Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Forester’s A Passage to India In British imperial fiction, physical setting or landscape commonly plays a prominent role in the central thematic subject. In these works, landscape goes beyond an objective description of nature and setting to represent “a way of seeing- a way in which some Europeans have represented to themselves and others the world about them and their relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social relations” (Cosgrove xiv). By investigating the ways in which writers of colonial ficition, such as H. Rider Haggard and E.M. Forester, have used landscape, we see that landscape represents a historically and culturally specific way of experiencing the world. In Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, the landscape is gendered to show the colonizer’s ability to dominate over native territory. However, while the scenario of the male colonizer conquering a feminized landscape reinforces a legitimizing myth of colonization, it is later overturned by Forester’s A Passage to India. In this novel, the landscape takes on a complex, multifaceted role, articulating the ambivalence of cross-cultural relationships and exposing the fragility of colonial rule. In contrast to King Solomon’s Mines, A Passage to India uses landscape as a tool to expose the problematic nature of colonial interaction that might have easily been left obscured and unacknowledged. We can read the landscape as a type of secondary narrator in A Passage to India that articulates the novel’s imperial ideology. The African landscape of King Solomon’s Mines is clearly feminized. The treasure map shows that the geography of the travelers’ route takes the shape of a female bod... ... middle of paper ... ...d the sky said, ‘No, not there’” (Forester 362). We would expect that the structures of colonial rule, such as the jail and the Guest House, would symbolically pull Aziz and Fielding apart. The presence of nature, the earth, the horses, the birds, with the sky itself dictating that they cannot now be friends is a deeper form of rejection to the notion of cross-cultural relationships. The only hope we are left with is the sky’s qualification of the “no”: not yet… not there. Works Cited Cosgrove, Denis. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Forester, E.M. A Passage to India. London: Harcourt, 1924. Ridger Haggard, J. King Solomon’s Mines, ed. Gerald Monsman. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of British India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Welch, James. "The Earthboy Place." Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology. Ed. Vizenor, Gerald. United States of America: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1995, 165-174.
Smith, Rowland. “Rewriting the Frontier: Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice Munro.” Rpt. in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Munro. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York, NY: Infobase, 2009. 162. Print.
All in all, the treatment of the American Indian during the expansion westward was cruel and harsh. Thus, A Century of Dishonor conveys the truth about the frontier more so than the frontier thesis. Additionally, the common beliefs about the old west are founded in lies and deception. The despair that comes with knowing that people will continue to believe in these false ideas is epitomized by Terrell’s statement, “Perhaps nothing will ever penetrate the haze of puerile romance with which writers unfaithful to their profession and to themselves have surrounded the westerner who made a living in the saddle” (Terrell 182).
Environmentalist and desert-lover, Edward Abbey in his essay “The Great American Desert” warns readers about the perilous dangers of the American deserts while simultaneously stirring curiosity about these fascinating ecosystems. He both invites and dissuades his readers from visiting the deserts of North America through the use of humor and sarcasm. In this essay, he is rhetorically successful in arguing that the open spaces of the undeveloped deserts are sacred places in need of respect and protection through his clever use of pathos and logos.
"Terrain as Narrative Lens in All the Pretty Horses." 2012 Brennan Prize Winning Essay // // University of Notre Dame. University of Notre Dame, 2012. Web. 02 May 2016. . Mexican wilderness comes to reflect John Grady Cole’s internal processes in its role as a vast tract of fenceless space, a canvas upon which McCarthy renders his main character’s experiences as they shape his identity. Meanwhile, the tightness of a Texan terrain scarred and lotted by barbed wire boundaries recognizes the restlessness that drives John Grady’s transience. The effect is a realization of the rapport between
Physical surroundings (such as a home in the countryside) in works of literary merit such as “Good Country People”, “Everyday Use”, and “Young Goodman Brown” shape psychological and moral traits of the characters, similarly and differently throughout the stories.
Louise Erdrich’s short story “American horse” is a literary piece written by an author whose works emphasize the American experience for a multitude of different people from a plethora of various ethnic backgrounds. While Erdrich utilizes a full arsenal of literary elements to better convey this particular story to the reader, perhaps the two most prominent are theme and point of view. At first glance this story seems to portray the struggle of a mother who has her son ripped from her arms by government authorities; however, if the reader simply steps back to analyze the larger picture, the theme becomes clear. It is important to understand the backgrounds of both the protagonist and antagonists when analyzing theme of this short story. Albetrine, who is the short story’s protagonist, is a Native American woman who characterizes her son Buddy as “the best thing that has ever happened to me”. The antagonist, are westerners who work on behalf of the United States Government. Given this dynamic, the stage is set for a clash between the two forces. The struggle between these two can be viewed as a microcosm for what has occurred throughout history between Native Americans and Caucasians. With all this in mind, the reader can see that the theme of this piece is the battle of Native Americans to maintain their culture and way of life as their homeland is invaded by Caucasians. In addition to the theme, Erdrich’s usage of the third person limited point of view helps the reader understand the short story from several different perspectives while allowing the story to maintain the ambiguity and mysteriousness that was felt by many Natives Americans as they endured similar struggles. These two literary elements help set an underlying atmos...
Apart from the novel's thematic development, McCarthy's setting and his detailed description of the ornate beauty of the desert southwest is deserving of praise. A lyrical quality and refined beauty are apparent in the novel's description. McCarthy's extended accounts of the pristine beauty of the desert can be seen as an artistic and visually appealing piece work apart from the plot of the novel. Such memorable accounts seem to be a lone highlight in a shockingly disturbing book (Moran 37).
It is the goal of the author in this book to convey the cultural and historical importance of captivity overseas. Even more so than that, I believe the author goes even further by claiming that; regardless of the various forms and locations around the world that captivity took place it still hold a special place in the history of the British Empire between 1600 and 1850. In order to truly understand the impact the British Empire had on the world and vice versa. One must explore the cultural interactions between the British colonists with the foreign lands they were forcing themselves upon. As the author puts very simply, the cultural interaction of taking captives in this era was not a linear process. Those Britons who came to the colonies slaving out other cultures for their benefit one day, may find themselves calling another culture master the next. This history of the British Empire is a history of social futility. Because, despite its small size this collection of English, Welsh, Scottish, and
The setting for this novel was a constantly shifting one. Taking place during what seems to be the Late Industrial Revolution and the high of the British Empire, the era is portrayed amongst influential Englishmen, the value of the pound, the presence of steamers, railroads, ferries, and a European globe.
This analysis of "Perils" will discuss the text as a manifestation of a disharmonious marriage of ragged defensive fantasy on Dickens' behalf, against the background of the reality of the predominating colonial framework: the discussion will aim to highlight the paradoxical Other negating tunnel vision through which the British colonial project felt both the balance and imbalance of its status as "colonial master." The terms "imperial" and "colonial" will be used according to Said's definitions in Culture and Imperialism:therefore ' "imperialism" means the practices, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory.
Bhabha, Homi. "From 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse' in the Location of Culture, pp. 85-92." Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia
Waïl S. Hassan,(2003). Gender (and) Imperialism: Structures of Masculinity in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. Sage publications. Retrieved from jmm.sagepub.com at University of Balamand.Dec, 2013. dio: 10.1177/1097184X02238529.
“The only people for whom we can even begin to imagine properly human, individual, existences are the literate and the consequential, the wazirs and the sultans, the chroniclers, and the priests—the people who had the power to inscribe themselves physically upon time” (Ghosh 17). History is written by the victorious, influential and powerful; however, history has forgotten the people whose voices were seized, those who were illiterate and ineloquent, and most importantly those who were oppressed by the institution of casted societies. Because history does not document those voices, it is the duty to the anthropologist, the historiographer, the philosopher as well as scholars in other fields of studies to dig for those lost people in the forgotten realm of time. In In An Antique Land, the footnotes of letters reveal critical information for the main character, which thematically expresses that under the surface of history is something more than the world can fathom.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.