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

Rider Haggards King Solomons Mines and Foresters A Passage to IndiaIn 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 collapse 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 Haggards King Solomons Mines, the landscape is gendered to show the colonizers ability to dominate over native territory. However, while the scenario of the male colonizer conquering a feminized landscape reinforces a legitimizing myth of co lonization, it is later overturned by Foresters A Passage to India. In this novel, the landscape takes on a complex, many-sided 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 subject the problematic nature of colonial interaction that might have easily been left obscured and unacknowledged. We can read the landscape as a type of indirect narrator in A Passage to India that articulates the novels imperial ideology. The African landscape of King Solomons Mines is clearly feminized. The treasure map shows that the geography of the travelers route takes the shape of a female bod... ...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 plait Aziz and Fielding apart. The presence of nature, the earth, the horses, the b irds, 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 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 ornateness of British India. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1992.