SOURCE: “Refashioning the Self: Immigrant Women in Bharati Mukherjee's New World,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 11-17.

In the following essay, Sant-Wade and Radell discuss three short stories from Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories, particularly the issue of immigrant women reshaping their lives and identities in the New World.

The female protagonist in one of Bharati Mukherjee's prize-winning short stories, from the collection titled The Middleman and Other Stories, is shocked when her landlord lover refers to the two of them as “two wounded people,” and thinks to herself that “She knows she is strange, and lonely, but being Indian is not the same, she would have thought, as being a freak” (113). The Indian woman, Maya Sanyal, who is the central figure of the story, “The Tenant,” recognizes her strangeness in America and her appalling loneliness, but she resists being recognized as a...