Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and the Reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Israa Hashim Taher

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.5p.137

Abstract

Born in England, to Bengali parents, and raised in America, Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) has been variously labeled as Indian-American, post-modern, post-colonial, and Indian writer. Naming Lahiri has been a long and intricate process. However, the identity she chooses for herself is something different. She wants herself to be simply recognized as an American writer. In her first novel, The Namesake (2 003) , the protagonist, reflecting the dilemma of his creator, suffers the confusing experience of having an appropriate name. Lahiri resorts to Russian literature to an identity for her protagonist. In her second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), Lahiri uses the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne not just to suggest the title, and epigraph for the collection, but more importantly to establish her belonging in an American literary canon, as Ambreen Hai suggests in Re-Rooting Families: The Alter/Natal as the Central Dynamic of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed I want to push this argument further by suggesting that Lahiri attempts to gain her formal entry into the main stream American literature by re-writing Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850)in reverse order in Hema and Kaushik, the second part of Unaccustomed Earth. Keywords: Lahiri, Hawthorne, India, Scarlet Letter, identity, America

Highlights

Born in England, to Bengali parents, and raised in America, Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) has been variously labeled as IndianAmerican, post-modern, post-colonial, and Indian writer
In " 'Names Can Wait': The Misnaming of the South Asian Diaspora in Theory and Practice", Singh (2007) suggests that since “The Overcoat” deals with a strange name like "Gogol", that name is expressive of the strangeness of the Indian immigrant experience in the United States.(p.17) As Lahiri's life shows, the child of immigrants begins in a kind of nowhere place
From the beginning of her writing career Lahiri was concerned with the experiences of the first and second-generation Bengali immigrants in the United States, a thing which sounded quite new to American readers at the time

Summary

Introduction

Born in England, to Bengali parents, and raised in America, Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) has been variously labeled as IndianAmerican, post-modern, post-colonial, and Indian writer. The same thing is true of nineteenth century American writers, like Nathanial Hawthorne who has inspired the writing of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. In her Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri uses the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne to suggest the title, main theme, and epigraph for the collection.

Results

Conclusion