ABSTRACT
The title of my chapter pays an unambiguous homage to Hirsch’s (1989) The Mother/Daughter Plot, in which the critic builds upon Adrienne Rich’s understanding of Lynn Sukenick’s concept of ‘matrophobia’ to show the extent to which the stories of mothers are even more submerged than those of daughters, not only in conventional plot structures within which “women function as objects or obstacles only” (1989, 2), but also, more surprisingly, in so-called ‘feminist’ variations of family romances and in texts written by women writers. Taking its cue from Hirsch’s influential study, my chapter looks at the fiction of the Bengali-American ‘celebrity author’ Lahiri (1999) and starts with the premise that, from her Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies, through The Namesake (Lahiri, 2004 [2003]), to Unaccustomed Earth (Lahiri, 2008) and The Lowland (2013a), Lahiri’s stories of migration between India and the U.S. and of putting down roots at the level of the first and the second Indian-American generations follow a trajectory where the maternal perspective, experience, and subjectivity are given unusual prominence and significance.
