses single motherhood as the frame of her female identity. One may consider that by creating Bibi Haldar, Jhumpa Lahiri offers a local vision of an Indian woman who steps out of the “victimhood paradigm” (Puwar 22). The interplay of normative and anti-normative female roles in Bibi Haldar’s case may be a metaphor for the subaltern female struggle in postcolonial societies. The fact that Lahiri creates an Indian woman who intervenes in the shaping of her identity may be interpreted as a response to Western ideology of Indian women’s submissiveness (Purakayastha 111).
III. Indian women in the Western space
In the next section of the paper I will analyse one of the stories whose female character (Twinkle) is located in the United States. I am interested in the extent to which Twinkle’s identity negotiation involves similar and/or different patterns with the character of Bibi Haldar. Sanjeev and Twinkle make up a young married couple who move to a new house in Connecticut, the USA. He is a former MIT student and a successful business man at present. She is enrolled at Stanford University, writing a thesis on Irish poetry. The new house into which they have moved contains traces of its former dwellers: Christian objects hidden in unexpected nooks around the place. The story conflict consists in Sanjay’s and Twinkle’s different attitudes towards the religious accessories.
III.1. Male and female roles: ambivalent attractions for otherness
From the very beginning, Twinkle is attracted by the objects she gradually discovers. Not only does she wish to keep them, but she also displays them around the house. Sanjeev‘s and Twinkle’s different reactions to the foreign items reflect distinct degrees of openness to cultural otherness.
Sanjeev intends to present a Hindu image to the outer world. The fact that they have to throw a party for inaugurating the house scares him, since he realises that the guests will see the Christian objects. He has a similar reaction when they find a plaster statue of Virgin Mary in the garden. While Twinkle suggests it should be placed on the lawn, Sanjeev considers this a betrayal of (their) Hindu identity. Thus, he intends to throw it away; Twinkle insists that the statue should be kept since it is part of their property. They finally reach a compromise: the statue is placed in a niche, so that it can only be seen by the visitors and not by the passers-by.
Sanjeev’s reticence towards the Christian objects illustrates his adherence to Indian traditions. His wife’s attraction to them underlies a deeper conflict between Twinkle’s and Sanjeev’s different conceptions of gender roles.
The next section of the paper will present the definition of the female identity standard from a male’s perspective ( e.g. Sanjeev’s).
III.2. Sanjeev’s rejections: defining traditional Indian female roles
Sanjeev is surprised at his wife’s insistence on keeping the Christian accessories. This episode makes him think of their history as a new family. He feels that her attraction to Western things actually disturbs him at a more profound level. Having been united by means of an arranged marriage, Sanjeev and Twinkle have started to know each other only afterwards. Gradually, he has understood that there are things about her that contradict his model of wifehood: she does not cook Indian food, she smokes, she is rather unorganised, and she wears high heel shoes – which makes him appear shorter. It seems that the two of them have been shaped by different cultural experiences: he finds her favourite films depressing; he knows nothing about the Irish poet on whom she writes her dissertation. Therefore, they seem to be united by a few vague cultural references (their teenage preference for Wodehouse‘s novels and the fact that they both dislike the sitar).
Confronted with Twinkle’s obstinacy in keeping the Christian objects, Sanjeev re-evaluates the circumstances of their marriage. Thus, he realises that he would have preferred a more traditional wife. Sanjeev is clearly aware of his passive acceptance of the Indian traditional marriage scheme. He has a negative definition of love, i.e. he knows only what love is not supposed to be. His decision of getting married was prompted partly by his feelings of loneliness and partly by his mother’s insistence. According to Indian traditional standards, Twinkle is the ideal person to be loved since she is beautiful, high caste and educated. I think Sanjeev’s inner conflict comes from the impossibility to reconcile his idea of a wife with Twinkle’s identity performance. Actually, Sanjeev’s wife-choice is a deviation from the usual marriage pattern among Indian males coming to study in the USA. According to Kurien, Indian males who chose to study abroad obey the traditional norm prescribed for men by Indian society. Their access to education is a path to becoming reliable bread-winners and future heads of families. Since they represent a segment of the more conservative Indian population, these men usually prefer traditional wives, mainly selected from India (Hondagneu-Sotelo 158). The reason why they do not marry Indian female students from the USA is because these women’s emancipation clashes with their conservative views. Taking into account that Sanjeev has chosen Twinkle and not someone more traditional, it may be the case that it is Twinkle’s very difference that simultaneously attracts and disturbs him. This ambiguity becomes apparent in his attitude towards her childish curiosity and fascination with small things. This is a feature Sanjeev appreciates, but cannot fully comprehend. On the one hand, Sanjeev admires his wife’s openness towards the world in general, but on the other hand her attraction for Western things signals the existence of a cultural barrier that unsettles him. When Twinkle and the guests find the Christ’s bust in the attic, Sanjeev admits that he hates its solemnity and perfection, but mostly Twinkle’s fascination with it. As his parents are still in India, while hers live in California, one may assume that Twinkle has spent more time in the West than Sanjeev, who came to America as a student. This may also account for their different attitudes towards Indian and Western traditions.
I will go on analysing Twinkle’s behaviour and the manner in which this character’s identity performance undermines both Hindu ideals of femininity and Western discourses on cultural otherness.
III.3. Twinkle‘s “Westernisation” – double subversion
Twinkle is far from embodying a traditional Hindu wife. It seems that the only frail link she has with her ancestors’ tradition is the arranged marriage ritual. But this, too, is taken over superficially, since she does not act according to Sanjeev’s expectations. I suggest that her Westernised identity can be interpreted as a subversion of both Hindu traditional norms of femininity and of Western exotic grids of perceiving cultural otherness.
Although her name is Tinima, she prefers to be called Twinkle, an English word borrowed from a nursery rhyme. She thus chooses to express her identity in Western terms. Her attitude towards the Christian objects illustrates the complicated way in which her identity has been shaped by the contact with multiple cultural traditions. First of all, the Christian accessories are not signifiers of sacredness for Twinkle. She is somehow amused by them: she finds them” beautiful”, “spectacular” and cute”. Their accidental discovery renders them even more attractive. At the party, the Christian objects and Twinkle become the foci of attention, to Sanjeev’s discomfort. After showing the guests her collection of Christian items, she organizes a treasure hunt in the attic, hoping to find similar things there. The process of discovering “other” cultural objects is pictured as a game, a kind of entertainment. The objects are not appreciated for their cultural value; it is their otherness and their placement in an unusual context (a Hindu home) that makes them “enjoyable” to the mixed audience (American and Indian guests). Delighted by the game of discovery, they enter the attic with Twinkle and later come back with the “prey”: a fifteen kilos silver bust of Jesus, with a solemn expression, on which they place a women’s feather hat. The last detail is meant to cancel the religious/cultural significance of the statue which becomes just another funny object. I interpret this attitude towards Western religious objects as a deconstruction of Western exotic grids of perceiving cultural otherness. The paradox of postcolonial studies along with performance theory may offer a key to understanding the deconstructing of exotic assumptions in This Blessed House.
According to Huggan, postcolonial studies are thought to operate at the intersection of two regimes of value: postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Postcolonialism is defined as a system meant to oppose colonial epistemologies and assumptions; postcoloniality is linked with the condition of global market where cultural products and ideas about cultural otherness circulate as commodities (28). It follows that within the area of postcolonial, cultural otherness is endowed with a political value, while within the regime of postcoloniality it acquires an esthetic one (Huggan 13). The exotic discourse – a product of colonialism – is based on this dialectical relationship: it pretends to honour cultural difference in order to disguise the inequality of power relations established in the cultural clash. In the global era, exoticism functions under the form of mass-market consumption of products from other cultures. Its assumptions remain the same, but its mode of operation changes. Twinkle’s attraction to the Christian objects may be interpreted as a subversion of exoticist assumptions. First of all, she is a non-Western female observer living in the symbolic centre of the capitalist world. Her fascination with Western religious accessories turns them into objects displayed under an exotic (female) gaze. The location of the Christian items in hidden places of the house obeys the aesthetics of decontextualisation (Appadurai quoted in Huggan 16). The removal of objects from their context simultaneously domesticates their cultural specificity and feeds the spectator’s need for novelty. Twinkle, too, is a product of a history of cultural transplantations. Her movement to a new house may be read as a metaphor for her perpetual dislocation. She is a diasporic Indian woman who exoticises Western culture while literally inhabiting it. I think the construction of this female character allows the author to encode multiple subversive significations. Twinkle treats Christian symbols as objects-to-be-admired, devoid of religious and cultural meanings. Therefore, her gesture overthrows exotic assumptions, showing how Western culture may become the object of the postcolonial gaze. The subversive potential of performance identity consists in repeated enactments of an established norm: ”performance is always a reiteration of a norm or a set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition” (Butler in Goodman and de Gay 69). Twinkle’s admiration for the Christian accessories is a repetition of the exotic norm that distorts the original.
On the other hand, Twinkle’s Westernisation clashes with Hindu hegemonic versions of female gender roles. In the case of immigrant populations, religious conservatism is a means of preserving cultural identities (van der Veer 9). In the American context, Indian immigrants react against racism and assimilation by constructing the image of South Asian communities as “model minorities” (Purkayastha 91, Kurien quoted in Hondagneu-Sotelo 167). Considering that most of the Indian population in the USA is of Hindu origin, Hinduism is the religion employed as an emblem of ethnicity. A hegemonic version of Hindu identity is created by male-led Indian cultural organisations. The discourse fashioned by these groups employs gender codes to support their religious-nationalist doctrine. Thus, women are conceived as preservers and transmitters of cultural norms. They are supposed to act as dedicated wives and mothers, and initiate their children into Hindu traditions. Men are the bread-winners whose professional success is conditioned by wife support. In the larger postcolonial nationalist discourse, women as symbols of the family are identified as mothers of the nation and are supposed to be protected against foreign influences (Chatterjee quoted by Loomba 191). Although the hegemonic version of culture is not shared by various groups within diasporic Hindu communities, it is an officially accepted version of Indianness (Purkayastha 88). Hindu women of the diaspora are thus faced with a double challenge. They have to shape their identity negotiating two ideological constructions of womanhood: the Hindu hegemonic one and mainstream stereotypes that conceive Hindu women in terms of submissiveness and victimhood.
Twinkle’s adherence to Western values clashes with traditional roles assigned to Indian women. Her fluid identity makes it impossible for her to be associated with the core of Indian traditions. As a diaspora Indian woman, Twinkle inhabits a double structure. Westernisation provides her the tools to deviate from a normative Hindu conception of womanhood. In the same time, the character’s shallow adherence to Christian symbols via a counterfeit exoticism can be interpreted as a contestation of Western cultural supremacy. I think Twinkle’s belonging to neither of the two worlds goes beyond a mere aesthetic hybridity. Her vague connections with both Hindu and Western cultures allow her to fashion a female identity that is not prescribed by either of them. If the political dimension of literature consists in its ability to offer alternative discourses to hegemonic truths (Rushdie 14), then one may say that The Blessed House offers alternative models to established visions: Western exoticism and hegemonic Hindu femininity.
IV. Conclusions
The stories analysed allow us to formulate several conclusions with respect to subversive identity negotiations in Lahiri‘s short stories and the idea of literature as a product for consumption. The continuity of female identity performance consists in the characters’ deconstructions of norms. Bibi Haldar accepts the status of a single woman in a community where marriage validates womanhood. The absence of a man in her live signals the assertion of her individuality and ultimately independence. Twinkle, an Indian woman located in the United States, acts in an anti-normative way, as well: she subverts both Hindu hegemonic ideals of womanhood and Western assumptions of female otherness.
The discontinuity of their identity construction resides in the means by which they fashion alternative female selves. Bibi Haldar chooses single motherhood. Although this is not a cultural specific model, it allows her to shape her identity in her own terms. As an Indian woman from diaspora, Twinkle inhabits a double cultural structure. The fluid nature of her cultural affiliations dismantles both Eurocentric discourses and Hindu hegemonic standards of femininity. Twinkle’s parodic Westernisation is the means she chooses to fashion a female identity that is neither Western nor Hindu.
It is true that Lahiri‘s stories mix local and global realities. This fact may partly account for their appeal to a new cosmopolitan audience. I agree with the fact that the hybdridity of her female characters corresponds to the shifting nature of things typical of the global condition. Still, despite their vague cultural specificities, the women of Lahiri’s fiction perform female roles that contradict certain standards of and stereotypes about Hindu female identities. Thus, Lahiri’s stories may be interpreted as illustrations of “the postcolonial exotic” (Huggan 28). They circulate both as cultural commodities on a global market and as means to construct oppositional subjectivities. To the extent that these stories dismantle hegemonic models of female identity, they cannot be regarded as mere aesthetic narratives.
Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Stories. London: Flamingo, 1999.
Secondary Sources:
5.4. Women’s Performances in Transnational Migration
Sektionsgruppen | Section Groups | Groupes de sections
|
 |