Multitudes of otherness : Italian and Indian crowds in Forster’s Where angels fear to tread and A passage to India

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on E.M. Forster's literary construction of national otherness through a reading of two specific scenes, from his first and last published novels, that centre on the depiction of foreign crowds. From Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) to A Passage to India (1924), it is possible to detect a movement of growing awareness, within Forster's consciousness, of the presence of the other. If the encounter with the Italian other is still highly mediated by an age-long literary tradition of fantasizing about the south of Europe that had depicted countries like Italy as unique constellations of counter-values to the British ethos, in A Passage to India the presence of the other is indeed more corporeal and revelatory of Forster's acquired maturity in his ways of dealing with the responsibility of thinking and representing otherness.