Nihilation of femininity in the battle of looks: a Sartrean reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A temporary matter”

摘要

The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals.udFeminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimatelyudconnected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to theudmasculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry into a dominantudscopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examineudthe sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to beuda voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the mostudinfluential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexualuddifference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system atudwork in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial criticaludattention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri’sudprefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladiesud(2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates theuddichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditionaludhierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinityudover femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holesudand slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it isudultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates theudOther to the state of “being-in-itself” and enjoys supremacy over the feminine.