Nello specchio dell'altro. Orientalismo, balcanismo e queerness in E.M. Forster

In 2007, David Bradshaw closed the Introduction to his edition of The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster inviting a reading of E.M. Forster’s work in a less reverential and possibly more critical way. This dissertation chooses to respond to Bradshaw’s invitation by the decision to study not only the works that have made Forster instantly famous, but also works unpublished during the author’s lifetime, focusing in particular on a drama unknown to the most readers and unpublished to this day. Entitled The Heart of Bosnia, it was composed in 1911 and is still held in the archives of King’s College in Cambridge. This study investigates The Heart of Bosnia by placing it within the framework of the Forsterian literary production, attempting both to re-propose in a new light aspects that had already, although only marginally, been taken into consideration by literary critics, as well as pointing out others completely unknown. In particular, this thesis observes in what way this unpublished drama related to other fictional works of his such as Maurice (1913) and A Passage to India (1924), which Forster wrote after the four novels that had made him known to the audience before 1910, in England and beyond, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room with a View, The Longest Journey and Howards End, questioning the approach of Forster’s texts to issues such as ‘race’, class, gender and sexuality. The methodological apparatus adopted for the present work is informed by the studies on discourse analysis. This research therefore relies on the studies relative to the collective imaginaries on the Balkans, the Orient and homosexuality. The pre-existent analyses which focused on the ‘construction’ of the images representing the ‘racial’, gender, sexual, and class Otherness, were taken into consideration, above all with reference to the British colonies, the Orient and the Balkans. This very rich field of studies shows in what way socio-cultural figures and representations contributed in a significant way to the formation of discursive processes that represent an integral part of the projects of dominion and control over the subjects set at the margins of the Empire, of Europe and of British society. Considering the Bosnian location of the drama, it is necessary to point out the specific nature of the discourses circulating between the end of the Nineteenth century and the beginning of the Twentieth century within the British public arena with regard to Bosnia-Herzegovina. These discourses constitute the background on which to project Forster’s work and as such, due to the absence of specific reliable literature, two chapters of this thesis are dedicated to the reconstruction of this context. The main point of reference for the development of these analysis is the corpus of British travel writing on Bosnia-Herzegovina. Having studied the narrative implications of the discourses present in the drama, it is possible to conclude by saying that Orientalism, Balkanism and the fin de siècle discourse on homosexuality refer to three thematic nuclei present in the drama. The first regards the issues relative to the construction of ‘racial’ identity, thus stressing the impossibility of the East-West cultural meeting, whereas the second and the third are related to questions of gender and sexuality, and refer to an image of society based on the principles of the New Chivalry type of patriarchy, on the one hand, and to homosexual masculinized identity, on the other. What these three themes certainly highlight is that The Heart of Bosnia, for the two completed novels that Forster wrote after 1910, A Passage to India and Maurice, is a crucial work as it announces some of the fundamental topics that make the later literary production of Forsterian narrative rather different in comparison to what the author had written before. With regards to Maurice, the unpublished drama announces the masculinized homosexual identity by focusing on the figure of the “savage”, whereas with regards to A Passage to India, it puts forward the theme of meeting (and its failure) between East and West, as well as the theme of the kind of patriarchy rooted in homosocial and/or homosexual desire.