A Feminist Inquiry into the Mother-Daughter Bond in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Writings

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the complex and dynamic mother-daughter relationship as inscribed in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, with special focus on two of her short stories Hell-Heaven and Unaccustomed Earth. Jhumpa Lahiri often highlights the lives of women who have to deal with migration, displacement and cultural negotiation. The mother-daughter bond is an important aspect of her narratives. Mothers are often portrayed as custodians of tradition and memory, while daughters inherit and reshape the cultural memory based on their own lived experiences. In diasporic settings, it is the continuous clash between tradition and modernity, between memory and forgetting and between distance and intimacy that shapes the mother-daughter bond. Through the mother-daughter relationship, Lahiri reveals the role of postmemory in the evolution of intergenerational bonds as well as the function of patriarchy in determining the roles of mothers and daughters for each other. A feminist analysis not only reveals the dual nature of the mother-daughter relationship that consists of both conflict and mutual understanding but it also depicts how the equations in personal spaces reflect the broader political issues. This paper attempts to reveal that the works of Jhumpa Lahiri demonstrate the mother-daughter bond as both deeply personal and profoundly political, reflecting the struggles of women to sustain identity, heritage, and agency across borders.