Aliens, Aliases, Surrogates and Familiars: The Family in Jhumpa Lahiri's Short Stories

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that alienation and familiarity serve as mobile matrices for understanding the affectively experienced impact of transnational migration in certain of Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories. While we may think of alienation as a precondition of migrant identity, it is a condition that is familiar to most of us in different contexts. How does alienation, thus plurally conceived, figure in the experience of migrants, producing the relay between heimlich/unheimlich experiences? Moreover, in the socio-cultural context of globalisation, how does transnational migration challenge conventional notions of family, a word associated with notions of familiarity and filiation that are seemingly antonymous to the idea of alienation? These are the questions I set out to answer, concluding that the ‘family’ is always a unit composed by its very hauntings, surrogates, and absences.

Keywords:

• Jhumpa Lahiri
• family
• migration
• diaspora
• post-colonial
• immigrant literature
• uncanny
• alienation
• surrogate
• subcontinent
• India

Notes

  ¹ Friedrich Schelling quoted in Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919) (James Strachey, ed. & trans.) (London: Hogarth, 1923), p.224.

  ² OED Online.

  ³ Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (Boston: Houghton, 1999), p.198. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

  ⁴ The meanings of heimlich and unheimlich are discussed below.

  ⁵ Matthew Solan, ‘Catching up with Pulitzer Prize Winner Jhumpa Lahiri’, in Poets and Writers (Sept./Oct. 2003), p.1.

  ⁶ Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, p.198.

  ⁷ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.XVII (1917–1919) (James Strachey ed. & trans.) (London: Hogarth, 1923), p.219.

  ⁸  Ibid., pp.224–6.

  ⁹ Barbara Kantrowitz, ‘Who Says There's No Second Act?’, in Newsweek, Vol.142, no.8 (25 Aug. 2003), p.61.

¹⁰ Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family: Private Property and the State (1884) (London: Penguin, 2010).

¹¹ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Arthur Baker, trans.) (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1908), p.40.

¹² Anthony Giddens, Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2nd ed. 1993), p.370.

¹³ Ronald M. Sabatelli and Suzanne E. Bartle, ‘Survey Approaches to the Assessment of Family Functioning: Conceptual, Operational, and Analytical Issues,’ in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol.57, no.4 (1995), p.1027.

¹⁴ Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (New Delhi: Random, 2008), p.60.

¹⁵  Ibid., p.62.

¹⁶  Ibid., pp.66–7.

¹⁷  Ibid., pp.70–2.

¹⁸  Ibid., p.67.

¹⁹ Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, p.114.

²⁰ OED Online.

²¹ Schelling quoted in Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p.224.