The Third and Final Continent
I found
“The Third and Final Continent” extremely upsetting, so much so that I went to
visit my friend this weekend to talk about her own arranged marriage. If romantic love is the “malady” in this
book, as it is presented in several of the short stories we have read, then the
positioning of this short story at the end of the collection seems to suggest that
arranged marriages might be a better approach.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s beautiful narrative paints an image of a love born of a shared
life, resulting in a “mother who is happy and strong” (197). The narrator’s voice is soft-spoken, courteous,
honest. He has made sacrifices to pursue
his career in the United States, and he makes things work despite a difficult
living situation. He prepares for his
new wife’s arrival, even though he does not yet have any emotional attachment
to her. In Mrs. Croft’s words, he is a
gentleman. We like Mala too. Because the story is told retrospectively,
the narrator is able to describe his new wife’s first few weeks in the United
States with empathy, even if he did not feel it at the time. The story is endearing. They end up falling in love.
This
is the very reason I find this story so problematic. My friend had a similar experience to Mala in
that her family arranged her marriage to a man living in the United States. Like Mala, she married the man in India and
then moved to the United States to be his wife.
Like Mala’s first week in the United States (we never find out if Mala ever gets a job and life outside of the confines of their house), my friend
cooked and cleaned for her husband and raised their child and rarely left the
house for ten years. Because “The Third
and Final Continent” is told from the narrator’s first person perspective, we
never get to hear what Mala left behind in India, aside from her parents. My friend left behind her lover, who
is female. My friend suffered from
depression for years before attempting to take her own life.
According
to my friend, arranged marriages in her culture usually involve a younger woman
and an older man. In Cameroon where I
was living, sometimes the age gap in arranged marriages can be as much as forty
or fifty years. My friend Yvette’s
grandmother entered into negotiations to marry Yvette to a man who already had
grandchildren. (Yvette was in her early
twenties at the time and hoping to complete her university degree.) The principal at the school where I worked
has devoted his life to discouraging arranged marriages in his community, as
they rob girls of the chance to complete their education. It was heartbreaking to watch my students get
pulled out of school to get married.
Education that can lead to employment or self-sufficiency becomes
de-valued. In “The Third and Final
Continent,” Mala is twenty-seven, so this is not the case for her, but look at
the criteria used to determine her worth as a bride: “I was told that she could cook, knit,
embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore” (181). We are not told what level of school-based education
Mala received, even though one of the first things the narrator tells us about
himself is that he has a certificate in commerce.
Yes,
as we discussed in class last week, love-based marriages often fail. But at least love-based marriages are not always
based on the woman’s marketability as a wife. And sometimes maybe teenage girls do fall in
love with old men, but usually there is less of a gap in age than seen in
arranged marriages. And in love-based
marriages, people have a better chance of marrying (or being partners with) the
gender to which they are actually attracted.
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us, single stories are dangerous. And if someone not very familiar with
arranged marriages ends this book with an idealized view of arranged marriages,
that is problematic.
--Gina
Gina, thank you for writing this. There is so much to unpack here. Your invocation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's words rung very true. This last story does present a single story when it comes to arranged marriages. It felt very fairytale like, easy and gliding. I also wouldn't want someone to come away from this book with an idealized view of arranged marriages. However, the idea of love as a "malady" is what really struck me about your post. I hadn't considered that aspect of this work. It makes me question what Lahiri's feelings are about love. Is romantic love really a kind of sickness? For me the real evil or gut wrenching part of this writing was in the uncertainty that came at the end of each of the stories. Where will these characters go? What will they do next? All the other stories we read had such sad or bittersweet or unresolved endings. Maybe Lahiri in writing "Third and Final Continent" really just wanted to ties some things up. I think taken as a whole the book presents many different ideas of love, that it can sicken you, spurn you, but also support you and fill you with the resilience to get through all the difficulties of a very flawed world.
ReplyDeleteGina, again I thank you for writing this post. It was really powerful and it really struck me. I think everything you said was true. However, I do want to push back on the single story. I do think if a person just reads "The Third and Final Continent" they will get a single story, but if that person reads the rest of the Interpreter of Maladies and especially if that person reads more of Lahiri's work as I have, there isn't a single story there. She is also highly critical of the success of arranged marriages, showing that love often does not develop from such unions, whether or not they ultimately dissolve or are unsuccessful at child rearing. I do personally agree with all of your points about arranged marriages, but I think Lahiri's body of work is more complex on the issue than a single story, because this is one version of what does happen. One of my best friends is Indian and her parents had an arranged marriage that turned out much like this story. I do think that putting it at the end may have helped highlight it into more of a single story though, making your point more valid. But thank you for bringing up the negative consequences of arranged marriages. I hope we can involve them in our class discussion.
ReplyDelete-Anna
Hey Gina,
ReplyDeleteYou bring up a lot of important points in this post. Was the author trying to idealize arranged marriages? I think an argument could be made for either side. Also, your idea that romantic love is the malady of Interpreter of Maladies is very interesting. That is certainly a possibility. I was guessing that the interpreter of maladies was the reader because the author presents us with a story in which there is some kind of situation (a malady, so to speak) that has no clear indication of right or wrong from the author, so the reader is tasked with interpreting the situation and the characters in whatever way they see fit. There could be a common malady throughout the stories (like romantic love, as you suggested) or it could be something different for each story. Since the author doesn't come right out and say it, I don't think we'll ever know for sure. But it's very intriguing to contemplate the endless possibilities, and I'm sure that's what we'll be doing in class.
-Erin
Gina, so heartfelt. But what confuses me is how you see this as the single story. It's not THE story about arranged marriages; it's A story about Arranged marriages. If you position it as centric and related to the marriages in Cameroon, then the range of stories about arranged marriages in other places and in other cultures are negated (My parents were arranged, i have friends with both successful and unsuccessful arranged marriages. We could fall back on adiche's conveniently if this were the only one.
ReplyDeletethe tendency to polarize how a relationship is successfully built is more of a single store than this one.
You have a lot of love and passion and connection to the experiences you had, now the idea is to use them to expand and continue to be prolific in what you know.
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