Sympathy and ambivalence: Identity politics in early twentieth-century anti-imperial novels (E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, India, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O'Faolain, Ireland)

This dissertation argues that the prevalence of sympathy in early twentieth-century, anti-imperial novels is not coincidental, for, writers extracted sympathy from sentimentality in an attempt to provide a salve for alienation through inter-personal connections. That salve, however, grew increasingly ineffective as the cost of sympathetic involvement grew to outweigh potential benefits, particularly in novels dealing with the British Empire in India and Ireland. In Chapter one, I trace the genealogy of sympathy from the philosophies of David Hume and Adam Smith to its role in early twentieth-century literature. In spite of its traditionally positive associations, sympathy disrupts the imperial relationships between the self and Other in early twentiethcentury, anti-imperial texts. It threatens the racial, gendered, and cultural boundaries of Otherness by exposing as arbitrary identities based upon cultural hierarchy. Chapters two and three argue that sympathy in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable provides a temporary refuge for people hoping to escape the meaninglessness often associated with modernism. In volatile geo-political contexts where the struggle for independence is tantamount, novelists depict a more ambivalent and troubling view of sympathy by focusing on its inability to provoke sustainable and benevolent change within the imperial system. Chapter four argues that Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September depicts the Anglo-Irish silencing of sympathy, for sympathizing with one side of a political struggle alienates the opposition; this is dangerous to the Anglo-Irish, for they become targets for violent retaliation. Finally, Chapter five, I argue that Sean O'Faolain's Come Back to Erin presents the most threatening portrait of sympathy. For O'Faolain, sympathy sheds its eighteenth-century roots in benevolence and endangers movements for liberation from British control. The tension between a compulsion to act and a simultaneous need to recoil from this urge is played out repeatedly in novels that attack the British Empire.