Single, Solitary and Wandering in Silence: Minimalist Aesthetics and Female Urban Presence in Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

Abhilasha Kullu

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i05.54029

Single, Solitary and Wandering in Silence: Minimalist Aesthetics and Female Urban Presence in Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

Author(s)	Ms. Abhilasha Kullu
Country	India
Abstract	The complex interplay of minimalist aesthetics, female subjectivity, and urban spatiality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel Whereabouts (2018), her first originally written in Italian and later translated into English by the author herself. Marking a significant shift from her earlier diasporic narratives centered on Indian-American identity, Whereabouts delves into an unnamed European city through the interior and exterior wanderings of an equally unnamed woman. Lahiri departs from conventional narrative structures and embraces stylistic minimalism, characterized by brevity, fragmentariness, and a refusal of resolution. The minimalism functions not merely as an aesthetic strategy but as a thematic articulation of the protagonist’s emotional solitude, existential displacement, and gendered experience of urban life. Set against the backdrop of a city that is both intimately known and emotionally distant, Whereabouts stages the figure of the solitary woman as a postmodern flâneuse—a female urban wanderer who moves through public spaces, not for spectacle or destination, but as a quiet assertion of presence and agency. In contrast to traditional male flânerie, which often romanticizes urban exploration, Lahiri’s female protagonist inhabits the city through a lens of introspection, detachment, and muted resistance. Her solitary strolls are less about discovering the city and more about negotiating her place within it, reflecting the tensions between visibility and invisibility, connection and isolation, movement and stillness. It examine how silence, absence, and incompletion serve as expressive modes within Lahiri’s minimalist prose, conveying the unspoken dimensions of trauma, memory, and identity. The protagonist’s quiet resistance to conventional narrative closure becomes a feminist gesture, challenging the teleological expectations of development, reconciliation, or romantic fulfillment. Her refusal to name, explain, or resolve points toward a broader critique of narrative expectations placed upon female characters in literary and social discourses. Minimalist prose as resistance: Lahiri’s sparse and elliptical style disrupts traditional narrative logic, embodying a subtle but potent form of resistance to closure, authority, and coherence. Urban wandering as female flânerie: The protagonist’s repetitive, solitary movements through the city constitute a gendered reimagining of the flâneur, revealing how the urban landscape becomes a site for introspective mapping and existential negotiation. Silence and absence as inner articulation: Rather than signaling emptiness, silence in Whereabouts becomes a language of inner life—a medium through which the protagonist communicates alienation, autonomy, and unresolved grief. In centering a narrative around stillness, ambiguity, and the quiet rhythms of urban loneliness, Whereabouts contributes meaningfully to postmodern, feminist, and diasporic literary criticism. It challenges the privileging of dramatic plot over introspective presence, and reimagines how female agency can manifest in the margins, in pauses, and in the act of silent witnessing. By resisting the compulsion to speak, explain, or conclude, Lahiri crafts a protagonist whose solitude becomes not a condition to be cured, but a space to inhabit.
Keywords	Silence, Introspection, Resistance, Solitude, Urban Loneliness, Existential Displacement.
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 5, September-October 2025
Published On	2025-09-05
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i05.54029

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Single, Solitary and Wandering in Silence: Minimalist Aesthetics and Female Urban Presence in Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

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