Femininity, Gender Roles, and Culture Theme Analysis

“Mrs. Sen’s” depicts the relationship between 11-year-old Eliot, his mother, and Mrs. Sen, the woman Eliot’s mother hires to babysit Eliot while she’s at work. The two women play very different domestic roles: Mrs. Sen does more traditionally feminine tasks like cooking, while Eliot’s mother fulfills the role of breadwinner outside the home and has little time for these duties. Eliot’s mother is like many American women, in that she raises her son without familial support and works outside the home. Mrs. Sen, by contrast, only recently emigrated from India, where family and community support are more central to the culture. In the U.S., however, Mrs. Sen plays the role of a typical American housewife, and she does her domestic tasks alone; both she and Eliot’s mother feel disconnected from others and unhappy with their roles. Through its depiction of Mrs. Sen and Eliot’s mother, the story suggests that both of these versions of femininity—that of the modern career woman and that of the housewife—are equally restrictive, isolating, and unfulfilling. Instead, a lifestyle that focuses on family and community is more conducive to happiness.

From the beginning, it’s clear that Eliot’s mother is worn out and emotionally disconnected, despite embodying an American ideal of the woman who “has it all” with both a career and family. Eliot’s mother takes care of Eliot and supports him financially without help from family or Eliot’s father, who lives far away. Instead, she pays Mrs. Sen to take care of Eliot after school. She doesn’t seem to have any friends to help, either. When her neighbors have a party she isn’t invited, and eventually “she looked up their number in the phone book and asked them to keep it down,” which suggest she doesn’t know her neighbors and hasn’t made connections in her community. Furthermore, despite being each other’s only connections, Eliot and his mother aren’t close—largely because she has to spend so much time at work. Mrs. Sen finds this sad, saying to Eliot, "You must miss her. When I think of you, only a boy, separated from your mother for so much of the day, I am ashamed.” But Eliot and his mother are accustomed to separation, both emotional and physical. That Mrs. Sen can’t drive is unimaginable to Eliot’s mother, because she works “in an office fifty miles north, and [Eliot’s] father, the last she had heard, lived two thousand miles west.” In the rare moments when they are together, Eliot’s mother is usually so exhausted from work that they don’t spend much quality time together. When she gets home from work, Eliot’s mother usually orders pizza for dinner rather than cooking and leaves him to put away the leftovers while she smokes a cigarette. This exhaustion shows how wearing it is for Eliot’s mother to do the overwhelming job of raising a child on her own—it prevents her from fully enjoying her life or having meaningful relationships.

As a housewife, Mrs. Sen occupies a completely different role than Eliot’s mother—but she, too, is overwhelmed, unhappy, and isolated. Mrs. Sen spends most of her time completing domestic tasks alone, or with only Eliot for company. She has no connections in the United States other than her husband, but she spends little time with Mr. Sen because he works long hours as a professor. Mrs. Sen seems to feel undervalued by him: when Mr. Sen says that he won’t go to the market to buy fish for her, she says, “Tell me, Eliot. Is it too much to ask?” Mrs. Sen dislikes the isolation of being a housewife in the U.S., but Mr. Sen and Eliot’s mother both expect Mrs. Sen to take on more independence by learning to drive. Mrs. Sen, however, has no desire to drive anywhere by herself—she merely wonders, “Could I drive all the way to Calcutta?” Mrs. Sen clearly wants to return to her old life, where she could rely on her family and community to help her.

While Mrs. Sen is unhappy as a socially isolated and undervalued housewife in the United States, she found doing similar domestic tasks in India much more fulfilling because she was part of a community—and this, the story implies, is the ideal way to live. Mrs. Sen often tells Eliot stories about her home in India and how connected she was to people there. She tells him that in India, if you “raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements.” In addition, when the Sens lived in India, Mrs. Sen was able to cook with other women, rather than alone. At home, she tells Eliot, “all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night.” Working communally and having connections made Mrs. Sen happy. In the U.S., however she must work without the help of a community, much like Eliot’s mother.

The only happy role for women presented in the story is the one that Mrs. Sen had in India, when she performed domestic duties communally with other women rather than in isolation. As such, the story suggests that Mrs. Sen’s former lifestyle in India—a version of femininity that’s very different from both the American career woman or the American housewife—is a more natural and fulfilling way to live.