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Roger Takla
Research Methodology Dr. Talal Wehbe
General Context, Research Question, and Rationale
E.M Forster has been seen by many critics as the Westerner who wrote of the East to
critique the imperial oppression practiced by England (Hawkins 1). As a result, he is often
heralded as the anti-imperial humanist liberal who not only sides by the colonized East but also
destroys the very foundations of Edward Saids theory of innate and/or direct Orientalism (Said
41). His most famous work,A Passage to India, tells the story of how the desire of the Indian Dr.
Aziz to bond and form a friendship with the English colonizers is an impossible task because
there cannot be any sort of bond between those who have assumed power over the other and
practiced a sense of cultural hegemony. In the Marabar Caves, Adela Questeds nave and
hegemonic desire to explore the real India leads the plot to an alleged attempted rape, and this
rape swings between reality and imagination without ever settling on a side (Forster 1921).
Consequently,A Passage to India depicts, according to these critics, the support of the rights of
the colonized and an open attack on the unethical, impractical, and inhuman practices of
empirical England. Therefore, Forster is seen as the socio-political reformer who writes to give
voice to the voiceless colonized allowing them to express what years of empirical tyranny has
veiled. Despite the many claims of his altruistic attempts to aid the helpless, contemporary critics
claim that Foresters the Marabar Caves chapters of A Passage to India raises questions
regarding the anti-empirical claims (Armstrong 13)
This paper aims to investigate, through a sociological approach to literary criticism,
whether Forsters Marabar Caves chapters of A Passage to India depict an Orientalist
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perspective of India through the depiction of the caves as the imagined, geographically mystified
space of the other, or it actually highlights his refusal of the practices of empirical England in
India.
Edward Saids theory of Orientalism argues that the western culture produced a view of
the Orient based on a particular imagination, popularized through academic Oriental studies,
travel writing and a colonial view of the Orient. The area was feminized as an open, virgin
territory, with no ability or concept of organized rule and government. Imagined geographies are
seen as a tool of power, of a means of controlling and subordinating areas. Power is seen as
being in the hands of those who have the right to objectify those that they are imagining. (Said,
90) Said claims that the Islamic world is portrayed as uncivilized; it is labeled as backward and
failing. This justifies, in the view of those imagining, military intervention. (Said, 101) Springer
argues that virulent imaginative geographies erase the interconnectedness of the places where
violence occurs by assuming violence sits in particular places. Virulent imaginative geographies
are argued to employ a sense of virility to code Oriental males as pre-oedipal and/or feminine.
Imagined geographies show the problems created by the use of popular discourse to construct
views of other regions or societies. All landscapes are seen as being imagined there is no real
geography to which the imagined ones can be compared. Thus when being analyzed, these
geographies should not be measured for their accuracy, but de-constructed so that the power
invested in them can be revealed (Springer 90 98).
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