Divide and Difference

Stoler’s “concept of an interior frontier” (516) is something that can perhaps be seen in many of the texts we have done so far this semester. In Forster’s Passage to India we saw that internal divide of the Indians within Chandrapore and between Flory and the rest of the white men at “The Club”. This existence of different kinds of colonizers and colonized seem to come from a “relationship between the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality which informed …the exclusionary, discriminatory practices which were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself.(Stoler 514). As the colonial empire was set up, the social relationships intra-racially and inter-racially resulted in not just complications and a more glaring rift between the two, but within each community as well.

We see this idea of difference and divide manifested in physical aspects as well. In Orwell’s Burmese Days, we see two clear instances early on in the story of how physical difference marks a certain social difference as well. In chapter 5 we see Flory’s insecurity over the “blue birthmark on his cheek” and how “his trouble …had begun in his mother's womb”, setting him “against public opinion” because of both physical appearance and later in a social context because of his friendship with Dr Veraswami. This shows one instance of physical difference being a site of both “interior frontier” (Stoler 516) and racial divide between colonizer and colonized. Flory’s description of the two women, Elizabeth and Ma Hla May also shows vast physical differences between them and the social implications of their status because of their race. With” the one faintly coloured as an apple-blossom, the other dark and garish […] neither of them could take her eyes from the other; but which found the spectacle more grotesque, more incredible, there [was] no saying”(ch6). This shows the gaze of divide(of social status :mistress vs. European, of race) embodied in physical difference, that for the moment alienates Flory in their mutual gaze, but also encapsulates(and complicates him) in the power-relations of difference and divide when the physical, racial and social realms collide.