| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,400,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 1996: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
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| Research Abstract |
9. SUMARY OF RESEARCH RESULTS
The chief purpose of this study has been to make clear the influences of two main thoughts upon literary works during the turn of the centuries in Britain, by way of reading E.M.Forster's A Passage to India. One is a degeneration theory. The other is a utopian vision of a mother-age civilization, in which the society was largely organized on a female basis, supposedly preceding to the patriarchy.
From the viewpoint of the mother-age vision, we have come to this understanding, i.e., Mrs Moore and Adela Quested to be, respectively, the symbols of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone. Forster was a private worshiper for the cult of Demeter, who was supposed to be the main deity in the mother-age. By using the figurative images of the goddesses, he depicted Mrs Moore as representation of the Woman's destiny in general and Her immortality, and Adela as of ephemeral being of a mortal, as well as of a virgin. Forster indirectly protested the patriarchal system, whi
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ch subordinate women to men.
In the light of the degeneration theory, we have made clear that this ideology of degeneration worked as a cultural apparatus, which continued to create 'the other'. This apparatus innately had a strong tendency to stereotype deviant individuals into some pathological categories. It fully developed in colonies, where the Ruling Race made use of it effectively in order to control the colonized other. It stereotyped not only criminal natives into the pathological categories, but every individual into some categories, such as Anglo-Indians, natives, Muslinis, Hindus, etc. Everybody exist not as an individual, but a member of some categories in colonized India. Thus human relationships between the two nations became barren. It also created confusion over the English system of language in India caused by the weakening power of a name itself, displaced by category. 'Echo' in this text, thus, symbolizes malfunction of the language system. Forster posed the primitive magical power of name, which he rediscovered in Indian chanting of gods' names, as a prescription for the 'echoing contradictory world' of our degenerate civilization. Less
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