In victorian times, womes underlay some kind of standart: they had to be…
- highly moralic
- of clear mind
- a positive influence to her husband (who lived in a seperate ’sphere’)
- a good and self-sacrificing mother
- a good and loyal wife
- responsible for cooking, parenting and enabeling her husband a good life.
And at last they were their husband’s property and had no right on property themselves.
Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktorianisch#Frauenfrage_und_Sexualethik
It’s astonishing. Almost everyone in our course doesn’t like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Briish Raj novel ‘Heat & Dust’. Everyone had to brace oneself up to read this book completely. It’s absolutely boring. The story is oldfashioned and could have been developed by everyone who just wants to write any book. Love, doubtfulness, pain. It appears like a Rasamunde Pilcher novel or a “printed-50-cent-gas-station-recycling-paper-bunch”. Maybe the film can be watched on ZDF anytime.
However. Surfing through the web makes you discovering people who like this novel actually. Astonishing!
The realtions between the characters in ‘Heat and Dust’ are not easy to understand. But after careful reading the reader is able to create a mindmap with the ralations and this is my version:
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The first pages of ‘Heat and Dust’ have to be read several times. Many people and places are mentioned and it’s not easy tosort all the information by reading only once.
Characters, their relations to each other, settings, times. It’s all mentioned by the narrator who is involved directly into the plot but doesn’t have a name what first seems to dissociates her from the everything else. But after reading the first pages several times and the following ones, too, this first impression changes.
The narrator first tells about Olivia, the second main character in the story beside the narrator. All information about Olivia are extracted from letters the narrator got from Harry, another important character.
When the letters arouse the narrators interest, she starts a trip to India where Olivia lived in the 1920s – about 50 to 60 years before the narrator – to learn more about Olivias life there.
The plot is divided in two times: the 1920s in which things about and araound Oliva are told and the 1970s which concern with the narrators story.
For more information about the ralations, check out my next post.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel ‘Heat & Dust’ tells the story of two women in India in different times. You get to know both as the narrator of their specific time: Olivia – a British women caught by the seductions of an Indian prince, the Nawab, in the 1920s and Anne (so called in the movie) following Olivia’s trace in India in the 1970s.
