Bahareh Bahmanpour

Bahareh Bahmanpour’s article “Female Subjects and Negotiating Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies” examines four short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri. Bahmanpour uses "Mrs. Sen”, “This Blessed House”, “The Treatment of Bibi Heldar” and “Sexy”, in order to take a close look at the at the female characters  that are trying to find their identity between two cultures.  This is proven when the author states: “the lives of Indians and Indian-Americans whose hyphenated Indian identity has led them to be caught between the Indian traditions that they have left behind and a totally different western world that they have to face culminating in an ongoing struggle to adjust between the two worlds of the two cultures.” (Bahmanpour, 2010) In this article the author uses words such as “hybridity" and “liminality” to show how these immigrants react when it comes to finding their identity. The author then explains how each character in Lahiri’s stories travel threw their experience of finding their identity, which is constantly changing. The reason for theses constantly changing identities the author argues is because identities are constantly negotiating from one to another. In the end Bahmanpour concludes that through Lahiri's stories Indian women are able to have a voice. This is something that I must agree with, because women, especially in Indian culture, have always had less power than men, which had led them to silencing all of their pain and suffering.