In A Passage to India colonization is only one of the many aspects of the relationship between the East and the West. The construction of the East and the West paved the way for the creation of stereotypes of Easterners by Westerners and vice versa and the physical, social, cultural, and emotional distance between the two parties perpetuated the reliance on stereotypes as a means of understanding one another.
Another binary opposition presented in A Passage to India is that of male characters versus female characters. This novel was written during a time of great change in women's rights in Great Britain. Women were beginning to gain some of the same rights as men, but in many ways were still second-class citizens. The …show more content…
The physical, social, emotional, and narrative distances in A Passage to India result directly in the dehumanization of both the Colonizer and the Colonized and male and female characters. Dehumanization is to deprive of human qualities or attributes, divest of individuality. Dehumanization occurs when one experiences another as sub-human rather than a thinking, feeling, human individual. Dehumanization can be seen on a narrative level in examples where the narrator describes characters, such as Ronny, in a manner that makes them seem incapable of demonstrating human thought and emotion.
Another important concept that is key to this discussion is that of perspective. Perspective can be defined as a person's point of view or the way one comprehends the world around him based on vantage point, prior knowledge, and the facts available at the time. Perspective has a multi-directional nature in that it can be applied to the agent initiating the looking in addition to the agent that receives the look and then looks back at the one that initiated the look in the first place. Distance is an important aspect of perspective as it influences the vantage point of the viewer. In narratives with greater narrative distance, such as those with third-person narration, the perspective is broad and …show more content…
P. 6). A Passage to India deals with many complex issues surrounding colonialism and the Orient. In accordance with Edward Said's ideas concerning what he calls "Orientalism", the concept of the Orient is something that, on one hand, was created by the West and represents a Euro-centric ideal of Eastern culture, and on the other hand is an actual place that existed long before it was given that name. The Orient moved from being merely a projected European ideal of the East to being something that could stand on its own. However, through the initial European idealization of the Orient, a foundation was created that made it possible for the Occident to infiltrate the Orient and made possible the exportation of European culture into the
Another binary opposition presented in A Passage to India is that of male characters versus female characters. This novel was written during a time of great change in women's rights in Great Britain. Women were beginning to gain some of the same rights as men, but in many ways were still second-class citizens. The …show more content…
The physical, social, emotional, and narrative distances in A Passage to India result directly in the dehumanization of both the Colonizer and the Colonized and male and female characters. Dehumanization is to deprive of human qualities or attributes, divest of individuality. Dehumanization occurs when one experiences another as sub-human rather than a thinking, feeling, human individual. Dehumanization can be seen on a narrative level in examples where the narrator describes characters, such as Ronny, in a manner that makes them seem incapable of demonstrating human thought and emotion.
Another important concept that is key to this discussion is that of perspective. Perspective can be defined as a person's point of view or the way one comprehends the world around him based on vantage point, prior knowledge, and the facts available at the time. Perspective has a multi-directional nature in that it can be applied to the agent initiating the looking in addition to the agent that receives the look and then looks back at the one that initiated the look in the first place. Distance is an important aspect of perspective as it influences the vantage point of the viewer. In narratives with greater narrative distance, such as those with third-person narration, the perspective is broad and …show more content…
P. 6). A Passage to India deals with many complex issues surrounding colonialism and the Orient. In accordance with Edward Said's ideas concerning what he calls "Orientalism", the concept of the Orient is something that, on one hand, was created by the West and represents a Euro-centric ideal of Eastern culture, and on the other hand is an actual place that existed long before it was given that name. The Orient moved from being merely a projected European ideal of the East to being something that could stand on its own. However, through the initial European idealization of the Orient, a foundation was created that made it possible for the Occident to infiltrate the Orient and made possible the exportation of European culture into the