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The “Indistinct [Dora Spenlow] Association” at the End of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “This Blessed House” and the Madwoman in the Attic Allusion’s Counter-Feminist Intent It Clinches

Five months into 2014 and seven beyond the release of Bengali American Jhumpa Lahiri’s fourth book, The Lowland, we find ourselves in fresh new territory as regards her work’s critical reception. Against expectations, this latest novel has drawn fewer unqualifiedly positive press reviews than did her prior fiction publications. Though The Lowland’s first critical readers have praised it for its ambitious reach into an important moment in our postcolonial globe’s recent history—the midcentury era of insurgent, Marxist–Maoist movements in various of the world’s underdeveloped places—and admired it, too, for its demonstration of Lahiri’s established brilliance in describing the American domestic, they haven’t known what to make of the fiction’s off-putting lead female character, the widow/wife/mother/scholar Gauri. In a representative review, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized as “highhanded and cruel” Gauri’s chief plot contribution, her choice to abandon her daughter and second husband in order to pursue an academic career in philosophy. Further, said Kakutani, the writer supplies no motive external to Gauri’s inborn heartlessness to explain her behavior, and, as a result, the abandoning mother “comes across not as a flawed and complicated person, but as a folk tale parody of a cold, selfish witch.” “Infuriating,” said The Guardian reviewer James Lasdun. He, too, was displeased by Gauri’s rendering: She “might have been interesting,” “might have been fascinating to follow,” might have been “a full-on study in cruelty,” had her author supplied her with feelings other than her wont to know and her implacable willfulness, said Lasdun. Underlying Kakutani’s perplexity, of course, is the aesthetic understanding that parody is a lesser authorial pursuit than the meticulous, Flaubertian reproduction of life and persons that had transparently guided Lahiri in all her prior works and that, to be sure, continues for the most part to guide her in The Lowland (with the exception, it would seem, of Gauri’s rendering). Underlying Lasdun’s exasperation, meanwhile, is the psychological awareness that we are all constituted of both our personas and our shadows, and any character that seems all dark, as does Gauri, is a failed fictional creation. And, last, underlying both reviewers’ dissatisfaction is the professional reading community’s near unanimous perception that Lahiri is a feminist (in that term’s simplest sense: a believer in her sex’s potential for virtue and an advocate of her sex’s ever less restricted freedom) (see, for example, Jackson, Reddy, Williams, and Rajan). Transparently The Lowland has thwarted this perception’s comfortable incumbency—thus, the reviewers’ vexation. The truth, however, is that the notion of Lahiri’s feminism should never have gotten into office. Both her fiction’s material contents and their intertextual linkages should have from the start rendered the notion absurd. Such was my argument some two years ago when, following lines of