Humanism And Its Limitations In A Passage To India―from Post-colonial Perspective

The famous literary critic Loniel Trilling says,“E. M. Forster is for me the only livingnovelist who can be read again and again, and who after each reading, gives me what fewwriters can give us after our first days for novel-reading, the sensation of having learningsomething”(Trilling,1982:3) Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) is a prominent Englishnovelist, critic, and essayist in the20thcentury. He spends all his lifetime in pursuing freedom,truth and harmonious human relationships. In his opinion, only people from different races,different countries, and different classes realize the “pure-heart” communication with eachother, the universe can be more glorious. This is the central idea of Forster’s liberal humanism.Altogether he writes only six novels in his life, though very limited in number, yet hisinfluence is far-reaching and everlasting.A Passage to India, the fifth of Forster’s novels, is generally regarded as the greatest one.The story centers upon the friendship between a liberal Englishman and an Indian, vividlyreflecting the antagonism and the racial conflicts between the English colonizers and theIndians. Since its publication in1924, A Passage to India has immediately become the focusof public attention from all over the world, and it has been interpreted from variousperspectives. In the very beginning it is considered to be an anti-colonial text. In1970s theintroduction and the development of post-colonial theory and criticism provide a freshperspective for literary critics to do textual analysis. This novel is read as an exercise inOrientalism, and criticized by critics of younger generations as emanating from a colonizedconsciousness.Forster tries to decline the political implications in the novel, arguing that “it is not aboutpolitics, but about a search for a more lasting home of the human race”. However, since thenovel is concerned with the international theme, with the flourishing of post-colonial theorynowadays, it is still worthy to be studied on the political consciousness. By analyzingForster’s liberal humanist thought and its limitations manifested in the novel, this thesis aimsto reveal how Forster incorporates his liberal humanism with literary ideals, and how he expresses his subconscious Empire awareness and Orientalist mentality in his literary creation.This thesis mainly uses Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism to analyze the colonial discoursereflected in the novel, and exposes that colonialism is the root of all contradictions.