Female Anxiety in Colonial and Post-Colonial British Fiction

Abstract

In this article, Freud’s theory of neurosis is used to analyze the actions of E.M. Forster’s female character in A Passage to India (1924) as well as those of Sunetra Gupta’s protagonist in Memories of Rain (1992). To begin with, this text demonstrates that Adela was marginalized by the ideological apparatus of empire thanks to the circulation of the myth of the black superpenis. In fact, this article was written to suggest that many white women who lived in the periphery were psychologically oppressed by Western patriarchal norms until the myth dealt with here was challenged by modernism. That is the reason why postcolonial novels such as Memories of Rain cannot be understood without a wide knowledge of the tradition they “attack”. As I see it, Gupta’s text does not only reverse A Passage to India. This novel is a proof that the legend of the interracial violator has been recently transferred to racial minorities.