Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Forester’s A Passage to India

passenger Haggards King Solomons Mines and Foresters A Passage to IndiaIn British imperial fiction, physical setting or landscape commonly plays a prominent role in the exchange thematic subject. In these works, landscape goes beyond an objective description of disposition and setting to represent a air of seeing- a way in which some Europeans consecrate 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 employ landscape, we see that landscape represents a historically and culturally specific way of experiencing the world. In Rider Haggards King Solomons Mines, the landscape is gendered to show the colonizers ability to dominate over subjective territory. However, while the scenario of the male colonizer conquering a feminized landscape reinforces a legitimizing myth of colonization, it is later overturned by Foresters 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 Solomons Mines, A Passage to India uses landscape as a tool to break dance the problematic nature of colonial interaction that might have well been left obscured and unackat onceledged. We can read the landscape as a suit of secondary narrator in A Passage to India that articulates the novels imperial ideology. The African landscape of King Solomons Mines is clearly feminized. The take account map shows that the geography of the travelers route takes the shape of a female bod... ...d the slant said, No, not there (Forester 362). We would expect that the structures of colonial rule, such as the put to sleep and the Guest House, would symbolically pull Aziz and Fielding apart. The p resence 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 hold we are left with is the skys qualification of the no not yet not there. Works CitedCosgrove, 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 Solomons Mines, ed. Gerald Monsman. Ontario Broadview Press, 2002. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of British India. gelt University of Chicago Press, 1992.