Brick Lane frames emancipation through consumerist and bodily appetites rather than collective identity.

Evidence

Against such collectivist cultural identity claims, Brick Lane insistently promotes individualism. This emphasis might be unsurprising, given that the novel is about shaking off patriarchy and tradition to find one’s own way in life. However, Nazneen’s growing sense of herself is mapped onto physical and material needs that can really be satisfied only by the indulgence of certain appetites. Her intensely physical relationship with Karim, while it lasts, provides her with a sense of herself as sexual and corporeal that she has previously been denied. Likewise, she experiences a fascination with the sparkling dresses that fit so tightly on the skaters she watches twirling on television. Moments of freedom are experienced through dress for her, too, as when she fantasizes: “If she wore a skirt and a jacket and a pair of high heels then what else would she do but walk around the glass palaces on Bishopsgate, and talk into a slim phone and eat lunch out of a paper bag? If she wore trousers and underwear … then she would roam the streets fearless and proud. And if she had a tiny tiny skirt with knickers to match and a tight bright top, then she would—how could she not?—skate through life with a sparkling smile and a handsome man who took her hand and made her spin, spin, spin” (277–78). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 194

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid) and Home Boy (Naqvi): both novels also orbit questions of assimilation, bodily desire, and London’s financial district as a space of possibility or post-9/11 exclusion.
• ADDENDUM: The Bishopsgate/glass palaces motif resonates with Naqvi’s Home Boy, whose narrator works in the City — a useful hinge passage for the reader’s central comparison.