Gender and Family Theme Analysis

Mr Biswas’s struggle for freedom is largely a struggle for freedom from the Tulsi family he impulsively marries into. Unlike the fairly modern relatives he grows up with, the Tulsis are orthodox Hindus, which infuriates Mr Biswas to no end—particularly because their home life is orchestrated and controlled by women. Accordingly, Mr Biswas’s quest for a house arises in large part from sense of emasculation amidst the Tulsis. His desire for a house also reflects a desire to exert authority over his family, which he conceives in terms of the nuclear unit of a couple and their children rather than the traditional joint-family unit in which siblings live together, supporting their parents and children. Mr Biswas’s insistence on authority leads him to treat his wife with ceaseless and profound cruelty; nevertheless, while he is by no means a feminist figure, by the end of the book, he achieves this authority and finally stops taking women’s emotional labor for granted, beginning to recognize their support and contributions to his life.

The Tulsis’ orthodox Hinduism at once oppresses the family’s women by restricting their roles to domestic labor and supports them within the circumscribed sphere of the home. The status of Tulsi women depends largely on their marriages; this is why Mrs Tulsi is willing to marry her daughters to men of whatever occupation and disposition so long as they come from the right Hindu caste—including Mr Biswas, whose part-time job as a transient sign-painter does not dissuade her from letting him marry Shama. Tulsi women are both powerless outside the home because their traditional marriages bar them from doing much outside the house but supported and connected inside the home because the women form Hanuman House’s core social unit.

Mr Biswas is continually frustrated that nobody pays him the attention he believes he deserves and he carries no weight in the household’s decisions or community. Indeed, nobody seems to notice when he comes and goes, and he feels emasculated because, while women’s status is formally dependent on having husbands, in the house the husbands’ status depends on their wives. While everyone fears Seth, for instance, his power is derivative of his wife Padma’s and his esteem in Mrs Tulsi’s eyes; the sisters eventually turn against him, but never against her. Similarly, Mr Biswas attempts early on to befriend his brothers-in-law but gives up after they report his complaints about the family to Mrs Tulsi; they are loyal to the family’s women and not to one another.

Mr Biswas accordingly sees his quest to break free of the Tulsis and win economic independence as a referendum on his masculinity. At Hanuman House, his inability to contribute economically reflects his failure as a man—and everyone tells him so. For a long while, while living in The Chase and Green Vale, he also became an absent father, seldom visiting or thinking about his children at Hanuman House except during occasional campaigns to “claim” them from the Tulsis—he is, for instance, he is not even allowed to name his own child. Instead, Seth and Hari choose Savi’s name—and those of the rest of his children—which infuriates Mr Biswas, who feels like his paternal role has been usurped. Mr Biswas feels emasculated primarily because of how his family treats him and longs for nothing more than the opportunity to seize control of his family’s life from the Tulsi women. His “tyranny” over his family in Port of Spain demonstrates his success in transitioning from the traditional Hindu world, where men’s labor determines a family’s resources and social standing but women control the household, to a then-modern nuclear family where women are generally still confined to domestic labor yet also lack decision-making power in the home.

After Mr Biswas moves his family out of Hanuman House, he finally gains the paternal authority he sought for so long; in a city of nuclear families without the strict gender divisions of traditional Hinduism, women have a greater, but still limited, freedom to control their own economic destinies through work. For instance, Mr Biswas is astonished that his boss at the Community Welfare Department, Miss Logie, is a woman; Shama takes over his bookkeeping and ensures that the family does not go bankrupt; and ultimately Savi returns to Trinidad in the Epilogue, poised to save the family financially with her well-paying job. While he disdained women’s power in Hanuman House, Mr Biswas begins to respect women’s power in the economy: he looks up to Miss Logie and fears her judgment and, most astonishingly, even finds a limited respect for his wife, Shama, in the novel’s closing pages. He appreciates her loyalty (despite his decades of abuse), her sober judgment in encouraging him not to buy the house (although it is too late), and her eagerness in taking care of the house while he is in the hospital (if only because this domestic labor proves to him that he is the true head of the household). He also comes to finally respect his own mother, Bipti, in Shorthills, when he discovers that Shama respects her, and she helps clear the yard of debris; this redeeming moment overwhelms all of his previous disdain for her resignation and passivity, and it later leads him to mourn her death deeply.

A House for Mr Biswas contains little explicit critical analysis of gender, but Mr Biswas’s sense of domination by women—and inability to acknowledge how they support and sustain him throughout the book—defines his feelings of suffocation and powerlessness among the Tulsis. Reflecting the gender norms of the late 1950s (the book was published in 1961), Mr Biswas yearns for a Western nuclear family in which women would still lack many opportunities outside the home but also lose the power inside the home—the very power that allows the Tulsi women to retain some independence and autonomy. While Mr Biswas’s textbook transition from tradition to modernity brings his family into a world where his daughter can have an education and career, this transition does not constitute a clean break from women’s oppression into (even relative) women’s liberation. Despite their absolute lack of power over where they live, the Tulsi women have relative power over how they live in the home, and so Mr Biswas’s fate demonstrates the resiliency of the patriarchy and complicates the conventional assumption that orthodoxy confines while modernity frees.