Abstract
It might seem scandalous to reduce E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, a complex and multi-faceted work considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, to such a concise formula. But we humbly offer up this mantra as our homage to Forster’s novel, as a passage into his Passage to India. British imperialism in India entailed a fundamentally racist set of beliefs about “Orientals,” a term which denoted anyone living east of Western Europe, from North Africa to China. Orientals were considered passive, weak, illogical, and morally corrupt with a tendency toward despotism. A Passage to India turns this imperial ideology on its head through its scathing depiction of British colonial bureaucrats, its detailed and nuanced portrayal of Indian characters, and its invocation of India’s rich history and culture. But it also shows how difficult the path to Indian independence would be through exploration of the tensions between the Hindu and Muslim characters in the novel. Despite its critique of the British Empire, Forster’s novel continues to draw controversy, particularly in the field of postcolonial studies, a field devoted to the study of literary, social, and political issues relating to former European colonies. Some critics argue that A Passage to India is still bogged down by the Orientalist stereotypes that the novel condemns. Others take issue with Forster’s exclusion of women from the idealized, though fraught, friendships between men in the novel – this exclusion is seen as revealing how the British Empire was not only a racist system, but a patriarchal one as well. By contrast, Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction between Gerald and Rupert. The novel ranges over the whole of British society before the time of the First World War and eventually ends high up in the snows of the Tyrolean Alps. As with most of Lawrence’s works, Women in Love caused controversy over its sexual subject matter. One early reviewer, W. Charles Pilley said of itin John Bull, “I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven.”(John Bull)
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