Conveying Exilic Melancholia through Natural Imagery in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narrative

This paper explores a corpus of Jhumpa Lahiri’s narrative, including The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Lowland (2013). Anchored on Barthes’s definition of the notion of idiolect, the chapter seeks to read Lahiri’s fiction through a study of its intratex-tual and intertextual components in order to show how natural imagery contributes to convey an intense sense of melancholia. Water, earth, woods, plants, rhizomes, and roots play a pivotal but also an original role since they function as the receptacle of an exilic sub-jectivity torn between a lost homeland and the need to adjust to a new habitat. The works chosen, therefore, epitomize the aesthetic significance of natural motifs in Lahiri’s oeuvre. By combining global and local issues, natural patterns foster a sense of ecocritical awareness of what nature may disclose and conceal about the relationship between migrancy and environment in our globalized society.