Unaccustomed Earth

Throughout these stories, we see women contending with the notion of the ideal woman. Common to most stories is a line that delineates that women must be thin and pretty in order to garner more respect and sense of worth from those around them—both women and men. Of particular resonance in this regard is Hema’s depiction of her own mother in comparison to the more-ideally beautiful and glamorous Parul, the woman who gives Hema her first explicit glimpse of her burgeoning womanhood and sexuality. However, in addition to these sexualized expectations, almost every family within this collection is depicted as one whose emotional center and cohesion relies upon the mother. This mechanism is again typified by Parul, whose death inaugurated the disintegration of Kaushik’s notion of family and home. Dr. Chaudhuri did virtually nothing to emotionally care for his son in the wake of his wife’s death, which is undoubtedly a consequence of the gender socialization of men. Kaushik, for his part, ultimately looks to Hema, a woman, to reconcile his own feelings of grief and loss. Through this theme, Lahiri parses the psychology of both women and men, while simultaneously relaying the contours of the feminine experience in particular.  

The parameters of the ideal woman, though, must be fed through the specific generation and location of the characters involved, as we see many female characters struggling with the pull of Indian tradition and that of American norms that dictate feminine respectability, attractiveness, and ideal roles.