30 pages • 1 hour read
Jhumpa LahiriSexy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Identity: Difference and Engagement
In focusing on Miranda’s experience in her relationships with Dev and Laxmi, “Sexy” explores how racial and cultural identity informs interpersonal interactions and how engaging across intersections of cultural difference can be both enriching and challenging.
In particular, “Sexy” engages with feelings of alienation but, rather than presenting these as the experience of Indian Americans as a minority group in America, the story presents Miranda as the minority identity in the story’s social grouping. She is the only non-Indian character and is shown to be a young person dislocated from the cultural environment in which she has grown up. While Laxmi has an extended network of family and friends, Miranda appears isolated. When Miranda tries to engage with Bengali language, food, and culture, she finds herself at a loss: the alphabet is a “scribble,” and foods are “unrecognizable.” Lahiri here reverses the immigrant experience, making Miranda the outsider in the story. Paradoxically, this feeling of difference is what Miranda considers her commonality with Dev, that he “understands her” and knows “what it’s like to be lonely”; the story tells us that he moved to Boston from India for college and could barely understand the accent. This is characteristic of how the story creates shifting tensions of difference and engagement, often suggestive of assumptions and misunderstandings by the characters.
The story suggests that Dev is attracted to Miranda because of her physical differences to women of his own background. Miranda is described as having “silver eyes and skin as pale as paper, and the contrast with her hair, as dark and glossy as an espresso bean, caused people to describe her as striking, if not pretty” (87). She is “the first woman [he’s] known with legs this long” (88). For Dev, the subtext of the story suggests, Miranda’s attraction is largely one of sexual convenience. She is much younger than him and his wife is absent. He appears to understand that their relationship is casual and temporary in a way that Miranda, half his age and inexperienced, does not. Dev is not actively unkind, but his behavior is callous and exploitative. In framing the convenience of Miranda’s sexual availability to Dev inside a narrative that explores cultural difference, Lahiri opens up the possibility that Miranda is considered fair game by Dev because she is a white American woman.
By using a white American protagonist and placing her experience inside a discourse addressing cultural difference and engagement, Lahiri explores the nature of these experiences. Miranda’s youthful naivete is juxtaposed with the assured personal and cultural confidence of Laxmi and the debonair self-interest of Dev to create a shifting powerplay of belonging and approval, and to challenge fixed notions of cultural “inside” and “outside.”
Perceptions of Infidelity
“Sexy” explores perceptions of sexual infidelity. It does so by looking at a variety of stances which may be determined by gender, age, or the individual’s position in a real or imagined relationship triangle.
The story posits something of an attitude divide between men and women. Laxmi’s cousin’s husband is repeatedly unfaithful, and the story hints that Dev is a habitual cheater: he picks Miranda up with ease and speaks without guilt about his wife; he wears no wedding ring; and he compares her naked body to previous women, apparently numerous. This attitude is juxtaposed with that of the wives in the story: Laxmi’s distraught cousin whose life is falling apart and Laxmi herself who now feels “paranoid” about the security of her own marriage. For the wives, infidelity is deeply personal and threatening.
As Dev’s mistress, Miranda displays more ambivalence. Young and unmarried, her personal experience hasn’t allied her emotionally to the wife’s moral position. She knows her behavior is ethically problematic, however, and has to work to separate this knowledge from her actions: “Somehow, without the wife there, it didn’t seem so wrong” (90). Laxmi assumes that Miranda’s standpoint on infidelity will reflect her own, while Miranda is hiding her affair. Miranda feels conflicted about this secrecy and “part of her wanted to tell Laxmi, if only because Laxmi was Indian too” (86). Miranda would be wrong to assume that Laxmi would understand, however, or that Laxmi’s Indian heritage would mean telling her would forge a greater connection between them. Laxmi’s moral stance on infidelity is unflinching and her friendship with Miranda survives through the story only because she doesn’t find out about Dev. Indeed, it is her support of the wife, emotionally and practically, which catalyzes the events leading to Miranda’s own moral epiphany.
This epiphany is triggered by Rohin’s perception of infidelity: “That’s what my father did […] He sat next to someone he didn’t know, someone sexy, and now he loves her instead of my mother” (110). Free from the drive of sex, the child Rohin has seen a truth that Miranda has been hiding from herself. Her wish to feel “sexy” and Dev’s ability to provide this has clouded her judgement. Although she still “longs” for him, she begins to appreciate that they are virtually strangers and to feel qualms about ranking sexiness as “loving someone you don’t know” (110) over the moral long-term claims and affections of a wife and family. When Miranda speaks to Dev, she tests his memory of one of their key moments against her own and his answer precipitates her decision to break up. She sees that the “understanding” between them has been an illusion. The ending is bittersweet—Miranda has been complicit in infidelity but is also a casualty of the relationship which could never give her what she hoped for.
In contrasting perceptions of infidelity, “Sexy” explores the complexity of extra-marital affairs, their motivations, effects, and the morality that surrounds them. The different opinions expressed in the story help to prevent a simplistic presentation of “right” and “wrong,” while tracing the development of Miranda’s moral position on sexual infidelity.
Fantasy, Wealth, and Aspiration
“Sexy” tells the story of Miranda’s extra-marital affair by framing her relationship with Dev as a mistake she makes through youthful ignorance. The story shows that this is part of her exploration of her own identity and moral principles in a strange new life. It is characterized by the seductive power of wealth and aspiration. The meaning of the story relies on the tensions between fantasy and reality and the shift from the first into the second, as Miranda comes to see her relationship with Dev for what it is.
A disparate level of wealth and sophistication forms a key part of the difference between Dev and Miranda and of her attraction for him. When they meet, he is described through the outward symbols of his success: his expensive clothes and groomed appearance, “the crisp bills [which emerge] from a burgundy wallet” (85). In her life “he was the first to pay for things, and to hold doors open [… and] to bring her a bouquet of flowers so immense she’d had to split it up into all six of her drinking glasses” (87). He takes her to a restaurant in South End where they eat “foie gras and a soup made with champagne and raspberries” (90). The glamour and romance of this lifestyle helps to contextualize why she is so caught up in the affair and why she sees it as other than it is for so long. While Dev may understand these treats as the attributes of an extra-marital affair—and as a fantasy escape for him from his married suburban life—Miranda mistakes them for signs of real affection.
In the absence of experience, Miranda play-acts what she imagines is the role of the other woman. This exacerbates both the story’s sense of her immaturity and the exploratory nature of her behavior as a young person working out who she wants to be. Her interaction with Dev is characterized by youthful uncertainty, passivity, and aspirational fantasy right from the beginning. They meet in Filene’s where Miranda buys “discounted pantyhose” in the basement but goes up to soak in the luxury atmosphere of cosmetics where “soaps and creams are displayed like jewels” (85). The story discloses that this is a habit of Miranda’s and that it sustains her while waiting “on cold mornings for the T” (85). Her meeting with Dev is part of her escapist behavior. When Miranda sees Dev, she hovers, posing as an intentional customer. The story expresses her mixture of confusion, desire and passivity: “Miranda didn’t know what she wanted. All she wanted was for the man not to walk away” (85). When she signs for her impulse purchase, her hand is “unsteady.” She is out of her depth, emotionally and financially. When Dev’s wife returns, Miranda returns to Filene’s to “buy herself things she thought a mistress should have” (91). This is the only use of the word “mistress” and marks a shift toward Miranda acknowledging her real role in the affair, although she is still playing a fantasy part. The story details her purchases in luxurious detail, making it more poignant when they go unworn or unnoticed by Dev. Once his wife returns, the initial allure of their relationship is over and sex becomes the only reason they continue to see one another. The silver dress that she buys while fantasizing about Dev hangs in her closet, the “tag dangling from the seam” a reminder of its expense, until the unsettling encounter with Rohin makes it an image of intruding reality.
This intrusion of reality—in particular, the sad reality of an affair seen from the other side—helps Miranda to recognize that her relationship with Dev has been a fantasy. The story connects Miranda’s willful escapism from the moral dilemma of her affair with the aspirational escapism of Dev’s wealth. Their relationship has been outside the perimeters of Miranda’s previous experience in multiple ways and it takes her a while to see its true nature.
Related Titles
By Jhumpa Lahiri
