A House for Mr. Biswas

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1961

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapters 1-2

Part 1, Chapters 3-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-6

Part 2, Chapters 1-3

Part 2, Chapter 4-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Wealth and Independence

A key theme in A House for Mr. Biswas is the protagonist's search for independence. Mr. Biswas craves independence, but he is a poor man, meaning that his struggles to establish his independence are often curbed by his lack of money. Being poor, he cannot afford to spend his time as he pleases, and he constantly worries about his next paycheck. He cannot afford his own house, for example, so he relies on the hated Tulsi family to provide him with accommodation. In doing so, he sacrifices a small piece of his independence and makes himself and his family reliant on the Tulsis. He cannot be independent because he needs his wife's family to provide his wife and children with the financial security that he cannot provide himself. This lack of independence hurts Mr. Biswas, to the extent that he feels a palpable though undiagnosed depression throughout the novel. Furthermore, he is often materially reliant on the Tulsis. Until he secures a job at the newspaper, he must work at their businesses and grow their wealth while failing to grow his own. Working for Tulsi businesses and living in Tulsi houses means that he cannot achieve independence and he cannot live on his own terms, as he is constantly reliant on maintaining their approval and support, even when doing so curtails his own sense of freedom.

Mr. Biswas begins his life in a mud hut and moves to a house, then to an estate in the country, then to a house in the city, and then to a house of his own. The buildings are larger and better equipped but, for a man who grew up in abject poverty, the slow and steady progress of modernization accounts for many of the improvements in his living conditions, rather than an increase in his financial status. Mr. Biswas is benefiting more from the passage of time rather than any real improvement in his financial status. To demonstrate this, Mr. Biswas is rarely able to save much money despite these increases in living conditions. Any increase in wages that he secures or any money he makes on the side is immediately spent on important costs of living. The more Mr. Biswas earns, the more he discovers he must spend. This inability to build any savings and inability to increase his wealth in any meaningful sense means that he never can become more independent, nor change his material conditions. He lacks the agency necessary to improve his life.

Mr. Biswas achieves financial independence by securing a job with the newspaper. He only achieves this by walking out of the Tulsi house and abandoning his family, at least for a while. He seizes independence by embracing his poverty and loneliness. The changes in his behavior and his attitude toward the Tulsi family illustrate his independence once he is more secure in his wealth. He is less shy in his criticism of certain family members, and he is openly antagonistic toward others. This independence is limited, however. Mr. Biswas is forced to confront the reality of generational poverty, in that the opportunities denied to him at a young age (such as education) mean that he will eventually hit a ceiling in his earning potential. He recognizes the link between wealth and independence, so he tries to create these opportunities for his children. He spends most of his earnings on his children's education, especially Anand's schooling. By educating Anand, Mr. Biswas is sacrificing his own wealth and his own immediate independence in the hope that his children will be able to achieve what he never could.

Gender Roles

A House for Mr. Biswas subtly explores the gender roles in the society of early-mid 20th century Trinidad. The theme is subtle because Mr. Biswas himself—the protagonist of the novel, from whose perspective all events are portrayed—never thinks to challenge these gender roles. To him, the roles are immutable and dictated by preexisting culture. Through their depiction, however, the roles of each gender in the society are portrayed and interrogated, often without Mr. Biswas's realization that this is the case. The society is nominally patriarchal. Men are expected to be the main worker in a family unit, men control the household money, and men oversee most of the island's institutions. In the domestic sphere, however, the social patriarchy evaporates, and women have a power all their own. Women are placed in charge of running the home on a day-by-day basis, with Mrs. Tulsi embodying this occluded matriarchy. Mrs. Tulsi has an institutional power on her own, to the point where she overcomes a male rival to her position in Seth. Mrs. Tulsi is respected, and her orders are followed, no matter how damaging or deranged they may be. Even men submit to her power. In this respect, the theme of gender roles reveals how the nominal patriarchy of life on Trinidad masks a hidden matriarchy which switches the positions of power between men and women.

Marriage is an important tool for consecrating gender roles in the society. From the beginning of the novel, the dynamic between husband and wife echoes the gender roles in the society. Mr. Biswas's parents provide a template for how he views marriage, a template which is especially fixed and unchangeable as his father dies when he is young, denying his parents' marriage the opportunity to evolve. Later, Mr. Biswas is married into a family after a passing interest in a local girl is made public. While Mr. Biswas has an unfulfilled opportunity to escape the marriage, Shama does not. She has less control over her future because she is never given the chance to refuse the marriage. Marriage functions as an institution which ratifies the power dynamic based on gender and perpetuates it, continuing the gender roles from one generation to the next. Characters marry at young age and find themselves trapped in these roles. Not even death is an escape; the female widows in the Tulsi home are forced into gendered role of widow, becoming a husbandless band of women who search for meaning in a society that tells them that they are no longer relevant. Marriage serves as an institutional way of replicating and perpetuating the gender roles in the society, even beyond death.

Mr. Biswas's search for independence has a gendered element. His submission to the Tulsis and to Mrs. Tulsi in particularly begins a festering resentment within him as he perceives that his masculinity has been challenged. His reliance on the Tulsis means that he cannot fulfill the traditional gender roles which he experienced as his parents' son. Relying on the female dominated Tulsi family is an emasculating experience for a man who has very few ways in which to express his masculine identity. Mr. Biswas may not recognize his internalized misogyny and his tacit understanding of social gender roles, but his resentment of the Tulsi matriarchy is a demonstration of the way in which these gender roles are quietly explored in the novel. By trying to reclaim his independence and his identity, Mr. Biswas is adhering to what he believes to be the social expectation of a man. He is expressing an understanding of gender and its function in society, even if he is not explicitly doing so. Mr. Biswas wants to be a commanding, independent, and respected figure because society has told him that this is what men should be, even if his lived reality has shown him otherwise.

Colonization and Identity

A House for Mr. Biswas is set against the backdrop of colonialization. The novel portrays life in Trinidad which was, at the time, a colony in the British Empire. Furthermore, the novel explores life for a small community of Trinidadian-Indian people who left the British colony of India for the British colony of Trinidad in search of work in a society that had recently abolished slavery. Many of these Indian emigrees were poorly paid, poorly treated, and thrust into contention with the local Afro-Trinidadian population by the white, British colonial overlords. Mr. Biswas is a member of the Trinidadian-Indian community, but several generations have passed since the first wave of Indian immigration to the island. As such, Mr. Biswas (and many of his peers) grew up in Trinidad without ever having visited India. They have no knowledge of their ancestral homeland, but they have been subsumed into the machinations of the British Empire.

On Trinidad, the Indian community is separate to the Afro-Trinidadian community. The two communities and two ethnicities are often thrust into conflict with one another as they compete for the meager resources and opportunities doled out by the colonial operators of the island. The non-white people of Trinidad internalize these hierarchies and direct their resentment toward each other, rather than the British. For example, Trinidadian-Indian people often criticize Afro-Trinidadian people without thinking to blame the colonizers of the island. Their identity is fixed in opposition with the Afro-Trinidadians, rather than the colonial system itself. The colonial apparatus benefits from this antagonistic relationship by denuding itself of responsibility for the poverty and strife on the island, with the inhabitants more like to blame competing ethnic groups rather than the institutions which have a greater impact on their lives.

Colonial identity evolves across the generations. The longer the families spend away from their ancestral homeland, the more they lose their connection to their historical culture. Mr. Biswas benefits from the caste system, for example, but he neither understands it nor condones it. To him, it is a vestigial element of colonial identity which has lost its cultural meaning. Anand similarly struggles to engage with his cultural ancestry. When he is asked to perform the Hindu rituals at family gatherings, he repeats the same gestures and motions but does not understand their meaning. He garbles words which sound correct but, to him, mean nothing. When Owad returns from his study abroad, he is critical of Indians from India. To him, they seem like an alien race. Mr. Biswas, Anand, and Owad are Trinidadian-Indians, on the cusp of forming their own identity divorced from their ancestors' Indian identity. The colonial movement of people has alienated the Trinidadian-Indians from their past.