On The Image Of The Other In Ruth Jhabvala’s Heat And Dust

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala(1927-2013)is an immigrant novelist and screenwriter with multicultural identities in the contemporary world literature, playing an important role in the Indian writings of English-speaking world. Her novel Heat and Dust, which has won the 1975 Booker prize, attracts the attention of the author of this thesis for its Orientalism technique. Based on the similar Indian experiences of the step-grandmother Olivia and “I” with two parallel narratives, it presents us what the Europeans have seen, heard and felt in the foreign land, especially those Europeans’ including Ruth Jhabvala’s arrogance and prejudice against the Oriental India under the different cultural backgrounds. In fact, this novel has been explored by scholars from many perspectives, nevertheless, the image of the Other in it has seldom been probed.The author of this thesis makes a specific analysis of Heat and Dust with the Other theory in Said’s Orientalism, discussing Jhabvala’s consciousness of the Other based on Orientalism ideology and the whole exotic images in the novel, including the exotic environment and character images. Thus, the relationship between the Other and the Self as well as the cultural connotation behind this relationship are disclosed.This thesis consists of three parts with main body coming between the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction part mainly covers the presentation of the writer, Heat and Dust and its literature review at home and abroad.The main body falls into four chapters. Chapter One functions as the theoretical foundation of the thesis, which introduces the origin and development of the Other conception. Particularly, it emphasizes the interpretations of the Other and its relationship with the Self in the view of Said’s Orientalism.Chapter Two investigates Jhabvala’s consciousness of the Other based on Orientalism, which is chiefly represented in her superior English identity and her complicated emotions toward India. As a result, it lays the foundation for the analysis of the Other image in Heat and Dust.Chapter Three illustrates the Other image of the exotic environments in Heat and Dust, including the natural environment and social environment. Influenced by her complicated emotions toward India, western readers’ horizon of expectations and any other else, the environment in Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust on the one hand has the characteristics of monotonousness and dirtiness, disorder and intolerance, and on the other hand it is portrayed as beautiful and fresh, peaceful and harmonious. These two kinds of environment images not only reveal the Europeans’ cultural superiority, but also reflect their need and desire: an ideal hope for the western Self and an intentional hegemony on the Oriental Other.Chapter Four expounds the Other image of the exotic characters. According to Said’s Orientalism, all the Indians in Heat and Dust, whether females or males, are marginalized and Otherized by the European. In the eyes of the Europeans, the orientals are silent Other waiting for them to describe. The females are stereotyped as obedient and ignorant, disadvantaged and miserable; the males appear to be either hypocritical and insidious, or flabby and feminized without any masculinity. Those descriptions of the Other image are actually a self-speech of the Europeans’ civilization and superiority, morality and rationality, which suggest a kind of Eurocentrism and cultural bias on the Orient.The last part serves as the conclusion, pointing out the fact that Jhabvala’s construction of the Other image just manifests her consciousness of the Other and the negative significance of the cultural conflicts between the West and the East.