Assimilation and Foreignness Theme Analysis

Throughout “Mrs. Sen’s,” the Sens struggle to assimilate to American culture after they emigrate from India to the U.S. for Mr. Sen’s job as a professor in a small college town. The couple’s life in the United States is different than they or their family in India expected it to be: while Mrs. Sen’s family assumes that living in the U.S. automatically guarantees happiness and a lavish lifestyle, the Sens’ standard of living is actually lower in the U.S. than it was in India. Mrs. Sen also has trouble connecting with others in the community, partly because Americans (like the mother of Eliot, the young boy Mrs. Sen babysits) make her feel foreign rather than accepted. These challenges make it difficult for the Sens to assimilate to American culture, showing that the American Dream that many immigrants pursue when they move to the U.S. is largely illusory.

While Mrs. Sen’s relatives back in India assume that the Sens are wealthy simply because they live in the U.S., the Sens actually have a lower standard of living than they did in India. Mrs. Sen can’t tell her family about her life in the U.S. because she knows they expect it to be glamourous and happy in a way it hasn’t turned out to be. She tells Eliot that “they think I live the life of a queen […] They think I press buttons and the house is clean. They think I live in a palace.” In reality, the Sens live in a shabby university apartment. When Eliot and his mother come to meet Mrs. Sen and see the apartment, Eliot’s mother asks if all of the Sens’ wealth is in India. In response, Mrs. Sen “look[s] around the room, as if she noticed in the lampshades, in the teapot, in the shadows frozen on the carpet, something the rest of them could not,” and says, "Everything is there.” Eliot’s mother’s rude comment suggests that contrary to their family’s expectations, the Sens live a modest lifestyle that well-off Americans look down upon. Furthermore, Mrs. Sen’s response implies that she left “everything” that matters to her—namely, her loved ones and cultural traditions—behind in India. The dejected way she looks at her surroundings and replies to Eliot’s mother speaks to her dissatisfaction with her lifestyle and economic circumstances in the United States. The difference in the Sens’ economic situation since they immigrated is further evidenced by the issues Mrs. Sen has with transportation. In India, the Sens were well-off enough to have a chauffeur—but now, Mrs. Sen has to either learn to drive (which frightens her) or take the bus, and she finds it difficult to get around. The dramatic change in lifestyle, from having a chauffeur to being reliant on public transportation, indicates that life in the U.S. isn’t what the Sens imagined it would be.

In addition to having fewer luxuries, the Sens (especially Mrs. Sen) struggle to become a part of their new community. This is partly because Americans like Eliot’s mother treat Mrs. Sen as foreign rather than accepting her. Before she moved, Mrs. Sen lived in a tight-knit community in India. She tells Eliot how she spent time with her family and a community of women in India: on the nights her mother invited other women to help them cook for celebrations, it was "impossible to fall asleep […] listening to their chatter.” In the U.S., on the other hand, she “cannot some­ times sleep in so much silence.” Here, unlike in India, she has no friends and no easy way to connect with others. In her few interactions with Americans, Mrs. Sen is treated as foreign rather than welcomed and accepted. Eliot’s mother is an example of this: when she comes to pick Eliot up from Mrs. Sen’s apartment, “she tended to hover on the far side of the door frame, calling to Eliot to put on his sneakers and gather his things.” Mrs. Sen invites her in and serves her traditional Indian food, but Eliot’s mother resists this hospitality and tells Eliot that she doesn’t like Mrs. Sen’s food (the implication being that it tastes foreign). Eliot’s mother’s rejection of Mrs. Sen is indicative of the exclusionary way Americans tend treat immigrants more generally.

As a result of these difficulties, Mrs. Sen is unable to assimilate to American culture, and she eventually gives up. Mrs. Sen is only happy when she can connect with the culture and community she has left behind in India, because she finds life in America difficult and alienating. Eliot notices that only two things make Mrs. Sen happy: a letter from home or a whole fish, the latter of which allows her to make the food she ate in India. Mrs. Sen’s need to connect with home shows her inability to assimilate and make a new life and community for herself. At the end of the story, Mrs. Sen seems to have given up on assimilation entirely. She gets into a minor car accident, and this failure at driving—an essential skill in her new culture that she did not need in India—causes her to completely retreat from the world. She loses her job taking care of Eliot (because she was driving without a license with him in the car), and with it, her only connection to other people in her current environment. After the accident, Mrs. Sen retreats to her bedroom and shuts the door, symbolically giving up on making any connection with the country where she now lives.

In the end, the Sens are worse off than they were in India: their class status has fallen, they’re alienated from their new community, and Mrs. Sen is unable to function in the way that American society expects her to. Their immigrant experience is implied to be a common one, and it directly contradicts the message of the American Dream: that the U.S. is a land of opportunity for everyone who lives there.