Postcolonial-Feminist elements in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

Abstract

Postcolonial feminism, also labeled third-world feminism, is an innovative approach, depicting the way women of colonized countries suffer from double colonization: native patriarchies and imperial ideology. While Western feminism focuses on gender discrimination, postcolonial feminism tries to broaden the analysis of the intersection of gender and multicultural identity formation. Postcolonial feminists believe that Western feminism is inattentive to the differences pertaining to class, race, feelings, and settings of women of colonized territories; therefore, postcolonial feminism warns the third-world woman not to copy nor imitate the Western woman's style, and tries to demonstrate what feminism means to woman in a non-western culture. The present article is based on the conviction that E. M Forster's A Passage to India (1924) possesses the characteristics to be interpreted from the postcolonial feminism vantage point. This novel is the account of two British women who question the standard behaviors of the English toward the Indians and suffer permanently from an unsettling experience in India. The female victim in this novel is not a third-world black woman as typically portrayed in such novels, but a white British woman who fails in her quest to see the real India. By depicting the limited worldview of the two British women this article concludes that the privilege attributed to them is indeed a one- dimensional view and Western feminist prejudice.