27 pages • 54 minutes read
Jhumpa LahiriMrs. Sen's
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Memories and the Past
Mrs. Sen is both comforted and haunted by her memories of growing up in India. Reading letters from her family or listening to tapes that they make causes Mrs. Sen’s expression and mood to change as she is taken over by the longing for home. Eliot describes the sound of Mrs. Sen’s native language as “rapid and riotous” (240). Mrs. Sen becomes more animated when reading letters from home because she has happy memories associated with her family and living in India. Typically, Mrs. Sen is reserved, but when she is reading letters or reminiscing, she is livelier and more excited. Eliot notices that the apartment feels too small for Mrs. Sen when she is in this state.
Mrs. Sen prefers to think about the past because she feels powerless and voiceless in her marriage. She asks, “Eliot, if I began to scream right now at the top of my lungs would someone come?” (229). Because she isn’t connected to a community, she feels sadness when comparing her life to her memories of India. Mrs. Sen longs for and misses the past. She goes through a period of depression during which she cannot perform routine domestic tasks. When she is overcome with longing for her past, Mrs. Sen experience depressive states.
She admits to Eliot that she doesn’t want to tell her family the truth about her life in America: “They think I live in a palace” (248). She is embarrassed by the size of the apartment and the dissatisfaction she feels. Mrs. Sen is scared to tell her family the truth about her life with Mr. Sen because it is not what they want to hear. Mrs. Sen feels trapped in her marriage because living in America prevents her from seeing family and friends. She lives in isolation, caring only for her husband and not herself.
Memories and the past are sources of both comfort and pain for Mrs. Sen. She delights in telling Eliot stories from her past. She tells him about the Indian custom of women coming together and chopping vegetables before an event. When reflecting on this memory, Mrs. Sen says, “Here, in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot sometimes sleep in so much silence” (228). Mrs. Sen feels like her new home is too quiet because she compares it to memories of her past home in India. The story suggests that nostalgia or the longing for an irrecoverable past may hinder one from creating a more fulfilling present.
Alienation from Community
Alienation is a prominent emotion that Mrs. Sen feels living in America married to Mr. Sen. Because Mrs. Sen is away from her community in India, she feels intense feelings of isolation and depression. Mrs. Sen has not found or created a community in America to replace her friends and family in India, which increases her feeling of isolation. The only people that Mrs. Sen routinely interacts with are Mr. Sen, Eliot, Eliot’s mom, and the owner of the fish market.
Mrs. Sen faces feelings of isolation due to her unhappy marriage and lack of connection to a community. While Mrs. Sen regularly corresponds with her family and friends in India, she does not have a community in the neighborhood she lives in, which results in feelings of isolation, eventually leading to a period of depression. After several days during which Mrs. Sen does not cook and sits on the couch for hours at a time, she opens up to Eliot that she has learned of her grandfather’s recent death.
Memory and the past have a strong influence on Mrs. Sen’s state of mind. She shares tapes, letters, and videos of her family and friends from India with Eliot. Soon after Eliot starts staying at Mrs. Sen’s, he learns, the narrator says, that “when Mrs. Sen said home, she meant India, not the apartment where she sat chopping vegetables” (229). Mrs. Sen refers to India as her home even though she no longer lives there. She does not consider the apartment she shares with Mr. Sen her home.
When asked about India by Eliot’s mom, Mrs. Sen says, “Everything is there” (224). She laments that she no longer has her community and loved ones. Mrs. Sen feels isolated from the people who care about her. Without a community to anchor her new life in America, Mrs. Sen feels lost and outcasted. Mrs. Sen feels rejected by people in the community such as a bus rider who complains to the driver about the smell of fish Mrs. Sen was carrying. Afterward, Mrs. Sen feels obligated to take the car to the fish market because the bus driver told her that she could not bring fish on the bus. This results in a car accident near the end of the story.
Patriarchal Gender Roles in Marriage
The relationship between Mrs. and Mr. Sen is deeply unequal. Mr. Sen makes all the major decisions for the family, including those that significantly impact Mrs. Sen, such as that she should learn to drive. Mrs. Sen cares for her husband and caters to his wishes, but he does not reciprocate. They provide for each other’s material needs, but Mrs. Sen has emotional needs that her husband ignores or even derides. For example, Mr. Sen ignores Mrs. Sen’s discomfort about learning how to drive because he would prefer not to have to drive her to the fish market.
At the beginning of the story, Mrs. Sen is described as the “professor’s wife,” a title that encapsulates her life: she exists primarily in relation to her husband rather than as an independent agent. The exclusionary nature of the title of “professor’s wife” points to the rigid gender roles that are at play in Mrs. Sen’s marriage, as well as her husband’s disregard for her inner life and emotional needs.
Mrs. Sen is expected to make dinner for Mr. Sen every day. She connects with Eliot while he watches her chopping vegetables and listens to her stories. Lahiri uses imagery when describing the food that Mrs. Sen prepares: “He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things […] she took whole vegetables between her hands and hacked them apart: cauliflower, cabbage, butternut squash” (226). The vegetables are a motif in the story that show how much effort Mrs. Sen puts into making dinner and being a good wife to Mr. Sen. Eliot notices the physical and emotional labor that Mrs. Sen puts into her marriage. He also notices that Mr. Sen is distant and aloof, and often cruel, toward Mrs. Sen.
Mrs. Sen shares with Eliot the customs of a married Indian woman such as the red dot she wears on her forehead. She says, “I must wear the powder every day […] for the rest of the days that I am married” (230). The red dot is used to distinguish that she is married, which is thus displayed to others in the community. Because Mrs. Sen doesn’t participate in a community in America, the tradition feels perfunctory.
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By Jhumpa Lahiri
