Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: Foodways and Identity ...

Notes
Culinary Narratology 29
1 See Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile bodies: Toward a Corporal Feminism. Sydney: Allen and
Unwin, 1994; Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993 and Bryan
S. Turner (ed). The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage, 1991.
2 Lahiri portrays varied types of first generation women’s attitudes towards the concept of
cultural assimilation. Different from Mrs. Sen and Ashima, we also have the kind of mother
in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” who prefers her daughter to embracing American
culture, without a burden of their past history.
3 Lahiri has been criticized for repeating the stereotypes of the dichotomy, portraying
western womanhood as self-assertive, cold and self-centered while the traditional Indian
mothers are warm, motherly and thoughtful.
4 Madhuparna Mitra writes that “Mrs. Sen’s” is perhaps “the most poignant” story in
depicting a female immigrants uprooted from her “comfortable upper-middle-class” home in
Calcutta and re-rooted in the new continent America (193).
5 As Noelle Brada-Williams indicates, the recurring themes of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of
short stories are the barriers to and opportunities for human communications in communal,
marital, extra-marital and parent-child relationships as well as the dichotomy of care and
neglect (451).
6 The first time Mrs. Sen decides to get fresh fish on her own is when she takes a bus to the
seaside. However, Mrs. Sen confronts the most direct racist marginalization on her way
home from the fish market. Specifically, she is confronted by an old lady and the bus driver
who interrogate Mrs. Sen about the bag she carries. This trip is an unpleasant experience
that deepens Mrs. Sen’s recognition of being an outsider in this society.
7 Mitra’s questioning the need to make “assimilative compromises” seems to carry a message
indicating a teleological intention that all immigrants aspire to a successful assimilation.
8 Critics have described second generation immigrants as “American,” “Anglo-Indian,”
“NRI” for “Non-Resident Indian,” or “ABCD” or American born confused deshi.
9 Lahiri portrays various first generation women’s attitudes towards the concept of cultural
assimilation. Different from Mrs. Sen and Ashima, we also have the mother in “When Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine” who prefers her daughter to embrace American culture without a
burden of history.