Wounded Subjects and Vulnerable Nature: Moving from Loss to Environmental Care in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

My article analyses the ways in which wounds and vulnerability govern the fictional world of Jhumpa Lahiri’s last novel, The Lowland (2013). A multivoiced tale, The Lowland brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of wounds through the layers of postcolonial traumas, melancholic attachments and ecocritical awareness. Among the wounded subjects that populate Lahiri’s Familienroman, Bela epitomizes a double-faced portrait of vulnerability. The lonely child of a disrupted Bengali-American family, torn between violent history and individual failures, Bela becomes increasingly concerned with the preservation of the East-American ecosystem. The heroine’s ecocritical stance works as a compensative strategy which juxtaposes neo-georgic dwelling with a critique of neoliberal policies. I examine how the tangled story of unresolved grief impacts both Bela’s self-definition and Lahiri’s narrative form. Bela’s narrative identity foreshadows a Ricoeurian version of recognition via identification with otherness that illuminates vulnerability as a way of self-definition. The novel, therefore, engages with the paradox of articulating the linguistic breakdown of melancholic subjects through ecological care: by overlapping human wounds with natural fragility, Lahiri combines Levinasian-inspired ethical care with Heideggerian eco-philosophy that give voice to wounds and vulnerability.