Friday, January 24, 2020
Rider Haggardââ¬â¢s King Solomonââ¬â¢s Mines and Foresterââ¬â¢s A Passage to India
Rider Haggardââ¬â¢s King Solomonââ¬â¢s Mines and Foresterââ¬â¢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 ââ¬Å"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 relationsâ⬠(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 Haggardââ¬â¢s King Solomonââ¬â¢s Mines, the landscape is gendered to show the colonizerââ¬â¢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 Foresterââ¬â¢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 Solomonââ¬â¢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 novelââ¬â¢s imperial ideology. The African landscape of King Solomonââ¬â¢s Mines is clearly feminized. The treasure map shows that the geography of the travelersââ¬â¢ route takes the shape of a female bod... ...d the sky said, ââ¬ËNo, not thereââ¬â¢Ã¢â¬ (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 skyââ¬â¢s qualification of the ââ¬Å"noâ⬠: not yetâ⬠¦ 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 Solomonââ¬â¢s Mines, ed. Gerald Monsman. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of British India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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